San Jose mayor’s staffer sues over communist label

A worker in the San Jose mayor’s office is caught in a political storm surging through Little Saigon’s war refugee generation over claims of communist sympathies.

Tara Dang, who conducts neighborhood outreach for Mayor Matt Mahan in a city with the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam, sued 8 people in May for defamation. The list ranges from local Vietnamese journalists to a school board member, all of whom Dang claims wrongly smeared her as a Vietnamese government sympathizer. Her lawsuit came under new focus the following month, after she testified in a San Jose councilmember’s restraining order case against a powerful Vietnamese business owner.

Dang’s lawsuit said she has weathered a number of verbal attacks, including claims that she’s a Vietnamese government propagandist who wears shirts bearing the national flag of Vietnam’s socialist republic, which today is under the communist party’s singular rule.

“Such statements were false and reasonably understood to call (Dang] a Communist, Communist sympathizer and Communist spy, all of which are devastating within the Vietnamese-American Community,” Dang’s lawsuit reads.

Dang and Mahan declined to comment.

Local journalist Nam Xuan Nguyen is among those named in Dang’s lawsuit. But the editor of Vietnamese language news outlet Cali Today denies saying anything defamatory.

“I never said anything like that,” Nguyen told San José Spotlight.

But he does have a bone to pick with Dang, who helps run a charity called the San Jose Vietnamese Running Club. The club raises money for scholarships and public benefit projects across dozens of provinces in Vietnam. Nguyen claims the club raised the ire of anti-communists when it accepted an award from the Vietnamese Red Cross Society, an organization whose founding is enmeshed with historical communist leaders.

Anti-communist organizers partly responded to Dang’s lawsuit in a Tuesday flag-waving rally in front of San Jose City Hall, where speakers held signs accusing Dang of trying to “silence” them. They also took aim at David Duong, the embattled CEO of Oakland-based recycling company Cal Waste Solutions, who has been similarly criticized for his close relationship with the Vietnamese government.

Dang’s charitable activities in Vietnam have rubbed some in the community the wrong way, said Ha Trieu, a leader of the United Vietnamese American Community of Northern California who also helps organize the Republic of Vietnam flag-raising ceremony in San Jose.

“If she was a normal person, that would be fine. But she works for the mayor,” Trieu told San José Spotlight. “From now on, we just prefer that if they want to contact the Vietnamese community any time in the future, please send another person.”

Another person named in Dang’s lawsuit is Van Le, an East Side Union High School District school board member who ran unsuccessfully for Santa Clara County supervisor and San Jose City Council. Le didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit names six other defendants and lists 20 others, unnamed, who Dang believes to have had a part in her suffering.

The communism charge — mostly hurled between rival political circles of older Vietnamese Americans — is taking local politics to dramatic heights in San Jose. One month after Dang filed her lawsuit, she found herself testifying in court for a separate case involving San Jose Councilmember Bien Doan and two powerful businessmen — Hai Huynh, a prominent local bail bondsman, and Duong, who is the subject of an FBI probe in Oakland.

In Councilmember Doan’s July restraining order hearing against Huynh, Dang testified seeing the two men arguing at a ceremony to raise the south Vietnamese flag in remembrance of the Vietnam War, whose refugees came to San Jose in droves for the warm climate that made them feel at home. Her statements supported Doan’s claims of fearing for his safety and others who painted Huynh as a “Godfather” figure with organized crime ties. A judge found no evidence to support that claim and denied Doan’s request.

But as the trial unfolded, the dispute was revealed to be about more than safety. Other well-known names in Little Saigon were called to testify, including Duong, the Cal Waste Solutions CEO whose testimony — and role in the Vietnamese American Business Association — rehashed long-simmering fights about who is or isn’t seen as close to the Vietnamese government. Some critics, Huynh included, label Duong a communist sympathizer due to his overseas activities, and Councilmember Doan’s appearance at Duong’s business group’s 2023 gala fueled the tension between Doan and Huynh.

But Duong was more than a witness in the restraining order trial. He has his own pending defamation lawsuit against Huynh, who has similarly criticized Duong for being a Vietnamese government lackey.
The Vietnamese American Business Association once co-sponsored a 2023 trip to Vietnam — where Duong also operates a waste management facility — for Oakland city officials, including Mayor Sheng Thao. The FBI raided Thao’s home last month alongside the homes of Duong and his son, apparently in the same probe focusing on Duong’s company and family members.

Duong owes much of his San Jose political influence to the local Vietnamese community, which rallied in support of him when he first sought a citywide recycling contract in San Jose. But his business activities and elbow rubbing with government officials in Vietnam spell betrayal to people such as Ha Phan, a Milpitas resident who showed up to San Jose City Hall carrying a sign denouncing the recycling entrepreneur.

“We were fighting for him to get the contract and he betrayed us,” Phan told San José Spotlight. “We want the city to take the contract back.”

Duong previously told San José Spotlight he only visited Vietnam to help the people — not the government — and his lawsuit challenges Huynh to provide evidence to support his claims. He noted the label of communist, which carries a different weight in Vietnamese than in English, generates violence.

In 1987, a Vietnamese American journalist in Orange County, Pham Van Tap — also known by his pen name as Hoai Diep Tu — died after what police said was an intentional house fire possibly set by anti-communists. Tap was the publisher of MAI, an entertainment magazine that printed ads for companies doing business in Vietnam. His death was part of a string of political assassinations of Vietnamese American journalists between 1981 and 1990.

“I’ve worked in the news for 40 years. I know the sensitivity in my community,” Nguyen told San José Spotlight.

Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Editor’s Note: Cal Waste Solutions has donated to San José Spotlight.