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Vietnamese outraged by actor’s punishment

By Ian Stewart
Saturday November 02, 2002

SAN FRANCISCO — Celebrated Vietnamese actor Don Duong has played an army commander, a refugee and a pedicab driver from post-war Saigon. Now he’s been cast as an outlaw by the nation’s communist leaders, forbidden to leave Vietnam and banned from acting for five years. 

Branding Duong a “national traitor,” Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture and Information recommended that the actor be punished for his portrayal of a North Vietnamese commander in the Paramount film “We Were Soldiers.” 

The treatment of Duong, one of Vietnam’s most popular actors, has outraged people in the large Vietnamese communities in California. 

“This incident just shows that Vietnam’s communists have no freedom of speech,” said Ky Ngo, the advisor to the President of the Vietnamese-American Community of Northern California. 

“I’m happy this has happened. This shows the American people that Vietnam has no freedoms,” he said. 

Officials at Paramount said Thursday that they were monitoring the situation and did not have an immediate comment. 

An official in Ho City Minh City, formerly Saigon, said Duong had not been detained or arrested. His final fate has yet to be determined. 

But Culture Ministry spokeswoman Pham Thuy Thanh said “We Were Soldiers” did not portray North Vietnam’s war aganst the United States in an accurate light. 

Duong also was criticized for playing a refugee in “Green Dragon” — a role the Vietnamese government labelled a distortion of the country’s past. 

“I haven’t seen these two movies myself, but authoritative personnel who have seen the movies “We Were Soldiers” did not correctly reflect the true history of the legitimate struggle of the Vietnamese people,” she said at a news conference. 

Vietnam’s communist government has led a strident campaign against “We Were Soldiers” in the country’s state-controlled media, accusing it of distorting history and harming the image of Vietnamese soldiers.