The annual commemoration of the Trung Sisters victory over the Chinese in 40 A.D. took place at the Unity Building (formerly G.I. Forum) in San Jose, California, on March 25.

The ceremony, solemn as always, was described in both Vietnamese and English by the Overseas Vietnamese American Women's Association President Hoa B. Truong as seeking freedom and democracy in present-day Vietnam.  She asked the guests to write to President Bush to bring pressure on the Vietnam government to release prisoners of conscience and the  political offense of "speaking against the Socialist regime."

The tradition of the Trung Sisters Commemoration was banished in Vietnam following the invasion of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.  Although the VN government allowed the people to celebrate the holiday again in the 1990s, the  rituals are now proscribed by the  government to conform to Communist dogma. 

Therefore, it is only among the Vietnamese overseas, the Diaspora, that the Vietnamese culture may be celebrated and learned.  This is of immediate impact on the proposed student exchange programs by California community colleges who have been falsely led to believe that Vietnamese culture exists primarily in Vietnam.  The Communists have been rewriting that history since 1946 to keep themselves in power and bring fear to the people by imprisoning them for exercising religious and cultural beliefs.