Vietnamese community reacts after South Vietnam flag flies at violent Capitol riot
Growing up in Biloxi, Sean Nguyen learned that the yellow- and red-striped flag of South Vietnam represented much more than the country his family had left.
“What I was taught is, that flag represents everything that we fought for,” he said. “And kind of coming to America— to live in a democracy, in a way.”
Last week, Nguyen saw the flag among the Trump banners, Gadsden flags, stars and stripes and Confederate battle flags in the crowd at the U.S. Capitol. (There were also several other national flags, including for Israel, Cuba, South Korea and Canada.) It wasn’t really a surprise, he said: many Vietnamese Americans, especially older people, strongly support the president.
Nguyen, a graduate of D’Iberville High School now studying at Loyola University in New Orleans, saw that dynamic play out in his own family this election cycle. He is more progressive, while his parents believed Trump was helping Vietnam and standing up to China.
But the sight of the flag at the Capitol last week still left Nguyen feeling “disappointed.”
“My friends from home, we kind of talked about it,” he said. “It makes us look like clowns.”
Meanwhile, some Vietnamese American Trump supporters watching around the country were thrilled.
“The Vietnamese flag will let everybody know that the Vietnamese people... support Donald Trump to be the president for the next four years,” said Terry Huynh, 49, who lives in Houston.
Huynh did not go to Washington last week, but she attended a Trump rally there in October. She traveled as part of a caravan of Vietnamese Trump supporters who made a stop in Biloxi for a rally.
At the rally, many Coast attendees said that their experiences as refugees fleeing Vietnam after the country was unified under the Communist regime in 1975 had left them deeply afraid of communism, and skeptical of today’s Democratic Party.
Rallying for Trump
Last week, Nhat Nguyen of Houston drove from Texas to Georgia to attend a rally for Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Then he got back in his car and headed to Falls Church, Virginia. He stayed in a hotel near Eden Center, a Vietnamese mall boasting the largest collection of Vietnamese shops and restaurants on the East Coast. The mall flies the flag of South Vietnam next to the American flag, and its parking lot bears street signs honoring military heroes of South Vietnam.
On Jan. 6, Nguyen, 58, got on one of 10 buses carrying Vietnamese Americans from Eden Center to the National Mall for the rally in support of Trump. He estimated there were 500 people in his group, plus hundreds of others in groups from as far away as California.
Nguyen, who was 13 when Saigon fell to the army of North Vietnam in 1975, said he felt he had to fight for “the country of freedom” where he settled.
“We lost our country because of some lies,” he said, referring to South Vietnam.
Nguyen said he feared that without Trump’s leadership, China’s power would be unchecked. (That anxiety has deep roots. After a millennia of Chinese control, Vietnam won independence in 939 CE. Today, Vietnam competes with its much-larger northern neighbor for territory in the South China Sea.)
Nguyen stayed on the grounds of the National Mall while other Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building, resulting in four deaths. He said he did not think most people who entered the Capitol knew they were breaking the law, because after the Capitol Police stopped defending the building it was easy to walk in.
He is still optimistic that Trump will have a second term, though he will accept the outcome if Biden takes office and stop speaking out for Trump. If that happens, he’ll be thinking about an earlier defeat.
“Before, I fight for freedom in Vietnam and I lost,” he said. “This time, if Biden stays there, honestly, I’m very sad.”
‘Who we are as Vietnamese people’
The flag represented South Vietnam for its entire existence, from 1955 to 1975. After the Fall of Saigon, it became a symbol of national pride and identity for members of the Vietnamese diaspora who fled the Communist regime. Today, the flag is common not only in Vietnamese communities in the U.S., but also in Canada, Australia, France and western Germany.
When Sean Nguyen learned at school that the flag of Vietnam was a yellow star on a red background, he was confused.
“Whenever you’re a kid and you’re drawing, I asked my parents, like, ‘How do I draw the Vietnamese flag?’” he said.
“They always tell me to draw it that way,” with yellow and red stripes.
Hanh Hua, a real estate agent in Mobile, came to Alabama with her family in the early 1990s after a period in a refugee camp in the Philippines. As a child, she learned how to recite the pledge of allegiance to the South Vietnam flag. Her father had attended the Naval Academy, and her family’s reverence for the flag was tied not only to patriotism, but to the experiences of so many South Vietnamese refugees after the war.
An estimated 200,000 Vietnamese people died at sea while trying to flee Vietnam.
“The symbolic meaning of this was the struggle of who we are as Vietnamese people,” she said. “Take away what it represented for whatever republic it was. It was for that time period. That so many left, however they could, whatever way they could, so that they could have a better life.”
That was why it was so painful to see the flag at the Capitol last week as part of an effort to overturn the election results.
“To see it be associated with hate, with racism, with supremacy... is so, so, so, sad,” she said.
Hua is a board member of the national group PIVOT: The Progressive Vietnamese American Organization. They campaign for progressive candidates and conduct voter outreach to Vietnamese Americans. This election cycle, they set up a website called VietFactCheck to provide information in Vietnamese and English about common pieces of misinformation gaining traction among Vietnamese Americans. (Few, if any, mainstream U.S. news sources translate their articles into Vietnamese.)
After Jan. 6, VietFactCheck published a new piece: “Was Antifa responsible for the riots at the U.S. Capitol?” (Fact check: False.)
The organization also published a message condemning the flying of the South Vietnam flag at the Capitol.
“Those who carry this flag in front of the Capitol not only do not speak for us, they betray our most fundamental values,” the message said. “They have desecrated our flag for their misguided, hateful, dangerous and failed insurrection.”
‘Really disappointing to see’
Gina Nguyen, a freshman at the University of Southern California from D’Iberville, said she saw parallels between the Latin American and Muslim immigrants Trump has denigrated and her own family members who immigrated to the U.S.
“You had a reason that you came over here, they have their reasons, too, they’re seeking a better life,” she said, describing an argument to Vietnamese American Trump supporters. “’They’re all desperate to find a better life. Why can’t you be more empathetic about it?’ They kind of just take Trump’s rhetoric and run with it. That’s why it’s really disappointing to see.”
On Thursday, the progressive Vietnamese American author and Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen published a column in the Washington Post comparing white nationalists and South Vietnamese nationalists. He argued that both display “radicalized nostalgia for a lost country and a lost cause.”
But other reactions, including from some Trump supporters, were more muted.
Skylar Nguyen, a high school senior in Gautier, spoke with the Sun Herald about her family’s political divisions in October. After the election, in which she voted for Vice President Joe Biden and her father voted for Trump, they haven’t talked much about politics.
She said her parents felt that what happened at the Capitol was wrong, but they weren’t surprised that Vietnamese Americans were in the crowd given Trump’s popularity. And though her grandfather was an officer in the South Vietnamese army, the sight of the flag didn’t elicit strong emotions.
“My parents are like, ‘Oh, that’s them, that’s their own opinion,’” she said.
The flag of South Vietnam was also a common sight at rallies for Biden held by Vietnamese Americans during the 2020 campaign. Nguyen said she didn’t think she would want to fly it there either.
“Maybe this is me personally, but it feels like you’re putting a paintbrush over a community or a country,” she said.
This story was originally published January 15, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
