By Katelyn Do

On January 25th, 2025, during a Lunar New Year's celebration in Orange County’s Little Saigon, YouTubers Lan Vu and brothers Huy Truong and Tuan Truong got into a tense verbal altercation that was filmed and uploaded on Vu’s channel. The argument, which took place on Main St. in Garden Grove, ultimately resulted in police intervention. The video documenting their argument has racked up over 300,000 views.

“Bưng bô cho việt cộng ở bên kia,” Tuan said to Lan. “Mặt của mày ra mặt của bưng bô.” In English, Tuan accuses Lan of being a “sellout” to the Communist government of Vietnam. “Your face is the face of a sell out,” Tuan said.

Tuan goes on to list the “proof” he has against Lan of being a “communist sellout” to the Government of Vietnam such as having photos of Lan posing with the Vietnam National flag, the yellow star on red flag, which is a controversial symbol in the community, synonymous with Vietnamese communist government.

Tuan continues to berate Lan in the middle of the busy festival, all while passerbys at the festival start to stop and watch, and the cameras continue to roll. Huy attempts to pull his brother Tuan away multiple times, but it just makes Tuan angrier.

“Your face is the face of a sell out.”

— Tuan Truong to Lan Vu

Tuan yells at Lan around the five-minute mark of the video, “I said you play with communists and you are a communist!” Just when things appear to escalate to a physical altercation, police come and break up the men.

A few months after the heated exchange, Lan says he tries to ignore the brothers when asked about their altercation. “Those things I faced for like fourteen years, I faced worse things before, when the anticommunist sense more stronger than now, and that didn’t even make me scared. How could they make me scared?” said Lan

So what’s so important about some random Vietnamese American YouTuber fight? To a larger American audience, this video may just look like three grown men fighting for some internet clout, but for the Vietnamese American community, this altercation might reveal a tipping point in growing divisions within the Vietnamese American community.

Furthermore, this altercation shows that old habits die hard in the Vietnamese ethnic press. Despite a new generation of journalists and news influencers who currently dominate the Vietnamese news media landscape, deep polarization still exists, with social media further complicating work towards productive dialogue.

Journalists vs. News Influencers

Most American audiences have likely never seen or heard of these men. So who are they?

Well, to Vietnamese Americans, these men are some of the most recognized news sources in the community. They have over a million subscribers each, building their followings off their news content. To the community, they’re not just YouTubers, they’re journalists.

“Normal people usually think that Youtube is different from journalism, but I think I identify as a journalist using YouTube,” Vu said. “YouTube is just a platform for whatever you do.”

Just like most Americans are shifting towards social media as opposed to traditional media, recent studies show Asian Americans as a whole increasingly rely on social media apps like Facebook for news. Vietnamese Americans especially rely on YouTube to get their news.

Vu has one of the largest channels in the community, PhoBolsaTV, boasting 1.72 million subscribers. The channel mainly highlights current events in the local Little Saigon neighborhood through interviews with locals and community leaders.

The Truong brothers cover the news a little differently from Vu. Both are prolific vloggers through Huy’s “N10tv” channel and Tuan’s “M16TV” channel. Combined, the brothers have over 1.7 million subscribers and average thousands of views on their near-daily livestreams. Huy is the more popular personality of the two and is known to weave his reporting on current politics and news with personal commentary, which has a strong right lean.

But to traditional standards, would their content be considered journalism?

Journalist Lam Thuy Vo weighed in on the discussion, saying there are important, nuanced distinctions separating “news influencers” from actual journalists absent in the conversation of social media journalism.

“I actually think that sometimes, some of the things that they do might be considered journalism. Some of the things they might do might be considered opinion. Other things could be analysis. Other things could just be false information,” Vo said. “In many ways, this is sort of like a very, very complex information environment that very few people know how to navigate, and because it is full of varying quality of information.”

Vo has published numerous investigations with The Markup and Documented on news influencers and misinformation in the Vietnamese American community. In one of her investigations, Vo details how Vietnamese political influencer Sonia Ohlala spreads misinformation disguised as news or political commentary.

Even if Lan or Huy might not fit the typical image of a journalist, their reach and influence in the Vietnamese American community are very real.

However, disinformation is not the only issue the Vietnamese ethnic media faces.

A wound that won’t heal

A unique aspect of the PhoBolsaTV channel is Vu’s reporting in Vietnam. It’s helped him gain an international audience, with many of his subscribers being from Vietnam. However, this has also exposed Vu to heavy criticism is his reporting in Vietnam. “Our audience is not just in the US. It’s everywhere. In Vietnam, there’s a big audience,” said Vu.

Many Vietnamese Americans see any positive relations with modern-day Vietnam and its government as a betrayal. Nationalist sentiment runs deep, especially among older generations, for South Vietnam, the country that they feel they lost after the North Vietnamese forces took Saigon and reunified the country in 1975.

Black April commemoration in Orange County. Photo by Katelyn Do

The Truong brothers have not been shy in expressing their contempt for Lan and his openness towards the current Vietnamese government. The brothers fled Vietnam as political refugees after Huy was imprisoned for six years in Vietnam for political speech.

Their argument highlights how, despite a rapidly evolving media landscape within Vietnamese-American ethnic media, many long-standing issues around anti-communism, polarization and censorship remain.

During their heated exchange, Tuan accused Lan of being a communist numerous times. Just a few decades ago, being labeled a communist or a Vietnam sympathizer could very well get you killed, as it did for five Vietnamese American journalists in the 80s and 90s.

Any semblance of progressive, left-leaning or sympathetic viewpoints towards Vietnam was considered essentially treason and met with violent retribution. Many of those sentiments still exist today, though most say the threat of physical violence has lessened.

Journalists and media figures fear challenging the existing status quo, feeling strong social pressure to adhere to the strict boundaries of what Vietnamese Americans want to hear.

Origins of Vietnamese Ethnic Press

History of Censorship

Nguoi Viet and the birth of the Vietnamese Ethnic Press

Yen Ngoc Do, founder of Nguoi Viet. Source: Orange County Register.

Fifty years ago, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in the US after American troops pulled out of Vietnam, effectively ending the Vietnam War.

In 1978, journalist Yen Do established the first Vietnamese-language newspaper, Nguoi Viet Daily News, in Westminster, CA, an event that would help define what we know as Little Saigon today.

Orange County’s Little Saigon Neighborhood is not just a place where you can find delicious Vietnamese food and visit the famous Asian Garden Mall. In the Vietnamese American diaspora, it’s considered to be the epicenter of Vietnamese American culture and politics

Its prominence didn’t just come from anywhere; the formation of an ethnic press was crucial to creating a strong local network among newly settled refugees, drawing more to the neighborhood.

“I wanted to help resettle and educate the newcomers and to continue the collective memory of our group of refugees,” Do said in an interview with Jeffrey Brody.

Nguoi Viet Newspaper was not just an average newspaper. It served as a vital resource for the local community to keep track of local events, promote local businesses and most importantly, stay connected with family members back in Vietnam.

The paper fostered these transnational connections by regularly publishing the price of a kilo of rice in Vietnam to help people gauge how much money to send back as remittances to their family members still in Vietnam.

Along with local news, the paper prided itself in its service journalism, assisting new immigrants in adjusting to American life. They'd publish guides on how to get your driver's license and how to open a bank account.

“Nguoi Viet started to help make the connection for refugees trying to learn how to adjust to America while still able to stay connected to things in the homeland and to people there,” said Anh Do, LA Times reporter and daughter of Yen Do.

“It's the one thing that creates an imagined community together. If you do not have a newspaper, then you do not have a connected community,” said Joseph Nguyen, lecturer in Vietnamese American studies at Cal State Long Beach.

This tradition of a strong relationship between the press and the audience has allowed these news influencers, like Lan and Huy, to build substantial followings.

A history of hostility, censorship and violence.

In 1989, community organizer and journalist Lam Duong was shot and killed in front of his apartment in San Francisco. Duong was an antiwar student activist and outspoken about his critical views on American intervention in the Bay Area, making him a target for many in the community who disagreed.

The tense, even violent polarization within the Vietnamese ethnic press has existed for as long as the Vietnamese American community has been in the US.

Despite a growing and sprawling network of Vietnamese language media in the mid-'80s, not every voice was given the space to speak. Staunch anti-Communist attitudes and post-war trauma set a volatile landscape for the press in Vietnamese American enclaves. Journalists were pressured into adhering to social norms or risk boycotts, violent retribution, or, in the worst case, death

Lam Duong's murder was only the first in a string of many targeting journalists in the Vietnamese community throughout the next decade. Duong’s story is chronicled in the 2009 documentary “Enforcing the Silence” by filmmaker Tony Nguyen.

“Vietnamese elders, who I would consider as elders, they would tell me, 'you need to be careful,' and I never really understood what that was about,” Tony said. Even decades after Duong’s murder, the threat of violent retribution towards progressive voices remains in the community. In 2009, Tony Nguyen decided to create his documentary after years of community organizing in Oakland as a college student.

Another notable case is that of Dam Phong Nguyen, an investigative journalist in Texas, who was shot and killed in front of his home in 1982 after receiving numerous threats for his investigations around a prominent political group called “The Front”.

Tu Nguyen, Dam Phong Nguyen’s son, recalls being physically harassed and intimidated when he went with his father to drop off his newspaper. “Back then, it was a very sensitive issue. You opine, and they will burn down your house… If you express anything or convey anything that is different, definitely, you are a moving target,” Tu said.

Tu describes his father as a passionate journalist who took his job seriously and didn’t allow the intimidation to affect his responsibility to expose the truth. Tu says the local community appreciated his father's work too. “They liked someone who comes out and tells you what you do not want to hear. That's what makes it so interesting to them,” said Tu. “They support him one hundred percent… but they did it silently, … they were very scared.”

A 2015 ProPublica investigation, Terror in Little Saigon, dug up these decades-old journalist killings, looking into how no one was ever held responsible for any of the killings, despite a clear pattern indicating politically motivated assassinations. The investigation was led by reporter A.C. Thompson with Tony Nguyen as a co-producer.

Thompson, who didn’t know much about the deep political tensions in the Vietnamese American community before his investigation, was shocked to see the levels of violence and censorship. “What I realized the more time that I spent with community journalists, is that there is just a massive culture of fear,” Thompson said. “There’s a huge amount of people that I met who were very traumatized, so very reluctant to say much”

Both Thompson and Tony faced criticism from the Vietnamese American communities after the release of the investigation. Tony shared that he even received threats on Facebook, like being sent photos of bullets.

Despite decades passing, the dark past of the political killings of journalists in the Vietnamese American community has effectively silenced progressive or left-leaning voices in the media landscape, which has paved the way for growing right-wing extremist sentiments.

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