The First Day Vietnamese Community Celebrates Tet Nguyen Dan

Tet will never be the same again for Minh Van Tran.

Also known as the Vietnamese New Year, Tet was once a time of joy, said the Spokane resident, a holy feast dedicated to one’s ancestors.

But ever since the 1968 Tet Offensive - when North Vietnam savagely attacked the South - a sense of tragedy has overshadowed the celebration.

“It was carnage,” recalled Tran, as his fingers grazed the gashes of his altar - a century-old armoire marred by shrapnel from the war. “Tet is sacred and (the Viet Cong) violated that. The celebration turned into a big funeral.”

For Vietnamese all over the world - including the more than 2,000 in Spokane - Tet Nguyen Dan (Feast of the First Day) started Friday with prayers and offerings of fruit to the dead. Members of Spokane’s Vietnamese community also will celebrate today with a feast at Rogers High School.

For three days, no one cooks or cleans in fear of sweeping away good fortune. Everyone wears new clothes and some even skip school or work to celebrate.

“It’s spiritual,” said the 58-year-old Tran, who came as a refugee to the United States in 1975. “On Tet, everything stops. It is bigger than Christmas and Thanksgiving put together.”

At his Valley home, Tran and his family begin the feast by clapping their hands to scare away the evil spirits. They wish one another “Ming Xuan” or “Happy New Year” before burning incense in a brass pot full of sand.

They also offer apples and oranges to Tran’s dead parents, whose black-and-white photos hang all over their home. Their ashes - kept in two silver urns - are found on the 5-1/2-foot rosewood altar, a piece of furniture Tran shipped from his hometown of Binh Duong.

“The ancestors are watching,” said Tran, his smiling face turning toward the urns. “They come back and say hi to us.”

For three days, friends also walk into the house without knocking. Together, they share a glass of rice wine or a plateful of banh ching - a New Year’s dish of sticky rice, beans and pork wrapped in banana leaves and boiled for six hours.

The lunar new year always will be a time for celebrating, said Huong Cooper, 48.

But many of her generation remember the Tet of 1968 when friends and relatives were killed - caught off guard by gunfire in the middle of the festivities. Homes were ransacked by both South Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

The war changed the way Vietnamese celebrate the new year, said Cooper, whose first husband died during the war.

“We used to have firecrackers to scare away evil,” she said. “But after 1968, the noise and smell of firecrackers confused people. They were reminded of the guns of the enemy.”

Now, when most Americans hear of Tet, they are familiar only with the offensive, Tran said.

But some younger Vietnamese - especially those born in the United States - know only of the red envelopes full of money they receive from parents and relatives for the holiday.

“We must continue to honor the tradition,” he said. “And we must also honor the history.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo; Graphic: Lunar New Year