Vietnam – Silicon Valley One World

Taiwan's Formosa Plastics Group admitted to releasing toxins that killed more than 100 tons of fish along the north-central Vietnam coast; San Jose protesters want the government to kick Formosa out of Vietnam. They fear Vietnamese dependent on fishing and the sea will starve. By Sharon Simonson SAN JOSE—They march in a big circle holding South Vietnamese and American flags, singing in Vietnamese, a portable amplifier broadcasting the music, crackly and loud. The long Northern California summer day is ending, but at evening, sunlight still fills the San Jose City Hall plaza. Fifty people today, but some weeks, hundreds march at the corner abutting busy Santa Clara and Fourth streets, organizers assure me. It’s the eighteenth consecutive Saturday that they’ve protested the April ...

Did President Obama seek to hearten the Vietnamese people or to make sales for U.S. companies By Sharon Simonson Pride and hope, disdain and despair fought for mindshare in Silicon Valley’s Vietnamese-American community this week as President Barack Obama visited the Southeast Asian nation and announced the end to a 50-year arms embargo. The population’s youth and the legions of Vietnamese people who turned out for the president, some waiting for hours in the rain “to see a car pass by,” cheered Loc Van Vu, who founded San Jose’s Immigration Resettlement and Cultural Center in 1976. If the president is pivoting to Asia, the Vietnamese are pivoting back, he said: “It looked like the whole country is looking west to America, freedom and democracy. “Let the Vietnamese have weapo...

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Bay Area Vietnamese Promote Uprising in Vietnam

President’s Visit Evokes Pleasure, Pain for Silicon Valley Vietnamese