The robust Vietnamese press in Silicon Valley has always played by its own rules, and a post on the blog Little Saigon Inside provided a particularly salacious example recently.
The author, Vinh Nguyen, points out that the Vietnam Daily Newspaper went after District 7 City Council candidate Minh Duong before the June primary with articles that accused him of being pro-Communist while boosting long-shot candidate Patrick Phu Le with headlines like “Phu Le Has a Very Great Chance of Being in the Run-off” (Le captured 17.11 percent of the vote to Duong’s 24.07 percent).
Then Ngyuen takes off the gloves to spin his version of the scandalous tale of how VDN owners Can Nguyen and Quynh Thi acquired the paper in the first place.
“One story is that [Thi] started out as a secretary for the original owner of the newspaper. She had an affair with him and he ended up divorced [sic] his wife,” Vinh Nguyen writes breathlessly. “Later on she allegedly dumped him for he was much older than her. In distraught [sic], he went to Washington DC and set himself on fire.”
He accuses the current newspaper owners of only caring about the anti–Madison Nguyen movement and of a falling out with Vietnamese community leaders over who has the right to market Nu Skin beauty products. Love! Betrayal! Anti-aging serum!
So sad!
It sounds like the wonderful, innocent Vietnamese culture has been overwhelmed by life in liberal big city America and they’ve all been turned into Democrats.
So basically there’s little difference between Vietnamese ‘play by it’s own rules’ news media and US mainstream ‘fake but accurate’ news media.
Fly – thanks for the tip.
Egad, shades of the “National Enquirer.”
You can’t make up stuff like this . . . that’s already 100% made-up falsehoods and innuendo. Fly—please do all you can to put central Vietnamese politics in the spotlight; the younger generation will only change and civilize once they are embarrassed to death of their parents’ generation’s antics and ridiculosity.
To whomever at SJI….please try and update blogs at least once between Fridays and Sundays….I think you really lose interest otherwise
Good suggestion. More on this later.
Much can be said of this,or very little. Is this appropriate?
Perhaps. Well, perhaps not. Do the Vietnamese mean what they say?
I do not know. This is best left alone. Oh, we should examine this.
OMG
They have them in their group,too!
Reminds me of the Cuban-American community in Florida. Captured ethnic enclaves where fear mongers wield power via slander and innuendo.
Assimilation helps and eventually second and third generation can join in the English speaking debates about who’s to blame for the recession, who’s going to open the borders to illegal immigrants, who’s a born-again nazi with anti-immigration stands, and all the other crap out mainstream press and political machines pump out.
What a twp attitude!
You need to learn a lesson!
You keep your labels for your group and stay off the turf of our groups, Jerome!
The blogosphere has too much room for the Asian tools of the kleptocrats.
The Mercury News has been trumpeting Madison Nguyen as a candidate for Mayor in 2014. I think this article helps to point out why selecting our next Mayor from the fever swamps of Vietnamese emigre politics might not be the wisest choice.
Is a Vietnamese-American candidate for Mayor really viable, when half the local Vietnamese-American community apparently believe she is a perfidious agent of Hanoi?*
*Or they pretend to believe that, at any rate.