Tuan Joseph Pham seems an improbable target for a smear campaign. A devout Catholic, Pham joined the anti-Communist forces in his native Vietnam as a teenager in the 1950s, when the country was better known to Westerners as French Indochina.
He continued to serve in what became the South Vietnamese Army throughout the American involvement, until the fall of Saigon in 1975—after which he was imprisoned for two years by the victorious Communist regime. He escaped from the country by boat in order to make his way to the United States in 1980 as a political refugee. Two decades later, Pham had become a leader in St. Paul’s Vietnamese community.
A few years ago, he found that none of his history mattered. So deadly is the epithet “Communist” among Vietnamese Americans that Pham, now 72, lost his business, his standing in his community, and even many friends.
The accusation that Pham was a Communist was leveled in 2004, complete with a protest demonstration outside the Capital Market, his family-owned Asian grocery on University Avenue near Dale Street. Customer traffic dried up, some patrons believing what they were told, others fearing that if they shopped at the store, they, too, would be attacked as Communist sympathizers. The Capital Market languished for several months, then folded.
Pham fought back with a defamation suit that gained national notoriety in the Asian-American media. The case hit home among immigrants in part because similar episodes of “Vietnamese McCarthyism” have popped up elsewhere in the United States, according to Pham’s attorney, Darrin Rosha, of Scherzo & Trio Legal Advisors, then in St. Paul and now based in Chaska.
In March 2006, Pham won a jury verdict in Ramsey County District Court against seven defendants. The verdict was later upheld on appeal. The legal saga finally ended last November, when the Minnesota Supreme Court refused to hear a further appeal.
The original district court jury awarded Pham $693,000 in damages, an amount later reduced by the court to $353,000. As of late March, he hadn’t seen a dime.
Pham insists that his suit was never about the money. If he could recover every dollar of the award—unlikely, if only because he has retained a debt-collection attorney who will take a cut—it would just about cover his legal expenses for the case. (Rosha advised him that it would be a difficult case to win, and that the legal process would be a long one.)
Pham says he brought the suit to restore his own and his children’s reputations, and also to send a message to his fellow Vietnamese immigrants: “We are Americans now. In America, you can’t get away with this.”
