The November election is still months off, but Little Saigon's candidates are already returning salmon-like to the spawning ground of local politics: anti-communism.
On April 29, city council members in Garden Grove and Westminster proposed declaring their cities "no-communist zones." The designation would require the U.S. State Department to warn the cities if a Vietnamese-government delegation intended to visit and would prohibit city employees from soliciting such visits. At one point, the councils considered denying police protection to visiting Vietnamese officials—until informed that would likely violate U.S. law.
"We can't prevent the communists from coming to town," Garden Grove Mayor Bruce Broadwater, who co-authored the proposal, confessed to the Los Angeles Times on April 28. "I would like to say, 'Hey, don't come.' But we don't have that authority—so we're going to make it tougher for them."
The resolutions await formal votes later this month but have already been approved by the vociferously anti-communist Little Saigon press.
In explaining the resolution for KCAL-TV Channel 9, Garden Grove councilman Van Thai Tran said the anti-tourism campaign was a warning to Vietnamese officials contemplating a visit to Little Saigon, noting sarcastically, "There will be a welcoming committee who will come out." Apparently unfamiliar with sarcasm, Tran quickly explained that the welcoming committee would not be a real welcoming committee. "Basically," he said, "there will be a lot of protesters."
Vietnam is "a dictatorial, oppressive [country] which is run by a group of thugs, and therefore we should have no dealings or direct relations with them," Tran said.
There's only one problem: the "dealings" Tran refers to already go on every day, and he and Kermit Marsh, his Westminster counterpart, know it. How else to explain the fact that the measures don't ban the growing trade with Vietnam; that would strangle the many Little Saigon businesses that import products from the country.
Like George W. Bush's War on Terror, then, this is a war with no sacrifices on the home front, little more than a political maneuver by three politicians with their eyes on the Election Day prize. Tran hopes to become the country's first Vietnamese-American state legislator by winning California's 68th Assembly District race this fall. Marsh is expected to run again for his council seat after failing to qualify for March's run-off election for Orange County's First Supervisorial District seat, which represents the majority of Garden Grove, Santa Ana and Westminster—the heart of Little Saigon. Broadwater did qualify for the board race and now faces a formidable opponent in Lou Correa, the termed-out state Assemblyman from Santa Ana.
Vietnamese voters who view Broadwater, Marsh and Tran as steadfast allies of Little Saigon should ponder this: it was Broadwater and Tran who led Garden Grove's draconian clampdown on the city's cybercafés, which are wildly popular with young Vietnamese. And it was Marsh who once said that hanging the flags of South Vietnam and the United States in tandem would be "haphazard and tacky."
