Vietnamese Americans Orange County

Tuan Nguyen has never been a soldier, but he has seen the horrors of war. As a 13-year-old living in Saigon, he saw the city fall to the Communist regime. And during an attempt to flee Vietnam several years later, he watched in terror as soldiers fired on his boat, killing the people next to him. "There was bullets and blood flying everywhere, people screaming," he recalls. "I had never seen anything like that. It changed my life completely."

A community walkathon to support victims of a typhoon that ravaged southern Vietnam raised $123,082, local organizers recently announced. Nearly 5,000 people came out for the fund-raiser, held two weeks ago in Mile Square Regional Park. The marchers were mostly young Vietnamese Americans active in community groups and church.

Contrary to prevailing theory, Vietnamese American youths generally do not join gangs to be a part of a substitute family, according to a first-of-its-kind federal study. Nor are they caught between the culture of their heritage and the country where they live. Quite simply, they join gangs because gangs are all around them and their friends are in them, according to the study released Friday.

Nearly 5,000 Vietnamese Americans came together Sunday to show their support for victims of a recent typhoon that ravaged their former homeland. The walkathon in Mile Square Regional Park was to benefit victims of Typhoon Linda, which ravaged the coast of southern Vietnam in November, leaving 3,700 dead and tens of thousands homeless. The marchers, most of them young Vietnamese Americans who are active in community groups and churches, raised nearly $50,000, organizers said.

Little Saigon community members Wednesday rallied around the recent release of five Vietnamese political dissidents, including a former Orange County resident and another who was imprisoned in Vietnam for publishing a pro-democracy newsletter. "This is a major event for the Vietnamese and Vietnamese American people," said Cong Minh Tran of Tustin and co-founder of the Human Rights Coalition Network, which focuses on human rights issues in Vietnam.

A delegation of 11 Vietnamese American leaders from Southern California, nine of them from Orange County, joined a national coalition Sunday in Washington, D.C., to begin a four-day congressional lobbying mission to ensure that any economic privileges given to Vietnam come with human rights concessions.

The Little Saigon Radio talk show on former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's controversial new memoir had ended an hour ago. Still, the phones continued to ring. If America's involvement in the war was indeed "wrong, terribly wrong," as McNamara put it, did that mean the Vietnamese also made a mistake, one caller asked. Did the millions of Vietnamese who fought or fled their homeland do it for nothing, another demanded.

After spending decades in Communist prison camps in Vietnam, Nguyen Chi Thien escaped in 1979 and scaled the wall of the British Embassy in Hanoi to deliver his life's work, a collection of more than 400 poems. The title: "Flowers From Hell." He was captured and again imprisoned, but the work won him international recognition and was translated into eight languages.

Nearly one in five Vietnamese Americans in Orange County have traveled to Vietnam since the country opened its doors to visitors almost 10 years ago, an indication of the bonds many have with the homeland they fled, according to a Cal State Fullerton survey released Thursday.

Month after month, the terror returned whenever Ann Phong looked at the ocean. During four unspeakable days at sea, death felt as close as the waves that ceaselessly licked the sides of the boat. Painting, however, has helped Phong confront the memories of her flight from Vietnam a dozen years ago. By giving form and color to her fear and pain with roiling, vivid tableaux, she has found release. "The more I hide it," she says, "the more it hurts me."