Garden Grove woman awaits husband's release from jail in Vietnam

Before her husband left Garden Grove for Vietnam, he reassured her that if authorities stopped him for his activism, he would be sent home, not to jail. Her two grown children heard the same comforting words.

“Now the kids keep asking, ‘Why isn’t he home?’” Mai Huong Ngo said.

Nguyen Quoc Quan was arrested a month ago upon arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, reportedly charged with terrorist acts linked to Viet Tan, a banned political party pushing for democracy in the communist country. 

The group says the charges are fabricated and has rallied U.S. lawmakers to push for his release, arguing that Vietnam is punishing a peaceful dissident. Human rights groups have frequently condemned Vietnam for jailing activists and bloggers for expressing their beliefs.

Quan, a software engineer and former high school instructor, teaches classes on peaceful tactics and leadership to fellow human rights activists, his wife said. A U.S. citizen who left his native Vietnam by boat in the '80s, he was jailed in Vietnam once before, five years ago, and sentenced to six months behind bars on other "terrorism" charges tied to leaflets advocating nonviolent struggle.

Five years ago when he was jailed, he had told Ngo he was going to Thailand, not Vietnam. He had promised her he wouldn’t go to Vietnam again after she begged him not to, fearful because Vietnamese newspapers had labeled him as a terrorist after he had talked to other democracy activists. 

This time, he called from the airport in Vietnam, exhausted, and said he would call again from his hotel.

Ngo waited. “I thought, he’s tired, maybe he forgot.” She kept waiting.

When she finally called the U.S. Consulate two days later, she discovered he had been arrested. Vietnamese news media said he would be detained four months while prosecutors investigated the terrorism charges against him.

Since then, she has scraped for news of him. U.S. Consulate officials have visited him twice in jail, most recently on Monday. They passed along his words: Don't worry. Tell the kids to study hard. Take care of your mother.

This month she went to Washington to testify on human rights abuses in Vietnam, recounting her husband's story as well as those of other jailed activists. "The Vietnamese communist government disgraces the honorable work of these brave activists and shutters them away into silence. But we cannot allow this injustice," she told a House committee.

Ngo reminds herself what he told her, that she is always with him, even in jail. He asked her to think the same thing. And despite the hazards, Ngo says, she doesn't begrudge him his human rights work.

"This is why I married him," she said.

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-- Emily Alpert in Los Angeles

Photo: This undated picture taken by the Vietnam News Agency shows activist Nguyen Quoc Quan, a U.S. citizen of Vietnamese origin, being detained in Ho Chi Minh City. Credit: Vietnam News Agency

China cancels tours to Philippines over South China Sea dispute

BEIJING -- China warned its nationals against traveling to the Philippines, canceled tours and raised trade barriers on imported pineapples and bananas as the squabble over disputed fishing grounds in the South China Sea grew more intense.

At issue is a triangular-shaped cluster of reefs known as Scarborough Shoal about 130 miles from the Philippines’ Subic Bay. The Chinese call it Huangyan Island and complain that the Philippine navy has been harassing its fishing boats there.

In keeping with the prevailing jingoism, a Chinese journalist on Thursday posted a photograph of himself planting a Chinese flag on an outcropping of rock. An enthusiastic microblogger promised, “We’ll plant the flag all the way to Manila.’’

"We want to say that anyone's attempt to take away China's sovereignty over Huangyan Island will not be allowed by the Chinese government, people and armed forces," warned the PLA Daily, the newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army in an article Wednesday entitled, "Don't Attempt to Take Away Half an Inch of China's Territory."

Filipino activists have planned demonstrations Friday at Chinese embassies. As a result, Beijing issued a warning for Chinese citizens in Manila to stay indoors. In Beijing, Filipinos residing in China got a similar advisory from their embassy.

Q&A: Making art and getting in trouble in Vietnam

Gabby Quynh-Anh Miller is a Vietnamese American conceptual artist who jets from California to Vietnam, bouncing between the live-and-let-live lifestyle of the Bay Area and the strictures of a single-party state slammed by human rights groups for cracking down on peaceful bloggers and activists.

Her work is currently showing alongside that of other artists who are from, or trace their ancestry to, Southeast Asia. The group exhibition in New Jersey is titled "Me Love You Long Time." 

The Times talked to Miller about making art in a country where speech isn't always so free.

What is the art scene like in Vietnam, and how is it different from California?

It’s so different. There’s a huge amount of commercial galleries that mostly cater to tourists. Then there’s the fine arts university which is government-run and really based on early 20th century French teaching methods mixed with Socialist realism, mixed with advertising techniques, I guess you’d say.

Wait, let’s stop for a second. What does 20th century French mixed with Socialist realism mixed with advertising look like?

Weird. You spend five years honing the craft of drawing and painting in a very classical style. And with every new regime, the art school got taken over. The communist or revolutionary government took it over and it became a production center for propaganda and Socialist realist art.

Nha San Studio, the space we’re running, is separate from the commercial realm, purposefully separate, and intentionally separate from the state-run way of doing things. It opened in 1998 and it’s the first and longest-running artist-run experimental space in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, you have to ask for permission from the Ministry of Culture to do any public exhibition. So that means you give documentation of your work, what it’s going to be ... some kind of explanation of the work's meaning to the cultural police, and you say, “Is this OK?”

So we register every event as a family gathering to circumvent that.

Chinese New Year: Colorful photos, not-so-colorful TV

Happy New Year! Well, in much of Asia, anyway. It's the Year of the Dragon, and ethnic Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese across Asia are celebrating with fireworks, festivals and family reunions. Check out more spectacular photographs from The Times through our photo gallery.

Chinese families also celebrate by watching the annual New Year's Gala, a five-hour pastiche of dancing, singing, comedy, magic tricks, propaganda and kitsch. But as our China correspondent Barbara Demick reports, the tradition is in jeopardy, as younger viewers turned off by the increasingly heavy hand of the Communist Party tune out a censored, bland show.

Just how bland? Warren Buffett showed up to play the ukelele.

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-- Emily Alpert

Photo: Thousands of people attend a festival in Shanghai to celebrate the Year of the Dragon. Credit: Peter Parks / AFP/Getty Images

China to overhaul rules for foreign workers

REPORTING FROM BEIJING -- China is planning an overhaul of its regulations for foreign workers, easing the rules for professionals while closing the door to hundreds of thousands of low-wage farm, factory and domestic workers from poorer neighboring nations like Vietnam and North Korea.

A draft bill was submitted Monday by the State Council, China’s equivalent of a cabinet, to the National People’s Congress, state media reported Tuesday. The official Xinhua news agency said the existing regulation had not been substantially revised for 26 years.

The aim is to “facilitate exchanges while making sure that those who should not enter are kept out,” Yang Huanning, deputy minister of public security, told the official Xinhua news agency.

Although illegal immigration isn’t the lightning rod in China that it is in the United States, it is becoming a larger issue here. China’s prosperity and periodic labor shortages have drawn migrants from as far away as Africa.

Vietnamese workers, who earn about half the wages of Chinese workers, harvest sugar cane in the autumn. North Korean women work as domestics in rural northeastern China, filling jobs left by Chinese women who’ve moved to the cities. Young Americans, Canadians and Australians fresh out of college teach English.

"Restricting foreign workers, this is a new problem for us. This issue didn’t exist before China’s opening and reform," said Zhang Wenshan, a law professor at Guangxi University who is involved with the reform of the regulations. "We need to control ordinary labor, while making it easier for foreign experts and talented professionals."

Zhang said he expects the Chinese government to make it easier for key foreign workers to get permanent residence here. "It is going to be very similar to the green-card system in the United States," he said.

State news reports said that China was examining fingerprinting and other biometric techniques for keeping track of foreigners. Penalties are expected to be tightened for illegal workers and companies that hire them.

The state press reported the regulation would allow for detention of up to 60 days for foreigners who have entered illegally, overstayed visas or threatened national security.

The state press has reported that 52 million foreigners visited China in 2010, a figure that has risen annually since 1990. But there are no figures available for the number of foreign workers in China.

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Japan joins multilateral free-trade talks, hopes to boost economy

REPORTING FROM TOKYO –- Desperate to jumpstart an already moribund economy further crippled by the March earthquake and tsunami, Japan announced plans to join talks for a multinational, Asia-rim free-trade initiative.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda signaled that he was prepared to take what many consider a gamble to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which would open up much-needed markets for faltering Japanese exports while angering other entrenched interests, such as the nation’s powerful farm lobby.

Signaling the division that surrounded the move, Noda deliberated for a day before using a nationally televised news conference Friday to announce that Japan will take part in the accord talks.

On Saturday, Noda left to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in Honolulu, where officials said he would convey Japan's decision to take part in the free-trade pact talks to President Obama.

Africa's Western black rhino declared extinct

Africa’s Western black rhino has officially been declared extinct and other subspecies of rhinoceros could follow, according to the latest review by a leading conservation organization.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the Northern white rhino in central Africa as “possibly extinct in the wild” and the Javan rhino as “probably extinct” in Vietnam.

The organization blamed a lack of political support for conservation efforts in many rhino habitats, international organized crime groups targeting the animal, increasing illegal demand for rhino horns and commercial poaching.

PHOTOS: Threatened with extinction

“In the case of both the Western black rhino and the Northern white rhino, the situation could have had very different results if the suggested conservation measures had been implemented,” Simon Stuart, chairman of IUCN's Species Survival Commission, said in a statement Thursday. “These measures must be strengthened now, specifically managing habitats in order to improve breeding performance, preventing other rhinos from fading into extinction.”