Viet Cultural Heritage Garden and Flag-Raising Ceremony Controversy?

 

In the Beginning

In 1999, the San Jose City Council designated 4 acres of land in Kelly Park to be built as Viet Cultural Heritage Garden.  The funding was supposed to come from the Vietnamese-American community and agency grants.  The fundraising effort was managed by an ad hoc committee under the leadership of Liem Nguyen, a now-retired engineer from Sun Micro Systems. A blueprint for the garden was drawn to include an imperial gate, a replica of a one-pillar pagoda surrounded by a lotus pond, a traditional Vietnamese community hall, along with statutes of Vietnamese heroes, and nine giant urns (replica of the Dynastic Urn of the Nguyen dynasty).  

First Round of Funding

Around 2002, former Santa Clara County Supervisor Pete McHugh helped approve $300,000 as seed funding from the county.  But everything fell apart with the lack of consensus in the community on how to fund the rest of the project. In the meantime,  Liem quit and folded the ad-hoc committee.

In 2005, the Viet Heritage Society was given a contract by PRNS (Parks, Recreation & Neighborhood Services) to build the garden.  Dr. Ngai Nguyen was the founder of the nonprofit. Board members included Victor Duong (brother of the owner of California Waste Solutions) and the now deceased Huong Le (brother of the founder of Lee's Sanchwiches).  Subsequently, the city agreed to contribute $1.7 million as a matching fund to a $1.3 million state grant.  Viet Heritage Society also claimed to raise an additional $1.6 million.

Unfinished Phase I Construction

Not until 2011 that Phase I construction began under the supervision of Nick Nghia Nguyen, a young volunteer who lived in the neighborhood next to the park.  He volunteered because he could not stand the eyesore piece of land that had been neglected for years with overgrown weeds and dumping. This led to the cheaply designed Asian-style arch gate, a 57-space parking area, and a half-built pond. In early 2013, former Vice Mayor Madison Nguyen asked Dr. Ngai Nguyen to remove Nick from the project and the progress stopped cold in its track. According to Nick, she wanted to put someone else in charge. The park once again was overgrown with weeds and a homeless encampment appeared. 

In 2014, two new Vietnamese-American council members were elected under the campaign promises of building a community center and VHG.  In 2015, Khanh Russo, Director for Strategic Initiatives, Performance, and Budget, threatened to audit the Viet Heritage Society for not carrying out the contract accordingly.  This prompted Dr. Ngai Nguyen to voluntarily terminate the contract with PRNS.  And VHG was once again under the city’s control. However, to this day, there are still a lot of questions about how the $4.6 million was spent. 

To help move forward, former Councilmember Tam Nguyen got approval to spend over $200,000 to build a fence keeping out the homeless, fill in the unfinished pond for safety reasons, lay gravel to control weeds, and separate a small area for a community garden.

A Lifeless Park

In 2016, to help keep the park lively since it was nonfunctional year-round behind a locked gate, Nguyen started the flag raising every first Saturday of the month.  In early 2021, after the COVID restriction was lifted, Nguyen and some of the people who attended the flag-raising ceremony disagreed bitterly on Biden and Trump. Mirroring the fractious and intense discord nationally, the argument got to a point where they asked Nguyen not to be part of the flag-raising ceremony.

Ha Trieu, a retired Intel circuit designer, stepped in and continued the tradition. However, since his group was having difficulty in getting PRNS to have people available to open the gate early Saturday morning, PRNS suggested they join the Adopt-the-Park program.  This would allow him to keep the key to open for the flag-raising without PRNS spending resources on weekends. As a bonus, with Trieu belongs to the program,  the park gets a clean-up once a month at no cost to the city.  It was a win-win for everybody. 

In 2019, Santa Clara County Supervisors Dave Cortese and Cindy Chavez allocated $210,000 to the city for the construction of the “Thank You American” monument in the garden.  Delayed by COVID but in 2021, former Councilmember Maya Esparzar asked the city council for an additional budget of over $500,000 to start the project.  The monument was finally unveiled in July 2024 and the community celebrated with joy.

 A Manufactured Flag-raising Ceremony Controversy?

The ceremony usually takes about 15 minutes and is attended by 20 - 30 people at nine o’clock every first Saturday of the month.  A third of them are from the local Vietnamese Boy Scout troops helping with the flag raising, picking up trash, and clearing weeds to earn their merit badges.  The rest are elderly folks in their 70s and early 80s who were in their 20s during the Vietnam War.  On some special occasions, the ceremony would double as a celebration event and the crowd would swell to 70-100 people.  Ha Trieu and his group are responsible for opening the gate and coordinate the cereomony.

Interestingly, the ceremony attracts political candidates from all over the Bay Area running for office as well as elected officials wanting to show their connection with the community.   Somehow, they think it is an easy platform to get public attention and name recognition. Mayoral candidate Matt Mahan in 2022 showed up religiously for every ceremony.  Same with city council candidate Bien Doan.  They both won.

On the first Saturday in August of this year, Van Le, a school board trustee of ESUHSD, and members of AVVA (Associates of Vietnam Veterans of America), invited Assemblymembers Ash Kalra, Stephanie Nguyen, and Evan Low to the event so that they could give the community a framed resolution declaring the recognition of the Viet Heritage Flag by the State Assembly as the official flag of the Vietnamese-American community in California.

The event was well received but near the end marred by disturbing verbal arguments and actions.  According to attendees, Van Le asked the ASMs to take commemorative pictures. She wanted two pictures, one with Saratoga Mayor Yan Zhao, Councilmember Bien Doan and all attendees, and the other with ASMs and the group without the mayor and councilmember.  Zhao politely stepped out of the picture while Doan refused and insisted that he would be in all two pictures. Doan loudly claimed he had the rights since he was invited to the event plus this is a city garden in his district, and he refused to take himself out of the pictures.  ASM Stephanie Nguyen could not believe the unruly behavior.  She has never experienced anything this weird from an elected official who stubbornly wanted to bully his way.  Later that day, ASM Ash Kalra called her and apologized. 

A week later, Doan personally went to the garden with a PRNS official to change the lock and kept a key to the new lock.  He asked PRNS to take the keys back from Ha Trieu and his group.  Afterward, he put out an announcement declaring from now on whoever wants to do a flag-raising ceremony on the first Saturday of the month will have to be approved by his office. His reason is that his office had received complaints about groups not being able to use the VHG for their own flag-raising ceremony.  

 He called for a meeting and  invited any Vietnamese groups who wanted to do the flag-raising ceremony since there are now 12 Saturday slots per year that his office will authorize and is limited to one group per slot per year. 

Out of hundreds of associations in a Vietnamese-American community of over 130,000  people, only a handful responded. The meeting had representatives of VIVO, VAR (Vietnamese American Roundtable), IRCC, AASC, Vietnamese American Student Association at San Jose State, and United Vietnamese American Community of Northern California (the same group that has been organizing the flag-raising ceremony for the last 3 years).  After meeting, all groups  declined to take responsibility since they could sense this was a setup for a personal donnybrook.   

The question wondered out loud is why would anybody even bother to create a fight for an arbitrary date at an arbitrary time to reserve a slot in an unfinished park that is 99% locked up throughout the year to protect a lifeless space.

(To be continued)