Vietnamese American community opposes Study Abroad (Global Educational Opportunities) program for foreign Vietnamese students at San Jose City College

by Jean Libby, editor, Viet-Am Review

At a public hearing on November 14, 2006, a large number of Vietnamese Americans in San Jose spoke and demonstrated against a proposed plan by Rosa Perez, Chancellor of the San Jose-Evergreen Community College District, to recruit students from Vietnam for education in the United States and to send American community college students to Vietnam “to learn their culture.” 

 The speakers recommended that special grants and tax funds instead be used for basic education of the residents of District, as these public schools were intended.  Several spoke of lack of ESL education for immigrants to the United States at these schools, which is necessary for success at American universities and the corporate world.  San Jose has the largest concentrated urban Vietnamese population in the country; Orange County has more Vietnamese people, but they are more widespread. Between 12% and 15% of the students of the San Jose-Evergreen District are of Vietnamese heritage.   

 The writer is a retired US History and Ethnic Studies community college instructor who taught these subjects at San Jose City College from 1999 to 2003.  I was appalled when reading the Mission Statement of the GEO (Global Educational Opportunities) program, by the statement made by Chancellor Rosa Perez that  “In getting to know about Vietnam, we must also face our history.  In the city of San Jose, both U.S. born and Vietnamese born citizens suffered immeasurably through a terrible war between the United States and Vietnam.” 

 The historical issue here is the same which enraged Vietnamese community college students and their parents in northern California:  the Republic of Vietnam, South Vietnam, is erased from the history. The chancellor continues: “The wounds of that war have been deep and slow to heal, especially for those who lost property, their health, their sanity, their loved ones, and their dignity.” 

 The illogic here is that the wounds would not have occurred had the United States not gone to war.  Yet today the Hanoi government admits that there were 170,000 Vietnamese people killed in North Vietnam by their own government, headed by Ho Chi Minh, in the 1954 and 1955 Land Reform.  This was done with Russian backing.  This was done before the United States entered the conflict on the side of South Vietnam, which is the homeland of most of the people who subsequently came to the United States as political refugees.  The San Jose-Evergreen Chancellor ignores the North Vietnam and South Vietnam partition that was in effect for twenty-one years following the Geneva Accords in 1954.     

The Vietnamese community of San Jose knows and has experienced the Vietnam War differently.  There were six wars in Vietnam in the forty-three years between 1945 and 1987, only one of these between the United States and North Vietnam (inaccurately described by Chancellor Perez as “Vietnam,”  The country now known as Vietnam was unified by invasion after the Americans betrayed their allies in the Paris Peace Accords and left.  Congress allocated funds to South Vietnam for “Vietnamization” which then did not materialize.  [1]

 In a recent statistical analysis by political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel, a finalist for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize: “Statistics of Vietnamese Democide; Estimates, Calculations, and Sources,” he concludes that the Hanoi government has murdered 1% of its population every year from 1946 to 1987, or one out of every 901 Vietnamese people “within their power” every year.  This total is murder, not the result of war.  Rummel measures the deaths at re-education camps and those in the “new economic zones,” which was the method used by the victorious regime to obtain the property of the defeated population by removing the female and elderly residents.  He calls them “forced labor,” and estimates that as time went on after 1975, they became “half as deadly” as the re-education camps.  Many women and children died. [2]

Further—and this has a direct relationship to the people of San Jose—the Hanoi government is responsible for the deaths of over a million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians since 1975.  He measures the Cambodian deaths during the Vietnam War attributable to South Vietnam and the United States, and finds that the Communist regime in power then and now has a much higher “murder by government” rate.  The highest, of course, is attributable to the Pol Pot communist government, which took power in April 1975.  

Most of the political refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia in the United States are the result of the policies of the Communist regimes against their own people.  Blaming the United States has been the greatest victory that Hanoi has achieved. 

The Vietnamese community of San Jose, especially the older ones, know that is not correct.  Professor Rummel assigns direct responsibility of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of “boat people”  who fled for their lives on the communist regime which is still in power, often with the same people.  That is another historical occurrence that is erased from the Mission Statement of the chancellor of the San Jose-Evergreen Community College District by blaming the war, not the actions of the victors following it.

 The anti-American propaganda of the communist government of Vietnam and establishment liberals in America combine to write a false history.  I know because I saw it in my textbooks and consulted the San Jose Vietnamese community to find out the reasons for discrepancy.  I learned those reasons from my students—Vietnamese and Cambodian--and their parents.   There are many people and organizations in San Jose today who know Vietnamese history, language, and culture and share it with the larger community.  To spend a great deal of money establishing departments and programs at SJCC to send about twenty Vietnamese Americans to study in Vietnam in order to “learn their history and culture” and ask the Hanoi regime to train teachers at SJCC in history is a shocking misuse of public funds.    

 The next session of the Board of Trustees will be held at 6 p.m. on December 12, 2006, at the Board offices on 4750 San Felipe Road, San Jose, CA 95135-1599.  The numbers of the chancellor are:  (fax) 408-531-8722 and telephone 408-270-6402.  email for the chancellor is rosa.perez@sjeccd.org .  The agenda has not yet been published.  The Vietnamese community of San Jose will be there, and I support their protest. [3]

 Information in Vietnamese and English and a YouTube video of the presentation by the Vietnamese community of San Jose to the SJECCD Board of Trustees on November 14, 2006 can be found on the vietsanjosecali blogsite:  http://vietsanjosecalif.blogspot.com .