LTS. – Người Việt trích đăng Chương Một trong tác phẩm “Yen Do and the Story of Nguoi Viet Daily News,” do nhà báo, giáo sư Đại Học California State University, Fullerton, thực hiện. “Yen Do and the Story of Nguoi Viet Daily News” là cuộc trò chuyện kéo dài nhiều năm giữa nhà báo Jeffrey Brody và nhà báo Đỗ Ngọc Yến, trình bày cách nhìn của ông Đỗ Ngọc Yến về sự thành hình của làng báo Việt Nam tại Hoa Kỳ nói chung vàNhật Báo Người Việt riêng. Dưới đây là chương một của cuốn sách, có tựa tiếng Anh là 'The Birth of Nguoi Viet,' được đăng với sự đồng ý của tác giả.

INTERVIEWEE: YEN DO
INTERVIEWER: JEFFREY BRODY

JB (JEFFREY BRODY): This is Jeffrey Brody, and I'm interviewing Yen Do about his life and the development of Nguoi Viet. Yen Do, why don't we begin by you explaining what year you came to the United States and why you started the newspaper.

YD (YEN DO): I came to the United States around the time of the collapse of Saigon, April 27, 1975. I first lived in Camp Pendleton for two months, then I moved to Santa Rosa, a small community north of San Francisco. After two months, I moved to Dallas, Texas, where I worked for more than a year. Then I moved to a fishing village by Houston near the border of Louisiana and Texas, called Port Arthur. I worked as a social worker for about two years. By that time I had been in the U.S. for more than three years and I was beginning to be accustomed to daily life. I had about 10 different jobs and moved around a lot, to more than 10 different locations.

In mid 1978, I began to hear about the boat people escaping Vietnam. I learned that President Jimmy Carter decided to allow about 100,000 boat people to settle in the United States. I also heard from my friends that in Vietnam, the communist government had implemented a policy of confiscating all the newspapers and books published before the fall of Saigon. Their intent was to destroy the collective memory of the society that had existed in the South prior to April 1975, in order to build up the new socialist order.

Before that news, I had begun to ask myself why I didn't use my experience as a journalist, and take advantage of the freedom here, to publish again. I wanted to help resettle and educate the newcomers and to continue the collective memory of our group of refugees. So I made up my mind to come back to my profession. That's around December of '77, and to save money, I worked about four months in Houston every weekend with a group of friends who were construction workers. I became a wallpaper hanger. I saved about $1,000 a month for four months, and when I had $4,000 in savings, I relocated to San Diego, where I got a job as the managing editor of a monthly magazine published by my friends.

JB: What was the name of the magazine?

YD: The magazine was Hon Viet. That means the soul of Vietnam. It was the first publication in Vietnamese from the resettlement days at Camp Pendleton in '75. Hon Viet was one of three monthly magazines published in the United States. They basically translated news from the world press. But they didn't reflect the news of the new life in this country. And my thinking was to publish a weekly newspaper that talked what's happening in Vietnam and printed stories about all kind of news affecting our daily life, from driving on highways, or shopping at the supermarket, or voting in elections, anything about our new life.

JB: What you were doing, it seems, reflects what has always been done in the ethnic press in the United States. You report about news of the homeland and news of the new community within the United States.

YD: Yes. I think what I brought into the publication was more news, because basically I am a reporter. I am an avid reader, so I kept on top of the news and the events in Vietnamese community life. Secondly, I observed the difficulties of the new life, of the new family structure here, from the perspective of the parents and the children, at work or in school. We understand that life is different and difficult. We needed to have people understand the society around them, but we didn't have time and we didn't have the capacity to teach them English. But we could explain everything in Vietnamese and use our experience to teach the refugees so they could help themselves. Then sometimes I thought about ways for the newspaper to publish and to survive. I found out that people in the community didn't have enough money to pay for advertising, but because I had experience in Vietnam, I knew they could afford to pay about $5 for each classified ad. In the beginning, I sold as many classified ads as possible. But the most important part of publishing is producing a standard-size newspaper. I wanted to publish exactly how we published in Vietnam. So the familiarity with the form and with the layout will help my readers and boost my circulation.

And there is another problem. I tried to find some editor or some publisher to cooperate with me and be partners, but I found out there was no one who wanted to help. But since there is freedom to publish in the United States, I said I just had to publish. That's the reason I jumped from reporter to publisher.

JB: You found that there's freedom of press in the United States, and all you needed was a printing press.

YD: Oh, yes. That was the happiest time in my profession when I found out about this. There was another problem - how to finance the newspaper. At the beginning, I had $4,000 in savings, but only after I spent most of that, did I begin to understand how to publish. So I closed my paper in San Diego after three issues and moved north to Orange County, which is in the hub of the Vietnamese community.

JB: So why did you move? Was it economic pressure?

YD: Yes. During my first three issues, every weekend I traveled from San Diego to downtown Los Angeles to circulate the newspaper. I went around Chinatown and downtown selling newspapers, especially during the Human Rights Day in early December. So by walking around, I met many old friends, we recognized each other and they agreed to help me to distribute.

JB: Did you charge any money for the paper?

YD: At the beginning, we charged seventy-five cents for each copy, and the newspaper had only four pages and two colors. I printed 2,000 copies at a cost of $250 for the press run. I had one friend who helped me to lay out the newspaper, but I wrote most of the news and the feature stories in the newspaper. When I stopped publishing in San Diego and moved to Orange County, a group of young friends assisted me and became my first distributors. They attached the newspaper to the front and back of their clothes and stood at the doors of Vietnamese churches and the pagodas. During the weekend, we could sell many papers and this was my way of distribution. Fortunately, there was big news then - the border war between China and Vietnam in February '79. So many people wondered about what was happening and what would happen to their relatives in Vietnam. So I printed many free leaflets about what's going on in the border war every day to provide free news for the community – so that when they saw my publication during the weekend, they were ready to buy, ready to pay $6 for a three-month subscription.

JB: Six dollars for three months was your first charge.

YD: Yes. So I could arrange to have enough money for each copy. Then, I could count only 12 Vietnamese businesses in Orange County, and I tried to get advertising from them. Most of them paid for classified ads or small display advertising.

JB: Do you recall what those 12 businesses were?

YD: Yes. About one-third of them still exist. A doctor’s office, one pharmacy, one supermarket, one restaurant.

JB: What are their names?

YD: Doctor Pham Van Hoang and pharmacist Quach Nhat Danh. And the Cho Que Huong supermarket. It's changed its name several times. And two restaurants, Thanh My and Thien Cung. Doctor Hoang was the first practicing medical doctor in Orange County from Vietnam. The first pharmacist was Danh, who became one of the fathers of Little Saigon. The supermarket, Cho Que Hoang was the first one here.

JB: These were located on Bolsa Avenue?

YD: On Bolsa, Westminster and Warner avenues. During that time, Bolsa meant nothing. Even then, Dr. Pham Van Hoang’s office was located at Bolsa and Edwards near the Westminster Mall Plaza. During that time, the Little Saigon area didn't exist. But the newspaper did exist not only to provide news. The Vietnamese community needed information about how to get jobs, how to apply for welfare, how to apply for a driver's license, even how to buy insurance. Plus, news about activities and services at churches and pagodas. They hungered for news about their relatives in Southeast Asia and the immigration policy in Washington. Basically, political news. News in Moscow, in Peking, in Paris, in Washington, D.C. The Vietnamese didn’t understand state government, but they understood that everything that happens in the capital, in the White House, is very important and very interesting for them.

JB: Did you write those articles yourself?

YD: I translated articles from the L.A. Times and from the Orange County Register. And during that time, I remember, there was one special edition about Southeast Asia news published in San Francisco, and I subscribed to that, and I picked up a lot of sources in Southeast Asia. At the same time, I began to understand that my readers were trying to understand everything about the situation in Vietnam. Then there were two major sources of information about news about Vietnam. capitals where they have news about Vietnam - Paris and Hong Kong. So I had my friends in Paris send clippings from Le Monde and a student friend in Texas mailed clippings of the Far Eastern Economic Review and South China Morning Post. So I began to set up a volunteer network of freelancers.

JB: So people in Texas would go to the university library?

YD: That person was completing his thesis at the University of Texas in Austin. After that, I tried to have at least one friend in every state, or every capital around the world, send stories and information to me. There was no fax and no low-price long distance at the time, just mail. And we needed the information every week because there were no other resources. We translated the news to provide a picture of what happened to Vietnam after the war. Then more and more we began to interview by phone the social workers or the new arrivals who came in, who told their story, the experience of daily life, their comments about what was happening to the refugees in Vietnam.

JB: So you would write about events in Vietnam by interviewing the new arrivals.

YD: Yes. And another resource was letters from Vietnam. Letters from Vietnam arrived through friends or through Hong Kong. They used an indirect writing style to report news. For example, instead of saying that someone had fled Vietnam, they said Mr. So-and-So didn’t have a job anymore.

JB: Oh, so this was a code that you developed. You knew that the letters were being censored or read.

YD: No. The people by themselves, their relatives, each other, they tried to let the other side understand. This is the way Vietnamese communicate to each other during the war, it continues now. It's not my code, but I can explore the habits of Vietnamese writers. That means Vietnamese readers or writers used to write between the lines.

JB: They'd write between the lines.

YD: Yeah. That’s the habit from a long history of censorship and from where people fear or imagine they could be punished if authorities checked and found out what they said. One family received only two letters a year because of the difficulty of getting mail sent from Vietnam to here. And sometimes the envelope must be sent through several hands. So each letter is a document, and for us, it's very precious because it's the primary source. Especially the sources from the religious families, because the people who are Catholic have large family networks throughout Vietnam, so they become good sources of information. They tell their stories, but they tell the story of the neighborhood or the next province. Their letters used to be full and have more details.

JB: So you actually were able to use these letters from people talking to their relatives from Vietnam corresponding in elliptical fashion, between the lines. They became your string of foreign correspondents.

YD: Yeah. Because I was the only publication that used these sources during that time, so more and more people sent material to me. They met me everywhere, at my office, in the supermarket, or at the car shop, and they gave me the copy. Or they reached me through telephone or they sent copies to me. I found out that I could have a very large network voluntarily, because it's relevant news. Everyone gave a small piece of news, and this was so they could receive back hundreds of other pieces of similar news. So I tried to expand my network, and after some time I knew that I must try to maintain credibility and not overly rely on one source or forget to get both sides of an issue.

JB: Why did you do that?

YD: Because a long time ago, especially in Vietnam, we didn't have enough sources, and even when we had sources, we couldn’t use them for fear of reprisals. So we had to create some kind of government-approved news. It's very complicated. But once I was here, I found out that no one came to tell me what to write and no one would censor me, and I didn't have any fear about printing news. At least, if I have some good news. During that time, there was a case of libel against me by some people in San Diego.

JB: What year was your libel case?

YD: Seventy-nine.

JB: What happened? You made a mistake?

YD: Yes. This was an interesting case. One of my freelancers in San Diego sent me a lot of materials concerning an anti-war activist in San Diego, a Vietnamese American. I thought that it was good material and I printed it in my newspaper. And that person sued me because I called him a communist.

JB: Oh, I see. You called him a communist.

YD: Yeah, because I thought his actions made him look like a communist, so I said communist, and I used a term that Vietnamese use to describe a communist.

JB: What was the term?

YD: The Vietnamese term an com quoc gia. That means eating “nationalist rice” but worshiping the communist cause or deriving benefit from the nationalists while worshiping the communists. But when they translate it to American English, it looks like a ridiculous phrase.

JB: To an American would mean nothing, but to a Vietnamese, it would mean treason.

YD: Yeah. For Vietnamese, it's very clear. During the war, a lot of people were working and receiving a salary from the nationalist government, but in fact, they worked for the other side.

JB: So this man sued you?

YD: Yeah. I asked my freelance to provide me with documents and I thought it’s clear that we are right, so I printed some more allegations. I met a lawyer, he advised me to stop. It went before arbitration and I had to pay $1,500.

JB: What did you learn?

YD: I learned two things from this case. First, there are so many, many things in America we can print. We don't have to rely on gossip, on prefabricated news. And secondly, a libel suit is very complicated in this country, and the best thing for a newspaper is to stay away from it.

JB: When you called him a communist, you couldn't prove that he was a communist, right?

YD: Yes. When I saw the documents, I thought that I could prove it. But because of the difference between American and Vietnamese legal systems, the difference between the languages, the different cultures, the difference in terminology, it’s very difficult to make a case for both the American and the Vietnamese side. So, now I understand that. Now I have to distinguish very clearly about what could be published in the United States and what could be published in Vietnam. I learned that in the United States you have balanced news.

JB: You want to balance each story by getting both sides?

YD: Yes. So I can say my philosophy of news in this country came from that experience. It's very difficult to say because in Vietnam, all news is one-sided.

JB: In Vietnam, the news was slanted, it was partisan.

YD: Yeah. Because in Vietnam, we operated with the anti-communist regime, and secondly, we are under pressure all the time to print one way.

JB: Print the anti-communist view.

YD: But here, we don’t have to. And anytime we do so, we are in danger of being sued.

JB: Libel is when you damage another person's reputation or good name. And one defense against libel is truth. But in Vietnam, you could damage someone's reputation and there wouldn't be a libel case?

YD: Yes. In Vietnam, the libel case is totally different, according to the French law and law during the wartime. If anyone was accused of being a communist, he could rely on the political system to clear his name -- but it's too long, too late, and too difficult. If frustrated, he could try another system, the system of violence.

JB: What is that?

YD: That means to threaten the writer.

JB: Oh, they threatened the writers in Vietnam.

YD: Yeah, so the writer or the newspaper must stop immediately. Or secondly, they rely on the government. If they know some people in government, the police, the secretary, or some people with power, they intervene.

JB: I see. So in Vietnam, they would go to the authorities and use their connections.

YD: Totally, they bribe. They have money, so –

JB: Do they bribe the authorities or bribe the newspaper?

YD: They bribe anyone. So during my first year, '79, I began to understand the two different systems, the American press and the Vietnamese press. The experience of the Vietnamese during the war.