KUCI Subversity: Tony Nguyen's Enforcing the Silence Dares to Address Anti-Communist Violence in the Vietnamese Diaspora in San Francisco Bay Area

A bold new documentary dares to address something only whispered about in the Vietnamese diasporic communities in North America -- the existence, especially in the 1980s, of a violent group of thugs -- masquerading as "freedom fighters". Enforcing the Silence director Tony Nguyen, himself having been a youth advocate in Washington D.C. and San Francisco, in resurrecting the shortened life of Vietnamese immigrant activist and journalist/editor Lam Trong Duong, pays tribute to those in the Vietnamese diasporic communities that were anti-war and progressive. Lam Doung founded the first Vietnamese youth center in America (Vietnamese Youth Development Center), and published a progressive Vietnamese-language newspaper, Cai Dinh Lang, that reprinted stories from Hanoi. That he supported Ho Chi Minh -- he was an early immigrant in 1971, prior to the fall of Saigon, and he attended Oberlin High on a American Field Service exchange and later stayed to attend Oberlin College -- may have led to his murder in 1981 at the young age of 27. Note: This particular show was an Internet edition only, interview recorded at KUCI studios on 25 April 2011 beginning around 5:30 p.m.