Truong Van Tran is proud to be an American. So proud that the Vietnamese refugee, 37, chose to give his two children not the ancestral surname of Tran but a certifiably American one, that of the first President of the U.S. At home in a gated community in Orange County, Calif., Tran expounds on what it means to be an American: “Freedom in this country means I can say what I feel.” The phone rings. It’s a producer from Roseanne who wants Tran to be a guest. But he has to check his schedule first. He’s not working, but he’s still busy with media requests. Sometimes he does four interviews a day. No, the press doesn’t really want to talk about the time in 1997 when he had to spend 20 days in jail for hitting his wife . And no, the media don’t want to interview him about the time he tried to wrest control of a Vietnamese meditation group called Vo Vi . Rather, they want to know why he is the target of one of the most heated displays of Asian-American anger ever seen in the U.S. Last Friday a crowd estimated at 15,000 gathered around Tran’s store, Hi Tek, an electronics-cum-video-rental outlet in a cramped minimall in Little Saigon–the unofficial name of Westminster, which lies about an hour south of Los Angeles. The demonstrators unfurled signs declaring, OUR WOUNDS WILL NEVER HEAL! BE AWARE! COMMUNISTS ARE INVADING AMERICA. They are not angry about some controversial video
