Hoa Van Tran‘s Vietnamese mailer hit mailboxes today; the Bolsavik got his from someone in Westminster. (PDF here) Hoa went on the attack, accusing Janet Nguyen of accepting contributions from alleged communist sympathizers, and Dina Nguyen of failing 
to speak out against the deportation of Vietnamese back to the communist country.
In the three-pager printed on a folded 17 x 11 paper, Hoa first went after Janet, accusing her of accepting contributions from “pro-communist capitalists.” While noting that Janet Nguyen did join the June 2007 protests against visiting Vietnamese president Nguyen Minh Triet at the St Regis in Dana Point, Hoa claimed that Janet had taken money from people associated with that visit.
Hoa attached copies of Janet’s financial disclosure showing a January 2007 contribution from Tru Le, which Hoa claims to be Eric Le (Vietnamese: Lê Công Tr?) about whom, he said, “the Vietnamese community suspects of organizing the event for Nguyen Minh Triet in Dana Point.” Hoa also copied entries showing contributions in December 2006 from managers of Lee’s Sandwiches. The company’s owner Chieu Le caught flaks from the anti-communist forces for allegedly showing up at the St Regis event, and for a brief period the Viet Weekly protesters also staged loud and obscene protests outside the Lee’s Sandwiches on Bolsa. (For some unknown reasons they never hit other Lee’s locations…)
Dina, at least, was not accused of being a communist. But she was accused of being anti-Vietnamese. (Not sure if in Hoa’s mind anti-Vietnamese is better or worse than communist.)
The genesis for Hoa’s accusation is a memorandum of understanding between the Bush administration and the government of Vietnam. Signed by the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on January 22, the MOU provided for Vietnam to take back its nationals who have been deported by the United States. (Prior to the MOU, Vietnam would not take them back and as a result, most deportees had nowhere to go and had to be released.) Read the DHS press release here.
While most community service groups opposed the MOU and held seminars to help people who may be caught in it (read the Bolsavik’s previous entry here), the Trannies stayed mum. It’s that silence that Hoa is now going after Dina Nguyen for, questioning whether her loyalty was with “her party or her people.”
Anyway, none of it was what first caught the Bolsavik’s eyes.
Maybe it’s because of his former job dealing with printers every day, but the first thing the Bolsavik noticed was how the entire letter is poorly prepared, all rasterized and the black-and-white mostly gray.
As you know, Vietnamese language is based on the regular alphabet, but with diacritical marks all over the place. Most commercial printers don’t have those character sets. The way most people do it, is to produce a PDF file with the font set included, and have the printer’s prepress department create a plate from that.
Hoa’s team, however, appeared to have just scanned his letter and printed the whole thing as an image. It came out with the words gray and not crisp, the page dirty with black dots, and the black-and-white photo totally flat.
