Bolsavik.com

As two Vietnamese brothers were floating in the Gulf of Siam in 1983 they found a bottle with a note in it. The message led to a friendship that helped the two and their families arrive in the U.S. after two years in a Thailand refugee camp.

The touching story is featured on CNN as one of “5 amazing messages in bottles” - here.

The note in the champagne bottle was thrown by Dorothy and John Peckham overboard a cruise ship in 1979 during a trip to Hawaii. They asked anyone who found one of their bottles to write them back, and even went so far as to include a $1 bill to cover the postage.

Four years later, on March 4, 1983, John’s birthday, the couple received a letter from Hoa Van Nguyen.

Hoa, a former soldier in the South Vietnamese Army, said he and his younger brother had found one of the Peckhams’ bottles as the two men were floating in the Gulf of Siam.

Hoa and his brother were boat people escaping communist Vietnam. When Hoa and his brother saw the bottle, they felt as though a prayer had been answered, giving them the strength to carry on, they said.

They would land in Songkhla in Thailand. Songkhla was one of the largest refugee camps in Southeast Asia and was among the most dangerous to get to as Thai pirates crowded the Gulf of Siam, robbing, killing and raping Vietnamese refugees.

(more…)

The sole Vietnamese-American on the city council of San Jose said in a written statement that she is “greatly disturbed” by the police beating of Vietnamese student Phuong Ho (pictured). In a separate interview with the Bolsavik, Councilmember Madison Nguyen also said she supports putting body cameras on police officers that record audio and video.

The statement (click here to read the original PDF) was issued by three council members. In addition to Nguyen, councilmembers Sam Liccardo and Ash Kalra also signed. Kalra is a former public defender; Liccardo is a former D.A. and the alleged beating took place in his district.

The three wrote, “We are greatly disturbed by the video released by the San Jose Mercury News on the arrest of Phuong Ho, a Vietnamese exchange student at San Jose State University.” (Read more here)

They stated, “The behavior of the San Jose Police officers at the scene needs to be investigated thoroughly to ensure accountability for their actions.”

In an acknowledgement that the secrecy surrounding the investigation of the Daniel Pham shooting (read here) was - at the least - problematic, the statement said, “We also ask that if the District Attorney chooses to conduct a grand jury proceeding, that it be open to the public.”

In an interview conducted for Nguoi Viet Daily News, Nguyen told the Bolsavik that she believes San Jose police needs some department-wide reforms.

(more…)

(Click on photo to view video)

Police using a metal baton repeatedly beat a man even after he’s down, and the whole thing was captured on video by an amateur who just happened to be there.

That may sound like something out of L.A. in the last century, but it’s not. It’s San Jose 2009, and the beating victim is a 20-year-old Vietnamese exchange student, hit more than 10 times, including at least once on the head while another cop sic’ed his Taser gun on him, reports the San Jose Mercury News here.

The grainy cellphone video of the police attack on San Jose State math student Phuong Ho (Vietnamese: Hồ Quang Phương) was posted on the Mercury News web site. It shows Ho on the ground, crying and moaning, being hit repeatedly. Click on the picture above to view.

News of the beating came on the heels of a decision by the local grand jury, after a secret session with the D.A.’s office, not to prosecute any of the police involved in the fatal shooting of a mentally unstable Vietnamese man, Daniel Pham (read here).

An unavoidable question: Is this an isolated case, or is there a pattern of abuse or discrimination toward Vietnamese?

San Jose Police Assistant Chief Daniel Katz, after being shown the video by the newspaper, said the department takes the matter “very seriously.”

Police reports identify the officer who was beating Ho as officer Kenneth Siegel, and the one who Tasered him as officer Steven Payne, Jr.

(more…)

The new leader of the organizing committee for the Tet Festival at has set a challenging goal for this coming fest: To break the $1million mark, on the cummulative amount of money the UVSA donates back to the community.

Phong Ly, the new President of the Union of Vietnamese Students Associations of Southern California, and the incoming Tet Chair, told the Bolsavik that he’s aiming to “make the Tet Festival so profitable that, after deducting other expenses, we can donate back to the community enough to break the $1 million mark, cummulatively.”

Including the 2009 Tet Festival, UVSA has donated in the neighborhood of $880,000 over 7 years, Tet Vice-Chair and UVSA Treasurer Tieu-Y Nguyen told the Bolsavik. To break the million-dollar mark means they would have to donate $120,000. Which means they would have to net a profit of $300,000.

That’s a tall order, considering that consumer confidence (and therefore propensity to spend) is still low, and after the 2009 festival (pic above, and more here) the group netted $206,466.99; and donated $73,233.50, according to Viet Bao here. The year before, they donated $106,000 (see here).

To break the $1 million cummulative mark, the UVSA would need a whopping 50% year-to-year increase. But then again, what’s life without a little challenge? Who knows, maybe they will.

(more…)

A 42-year-old Viet alleged gangster is among three people charged with murder in the death of a Vietnamese-American man who had witnessed a prior shooting, resulting in the conviction of this defendant’s brother, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here.

Quy D. Nguyen, 42, of Seattle is facing multiple charges in the January 2007 killing of Hoang Nguyen. Also charged is another Viet, Le Nhu Le, 41, of Kent, Washington; as well as Jerry H. Thomas III, 23, of Algona.

Hoang Nguyen was shot outside his apartment complex in what investigators believe was a revenge-murder plot masterminded by Quy Nguyen.

Although he’s 42 years old, Quy Nguyen is believed to be the leader of the Young Seattle Boyz street gang. Quy Nguyen is also believed to be a drug lord, paying people to run houses where he grows marijuana.

Hoang Nguyen had been a witness in a double shooting in Seattle in July 2006. Quy Nguyen’s brother Diem Nguyen was convicted in the shooting and sentenced to nearly 40 years.

Investigators said a gunman approached Hoang Nguyen and his wife as they were getting out of their car. The gunman asked Hoang Nguyen to put the coffee cup he was holding on the ground. As he did so, the gunman shot him in the back of the head, the victim’s wife told detectives.

(more…)

A Santa Clara County grand jury last Thursday declined to indict any of the police officers who were involved in the shooting death of a mentally ill Vietnamese man, reports the San Jose Mercury News here.

Daniel Pham, 27, was fatally shot by police last May. He had attacked his brother with a knife, and the family had called 9-1-1.

When police arrived at the scene, they claimed they didn’t know Pham was a mental patient. The family, however, insisted that they were screaming and yelling, in English, to the police, that Pham was mentally ill. Police shot and killed Pham.

Two weeks ago, several community groups in San Jose, Viet and non-Viet, protested the shooting and presented a petition with a thousand signatures calling for the D.A. to open grand jury proceedings. (In the picture are Daniel Pham’s mother, his older brother, and the brother’s ex-girlfriend.)

The D.A. Dolores Carr, however, had left the building by the time the group got there. She had earlier said that she has a long-standing belief that grand jury investigations into police shootings should not be open to the public. This is a reversal from her predecessor’s policy, who opened the grand jury proceedings into shooting of Bich Cau Thi Pham, who was killed by San Jose police for holding a vegetable peeler smaller than a regular steak knife.

With the proceedings closed, the grand jury promptly rendered its decision not to prosecute any police.

Which raised even more questions. As anyone remotely connected to law enforcement knows, grand jury proceedings are the D.A. office’s one-man show, and the grand jury almost always does whatever the D.A. wants.

The Assistant D.A. in charge of the case, Dave Tomkins, told the Mercury News, “The grand jury heard all the evidence in the case and they declined to criminally indict. That says it all.” By “that says it all,” Tomkins may have meant whatever –  but to everyone else, that does say it all: That the D.A.’s office was slanting the evidence toward no indictment.

(more…)

A Vietnamese man was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving after he allegedly slammed his minivan into, yep, a police cruiser.

Trang Nguyen, 52, was in jail for two days before he was released early morning on Sunday on bond, Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s records show.

The crash occured about 7:30pm Friday, according to the Pasadena Star-News here.

A sheriff’s deputy, driving a patrol car, was driving northbound on San Gabriel Boulevard in San Gabriel, while Nguyen was approaching from the opposite direction on the same street.

At the corner of Chestnut, Nguyen allegedly did not yield the right of way to the patrol car, cut left in front of the incoming cop car, and allegedly caused a crash.

(more…)

Campaign disclosures for Q3 of 2009 were due last week, and the two Republicans vying to replace U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez both show healthy numbers.

Assemblyman Van Tran, known for his fundraising prowess, pulled in a modest $91,809, according to his campaign disclosure here. This apparently smaller-than-expected amount, however, may be due more to the vagaries of the calendar: The previous quarter, he amassed a whopping $253,921.

What’s a little more surprising, is that political neophyte Quang X. Pham also showed he’s no light-weight. (Report here.) With his first fundraiser taking place in mid August, Pham still took in $63,858 in contributions, and lent his campaign $62,500.

Both campaigns easily dwarf the last Viet to challenge Sanchez. In the 2006 elections, Tan D. Nguyen took in a total of just $116,345.43 in contributions for the entire election cycle.

Tran and Pham, however, still need to do a lot of work to catch up with the incumbent. Rep. Loretta Sanchez is sitting on a war chest of $769,010.75 (report here) of which $134,838.40 were raised this past quarter.

Which they are. Tran told the Bolsavik, for his Nguoi Viet story here in Vietnamese, that he plans to raise and spend between $1 and $1.5 million for the general elections. “We’re on target to meet that goal,” Tran said.

(more…)

Long Kim Pham, the perennial candidate who surprised everyone by winning a seat on the Orange County Board of Education, on Thursday sent out emails claiming the priests-rectors of the Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs Church in Sacramento are communists. Not just Viet communists, but Chinese communists.

Calling the church leaders “traitors in priests’ clothing,” Pham quotes a news item, apparently from haivannews.com, claiming the priests allowed communist Chinese to use the church hall to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. (Click on the picture to read the email in full; click here to read the email’s attachment.)

Haivannews.com, however, apparently has taken down that news item, supposedly dated October 4. It does keep a letter from a reader (here) explaining that the event was, in fact, not political but a mid-Autumn Festival celebration by the local Chinese-American community.

(more…)

A Viet long-time Superior Court judge is only one step away from becoming the first Vietnamese-American federal judge, having been reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to its web site here.

In the video webcast here, the unanimous vote on Judge Nguyen occurs at 29:00 to 29:25.

(more…)