Red? Yellow? Star? Stripes?

Han Tran got on the Internet last year to look for the flag of her native land, Vietnam. Much to her surprise, the Google search yielded two different results: a red flag with a yellow star, and a yellow flag with three red horizontal stripes.

Confused, Tran turned to a trusted expert.

“I asked my dad which flag to use, and he said the striped one,” said the 14-year-old, who was born in Ho Chi Minh City and came to America in 2000. Since her Google encounter, the Citrus Heights resident has known that two Vietnamese flags exist, without really grasping why.

Jennifer Pham can understand how she feels. The UC Davis sophomore is still unsure about the difference between the two flags, although she grew up seeing more stripes than stars, mainly because her cousin used to sew pillows with the yellow flag on them.

“I think the yellow flag belongs to the south, but I don’t know,” Pham said.

She guessed correctly. The yellow logo represented the former Republic of South Vietnam, before the Communist North united both sides in 1975, ending the Vietnam War. In addition to changing the unified country’s name to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Communist regime went on to replace the old flag with a red one that better matched that of China and the Soviet Union.

Yet the majority of Vietnamese Americans born in the ’80s and ’90s are raised to accept the technically obsolete yellow flag. It’s displayed in homes and on TV, on the streets and in stores, particularly in south Sacramento and particularly around the Lunar New Year. Kids see it enough that they come to think of the yellow flag as the official symbol of Vietnam. Their parents never tell them that the Vietnamese government only gives authority to one flag at home and abroad, and that’s the red one.

Instead, the younger generation of Vietnamese Americans continues to believe a half-truth. They’ve unknowingly transformed the two flags from symbols of a country to symbols of a generational divide.

To the older generation, these symbols have a third layer. Those old enough to remember the war cling to the defeated yellow flag as a statement against the Communist government, and they pass that behavior on to their children. Problem is, they don’t pass on the conviction that belies that behavior.

Out with the new, in with the old
While there are certainly Vietnamese Americans who originated from north Vietnam, the overwhelming majority trace their roots back to the south.

Historically, that makes sense.

After their crushing loss in the bloody civil war, some South Vietnamese chose to cope with Communist rule, while millions of others escaped. Hundreds of thousands of those refugees ended up on the soil of their former ally, the United States.

With them, they brought the ensign of the old South, the only governing authority they support.

Tran’s mother, Ngoc Anh Vu, is among those supporters. She explained her opposition to communism simply: “No freedom.”

Tam Ta, 20, is too young to have experienced the war, but from the little time he spent in Vietnam, he concludes the leadership is “corrupt.” Ta, who came to America in 1995, shared an anecdote about his cousin in Vietnam, a good student who scored well on a college test but wasn’t admitted. Compare that to another student who scored poorly but got in, Ta alleged, because of his family’s ties to the government.

“Most Vietnamese people here don’t like communism,” said Ta, a resident of Elk Grove.

Making it through school doesn’t necessarily equal success, either, at least not for Minh Dang’s sister. He said she couldn’t find a job after graduating with a degree in pharmacy, so the Vietnamese government had her take up a volunteer gig.

“People are very poor, they can’t survive,” Dang, 37, said. “Life’s so horrible, and the government doesn’t even care.”

Dang, who now works for a Folsom company helping low-income families find health insurance, admits that the economy in Vietnam is improving as it opens its doors to foreign investors. But that doesn’t solve what Dang sees as the country’s biggest problem.

“There’s no freedom of state, no rights,” said Dang, who is old enough to know the aftermath of the war, but immigrated to America in 1993. “There’s no law. The government can do anything, anytime. It’s very scary.”

And by “anything,” he means, for example, that the administration crushes dissent, so that citizens who still support the former South would never actually speak out. The conspiracy theorist in Dang also believes that Vietnam—which ranks 155 out of 168 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ 2006 Press Freedom Index—has feelers in the United States to keep tabs on possible anti-communist troublemakers.

At the same time, Dang knows that few Vietnamese living in America would ever flaunt the red flag because it would be quickly taken down by sympathizers of the South. So while red rules Vietnam, yellow dominates here. “You’d never see them together,” Dang said.

In fact, the yellow flag is so prevalent among Vietnamese Americans that the red flag has drawn widespread protest wherever it goes up. Students demonstrated against the red at colleges in Texas and California. Fifteen thousand Orange County residents rallied against a video-store owner who chose to hang the flag in his shop. A San Jose group representing Vietnamese Americans convinced the U.S. Postal Service to pull the flag from thousands of brochures nationwide.

And where the red goes down, the yellow goes up. Dozens of states, as diverse as Oklahoma, Hawaii and California, have passed resolutions adopting the yellow flag to officially represent local Vietnamese Americans. An even larger number of cities, ranging from Eagles Mountain, Utah, to Worcester, Mass., to good old Sacramento, have done the same. Even jurisdictions in Australia and Canada have legislation acknowledging the yellow flag. Advocates call it the Vietnamese Freedom and Heritage Flag.

Mixed message
It’s nothing new that a post-war population takes shelter in a new land, while continuing to condemn the rulers of its old one. And it’s nothing new that second-generation citizens gradually lose touch with the heritage of their immigrant parents. But the case of the Vietnamese in Sacramento goes beyond just losing touch. One thing that the kids do retain, the yellow flag of their forbears, is largely superficial in that they accept it for little other reason than because their parents said so.

In Vivien Nguyen’s house in Antelope, the stripes hang above the TV in the family room, and above her parents’ bed. She’s aware that her family backs the South, but confessed she hasn’t formed her own opinion either way.

“I wouldn’t say I’m for the South,” said Vivien, 14, but she wouldn’t say she’s for the North, either.

Tra Truong, also of Antelope, said he is more familiar with the yellow flag because his mom told him, “We shouldn’t have the other flag.

“She doesn’t like the Viet Cong,” he continued, referring to the South Vietnamese who fought for the Communist side. “Whenever she sees a guy who talks or looks like the Viet Cong, she tells us they’re not nice. But she never told us why.”

Dang’s nephew, Tony Dinh, noticed that same anti-Communist attitude in his parents. His dad fought for the South army, and fled to the United States shortly after the war. Dinh, 21, recalled his father’s constant recounting of his time spent in a Communist prison, eating only rice and salt. But other than that, Dinh doesn’t know enough to make his own judgment about the regime or its emblems.

“The only flag that has meaning to me is the three-striped one because that was imposed upon me by my parents,” said Dinh, a CSUS student.

For years, Dinh thought that was the only banner in use. When he eventually came across the red flag, his dad told him, “That’s the Viet Cong flag, you shouldn’t respect it.” Often, like Dinh, young Vietnamese Americans learn at home that the yellow flag represents Vietnam, and it’s not until an outside force (usually school) intervenes that they find out otherwise.

Sometimes, the yellow field with its red stripes is so ingrained in their knowledge that Vietnamese Americans might never discover the truth.

“I didn’t know the red flag was the official one until you told me,” said Trung Nguyen, 22, another CSUS student.

Don’t ask, don’t tell
John Nguyen, of Elk Grove, said that he, too, had incorrectly believed in the legitimacy of the yellow flag until interviewed by SN&R. Nevertheless, the 19-year-old is content with what he knows about his family history, saying he never got around to asking his parents much about Vietnam.

Therein lies one of the chief causes of the younger generation’s misconceptions about the Vietnamese flag and, by correlation, about their heritage. Their recent memory overshadowed by life in America, the youth may not think to or want to discuss the history that brought their families here.

“It’s the past,” Pham said. Since no one talks about it in her house, she figures her parents have let go of that part of their lives.

There was a time in Vivien’s life when her family did talk about the war. At supper, her parents and grandfather would chat about their homeland, but not before sending Vivien to her room so that she couldn’t hear any of it. What she does know is that her grandfather was jailed for defending the South, which is why the United States helped her family come here in 1992, a year before she was born.

Vivien remembers when her family would gather with other veterans a few times a month in south Sacramento to remind themselves why they fought, even if the conflict is long over.

The year Vivien turned six, she and her family stopped going to those meetings, and they stopped mentioning the war altogether. That was the year her grandfather died.

“Now we don’t like to talk about it a lot,” she said.

It’s admittedly a delicate subject, one that Trung has been unable to broach with his own family.

“I don’t ask them those kinds of questions,” he said. “Whenever I do ask, they get mad, they ignore it, or they change the subject.”

Part of the problem may be the language barrier. If he had to quantify it, Trung estimates that he speaks 30 percent of the Vietnamese language. The way it usually works: He’ll talk to his mom in English, she’ll respond in Vietnamese.

Whether they described themselves as fluent or not, most of the people interviewed for this story estimated knowing 60 percent to 70 percent of the language.

That, coupled with a reluctance to rehash a decades-old topic, has left many young Vietnamese Americans culturally unaware.

“Most kids don’t care, and parents don’t tell their kids,” said Dang. About 90 percent of the Vietnamese Americans he knows denounce communism. “They believe in one flag, and they don’t want to think that the other exists.”

By telling their children only about the yellow flag, the older Vietnamese hope to keep the anti-communist spirit alive. But since they don’t explain the turbulent past that goes with the territory, and their children don’t seek the explanations, the younger generation sees little more than a yellow piece of cloth. Or is it a red piece of cloth?