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Living on the edge: Vietnamese fishermen in southern California

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Living on the edge: Vietnamese fishermen in southern California

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LIVING ON THE EDGE
Vietnamese Fishermen in Southern California
© 1997
By
Bemd Knoll
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
(Visual Anthropology)
May 1997
Bemd Knoll
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UMI Number: 1384901
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UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N C A LIFO R N IA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 80007
This thesis, w ritten by
Bemd K n o ll_____________________________
under the direction of his. Thesis Com m ittee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of the
requirements fo r the degree of
Masters in V isual Anthropology
»
D ate— Apr.j 1...1.0 ,...1 .9.9.7-
Dt*n
T H E S ^ C O M M IT O E
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction................................................................................................................................. 1
The Other.....................................................................................................................................9
The Long Beach Trawlers................................................................................................. 10
The Ventura Longliners.....................................................................................................20
The Ventura Hook and Liners...........................................................................................27
Macro Setting........................................................................................................................... 33
Fisheries Management: Managing What for Whom?......................................................35
The Sea Cucumber Case....................................................................................................41
Santa Monica Bay, Halibut, etc.........................................................................................52
Examples o f Cross-Cultural Miscommunication............................................................. 56
Micro setting.............................................................................................................................60
Organize or Vanish?..........................................................................................................60
In Rome, Do as the Romans..............................................................................................65
The Project................................................................................................................................69
Background........................................................................................................................ 69
Cross-cultural Communication at W ork...........................................................................71
Video Production............................................................................................................... 75
Delivery...............................................................................................................................79
Post Scriptum..................................................................................................................... 80
Conclusion and Recommendations.........................................................................................82
Revisiting Rom e................................................................................................................ 82
What Is to Be Done?..........................................................................................................84
Bibliography..............................................................................................................................89
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Number Page
Illustration 1. Detection clues for stop and search operation.................................................. 6
Illustration 2. Pier268-B.........................................................................................................II
Illustration 3. Bottom trawl in operation................................................................................14
Illustration 4. Vietnamese longliner in Ventura harbor......................................................... 20
Illustration 5. 'Cajun' and Vietnamese longliners moored side-by-side in Ventura
Harbor in February 1995................................................................................ 24
Illustration 6. LA fish auction on April 3, 1995.................................................................... 25
Illustration 7. Hook and line tubs on top of a wheelhouse.................................................... 28
Illustration 8. Hook and liner unloading rockfish in Ventura in September 1996............... 29
Illustration 9. Fishing in Halong Bay, near Haiphong.......................................................... 36
Illustration 10. Corpus delicti: the sea cucumber.................................................................42
Illustration 11. Safety equipment requirements.................................................................... 77
Illustration 12. Sample page from the Summary o f Commercial Fishing Laws.................87
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
EPIRB Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon
FGC California Fish and Game Code
Fish & Game California Department of Fish and Game
NMFS National Marine Fisheries Service
PFD Personal Flotation Device
SCTA Southern California Trawlers Association
USC University of Southern California
VABA Vietnamese-American Bar Association
VCSC Vietnamese Community of Southern California
VFAA Vietnamese Fishermen Association of America
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like any endeavor in social science, this project involved many people who cannot
be mentioned here individually but whose contributions I sincerely appreciate. This applies,
especially, to the Vietnamese fishermen in Long Beach, San Pedro and Ventura who taught
me a lot about questioning appearances. The production of the safety training video for
Vietnamese fishermen, which provides the focal point for this research and thesis, would
have been very difficult, if not impossible, without the funding support by USC Sea Grant.
My special thanks go to Peter Biella, Fran McClain, John Richards, Pat Hartney, Phyllis
Grifman, Craig Trinh “Phat” Huynh and Dr Tri Dinh Tran who were members of the Focus
Group which guided this project through occasionally rough waters, and never ceased to
encourage me. Until a motorcycle accident in early June caused him serious injury, Phat
was my Vietnamese voice, a very patient and perceptive interpreter whose collaboration I
have since sorely missed. Finally, I would like to express deepest gratitude to my wife Ruyi
for having gone along with that rather peculiar desire of her middle-aged husband to return
to school.
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Chapter I
INTRODUCTION
My personal engagement with Vietnam dates back to the late 1960s when students
took to the streets in Europe and North America to demonstrate against the perceived fail
ings of their parents' generation to deal with the past, to organize a present that had clearly
taken to heart the political and economic lessons of that past and, finally, to acknowledge
the new dynamics of a post-colonial era that had little tolerance, in the case of Vietnam, for
the colonial legacy of France and the imperialist ambitions of the United States. This small
country at the western edge of the South China Sea with a tortured history of domination by
such diverse forces as China, France and the US became a symbol for my doubts in and,
later on, resistance against the logic of capitalism.
The victory of the “North” over the “South” in 1975 and the subsequent reunifica
tion of Vietnam did not bring the much hoped-for respite to the country’s citizenry. Well
into the hundred thousands of Vietnamese have since opted with their feet to escape politi
cal pressures and dire economic circumstances that some thought unacceptable, others felt
unbearable. Lured, on top of this, by an image of a place where milk and honey flow, about
130,000 headed for the US (see Maril 1995,201), especially to California.
My main interest lies more with issues of present-day life and developments in
Vietnam—I am especially intrigued by the problem of reintegrating thousands of so-called
economic migrants screened out of the international refugee net and bound to be sent back
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to Vietnam. However, the logistics of doing fieldwork in Vietnam were problematic, and I
sought an “Other” closer to school, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
As luck would have it, in early 1995, I ran into a photographer specializing in labor and
union issues, an existence which I had thought virtually impossible in this country whose
elite prides itself for having broken the spine of organized labor. He directed me to groups
of Vietnamese fishermen operating from the harbors of Long Beach, San Pedro and
Ventura.
My initial thought was to produce an ethnography of one of these three fairly com
pact groups, neither one numbering more than 30 individuals. But access to the Vietnamese
fishermen was not as easy as I had thought. Part of the problem was my lack of command
of the Vietnamese language, which I intended to overcome with the help of a Vietnamese
student from one of the LA-area colleges. Until I found that assistance, I turned my research
attention to government agencies, like the US Coast Guard, the National Marine Fisheries
Service (NMFS) and California's Department of Fish and Game (Fish & Game), fish buy
ers, equipment suppliers and a variety of other individuals who were dealing with the fish
ermen on a regular basis.
The amount of information gathered from these sources was overwhelming. So was
the recognition, which came rather soon, of the breadth and depth of the problems that con
fronted the Vietnamese fishermen in Southern California. Economic marginality heads a
long list that also includes repeated run-ins with US authorities over anything from violat
ing documentation requirements to fishing in closed areas and the illegal taking of protected
species, death and injury as the result of inadequate safety on board many vessels that no-
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body else wanted, and a seeming inability to develop a collective stance vis-a-vis adversar
ies and challenges.
It was the concern for the safety of the fishermen, that eventually provided the focus
for my work and the shift of emphasis from ethnography to applied anthropology. I took my
cue from Roy Rappaport’s understanding that applied anthropology “designates analyses of
particular human problems, situations, or processes for the purposes of comprehending their
causes, dynamics, and consequences and, in some instances, for developing courses of ac
tion designed to affect those situations or processes” (Rappaport 1993, 296). The shift was
further helped by the discovery of a safety training video that California Sea Grant had pro
duced in 1987 for Vietnamese fishermen operating in northern California. In the autumn of
1995,1 approached USC Sea Grant with a request for funding to update the 1987-video and
conduct anthropological fieldwork to explore the best available route to deliver the safety
message to Vietnamese fishermen.
With the request granted before yearend and Vietnamese research assistance identi
fied in early 1996 in the person of Craig Trinh “Phat” Huynh, a UCLA graduate student, I
headed for the field: Pier 268-B at Long Beach’s Fish Harbor on Terminal Island, home to
never more than 20 Vietnamese trawlers,1 plus one gill-netter and one lobster boat. Not only
had this group lost four of its members to accidents at sea over the previous two years, its
multifaceted entanglement with US law had reached crisis proportions in 1995 with the
opening of a court case in Long Beach against 15 members accused of unlawfully taking
I Following industry custom, a trawler, gill-netter, etc in this thesis is both a boat equipped with a particular type o f fishing
gear and the collective term for the people who operate it
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sea cucumbers (see Chapter 3). It was my belief at the time that the sense of crisis, which
had gripped both accuser (Fish & Game) and accused (Long Beach trawlers), provided a
unique opportunity for action designed to break the logjam of incomprehension, distrust and
open hostility, that was posing a serious threat to the fishermen’s professional survival. One
action, which I felt a great need for, was the organization of the fishermen into an associa
tion that would give them a collective voice to be reckoned with and a viable forum to dis
seminate information and messages including those contained in the aforementioned safety
training video.
The choice of Pier 268-B and this particular group came after I had spent nearly six
months getting acquainted with a group of Vietnamese-owned and operated longliners (see
Chapter 2 for a summary of my observations2 ) which a young Vietnamese entrepreneur had
brought to Ventura late in the summer of 1993 from their original home ports along the
Gulf Coast. But the unforeseen movements of their target species, swordfish and tuna, away
from the California coast during the spring and early summer months led to a steady decline
of these vessels operating from Ventura. Finally last summer, there were just three left. A
third possible target for my work had been a group of about 15 boats engaged in hook and
line fishing for rockfish around the Channel Islands. Unfortunately, I was never able to get
close enough to this group to learn much about the circumstances of their existence (beyond
the fragments which I have included in Chapter 2).
2 In the spring of 1995,1 used material from my observations on the longliners to experiment with the hypertext potential
o f open-ended, non-linear ethnography and multiple authorship on the World Wide Web (see Knoll 1995).
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Before outlining what the reader will find in the main body of this thesis, I would
like to draw attention to the limited availability of literature on coastal communities in Cali
fornia in general and the Vietnamese fishermen in particular. Apart from a handful of news
paper articles published over the years mainly on run-ins between Vietnamese and non-
Asian fishermen in various harbors around San Francisco, I found one dissertation from
1976 (Stuster 1976), which has lost most of its relevance due to the rapid decline that the
industry faced in the intervening 20 years. There are also two very useful articles by Mike
Orbach, an anthropologist then at UC Santa Cruz, who had studied the adaptation of Viet
namese fishermen to local environments in Monterey Bay in the early 1980s (Orbach and
Beckwith 1982; Orbach 1983). One rather intriguing piece of literature is the Blue Book o f
Coastal Vessels, South Vietnam. This book had been compiled in 1967 by the Remote Area
Conflict Information Center of the Batelle Memorial Institute to help the US and South
Vietnamese navies distinguish the “good” guys—meaning genuine fishermen—from the
“bad”—disguised Vietcong guerillas (see Illustration 1 on the following page taken from
Blue Book 1967, 88). It also provides the only non-Vietnamese source known to me on
fishing boats and methods used in Vietnam.
There is in comparison quite an extensive literature on the general problems of inte
grating the post-1975 flood of Indochinese refugees into the US mainstream. One of the
better examples is the two-volume Selection o f Readings on Socio-Cultural Values and
Problems o f the Vietnamese in the United States, prepared by The Vietnamese Student As
sociation of San Jose City College (VSA 1990 & 1993), especially, Nguyen Dang Liem’s
contribution on “Vietnamese-American Crosscultural Communication” (Nguyen 1990).
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Better coverage, from an ethnographic point of view, is also available for the other
“center” of fishing and Indochinese immigration into the US, the Gulf Coast states of
Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. Three studies by two authors (Durrenberger 1992 and
1996 and Maril 1995) provided me with a stimulating historical picture of the industry, as
well as with various vignettes of Vietnamese survival in what hardly can be described as a
welcoming environment. I will refer to those readings again later.
Haircut
Clothing ^ Kicu to'c d t
hi quin
Sun tan
ld n f In (ram ning)
n Dialect or accent
Th&igS’ hay giong noi
lability to repair equipment
Kha-nSng su* chui
db trang-W
Manicure
Hong a y mong chan
Skill in handling equipment
Kha-nXng it-dung A trang-bj
Fishy odor
Hui anh ca i
' / /
Digging tools
Dung-cu dio i ll
Type of fish catch
}:Loai ca dinh dtitfc
Condition or cargo
IHtu-Uen hang-boa chuyfei-chor ,
rv\ \
> Empty boat
y Thuyen trtng
Illustration 1. Detection clues for stop and search operation
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Two themes have driven my research and will guide my writing. One is historical:
the events of the past 18 months—from the spring of 1995 to the fall of 1996—that affected
the Vietnamese fishermen. The other is practical: the re-editing and distribution of a safety
training video for the same fishermen in response to a perceived need and the existence of
an earlier version. As I will demonstrate, both themes are intricately inter-linked, as are the
economic, political and social arenas of a late 20lh -century world that surrounds these fish
ermen.
The thesis will start with an introduction of the Other: Vietnamese fishermen
working the waters off Southern California from the ports of Long Beach, San Pedro and
Ventura. It includes information on how many fishermen are operating what kind of boats
and gear from which harbor to target what species, as well as historical pointers and basic
economic data. Although the main focus of my work has been the trawlers from Fish Har
bor, I have chosen to add to this chapter my observations on the Ventura longliners and
hook and liners, as their presence rounds off the picture, and so little is known about them.
In Chapter 3 ,1 will look at the macro setting of the political and economic environ
ment that surrounds the fishermen, shapes their interaction with society, and determines the
chances of their professional survival. Key issues addressed here include the prevalent logic
of resource management approaches, the mechanisms that drive the translation of these ap
proaches into federal and state policies and law and, ultimately, the difficulties of imple
mentation and enforcement. Examples drawn from a number of run-ins with US law over
the 18 months I spent with the Vietnamese fishermen in Long Beach will serve to illustrate
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the intractability of their current situation and explain the ultimate failure of my attempts to
make a difference.
From the macro setting I will progress in Chapter 4 to the micro setting at Terminal
Island’s Pier 268-B. I will look at and describe communal interaction among the Vietnam
ese fishermen as well as their encounters with fishermen of other ethnic backgrounds and
the many official agents of US government institutions. This chapter will also tackle the
often-antagonistic nature of these encounters and explore the conditions and chances for
overcoming those antagonisms.
Theorizing, analyzing and describing the Other is one thing; doing something prac
tical on their behalf is another. The latter is the focus of Chapter 5. It will summarize my
effort to re-edit and deliver to its intended audience in Southern California a safety training
video that had been produced in 1987 by California Sea Grant for Vietnamese fishermen in
northern California. Apart from bringing the earlier material in line with present safety
regulations, the project included fieldwork among the Long Beach trawlers to establish the
best delivery route for the video’s message. The findings from this fieldwork will flow into
the final chapter’s recommendations whose prime purpose it is to solve some smaller, im
mediate, problems and act as a wake-up call for an industry and a society that, in my opin
ion, face a very troublesome future.
8
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Chapt er 2
THE OTHER
Vietnamese fishermen—the Other of my work—have been a fixture in many ports
along the California coast since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Fleeing either the ter
rors of war or the rigors of the North Vietnamese regime that assumed power in the whole
country after reunification, they arrived at various refugee holding centers all around the US
after a sometimes lengthy odyssey on flimsy boats across hostile seas and through assorted
refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Many,
who had arrived in the colder northeast, soon moved southward to the warmer Gulf Coast
states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas, as well as westward to California.
Like their Gulf Coast brethren (see Maril 1995, 201-237 for a good description),
Vietnamese fishermen in California, who initially favored the harbors o f San Francisco,
Monterey, Moss Landing and Half Moon Bay, soon encountered resentment from local
“Anglo” fishing communities. In some instances, resentment developed into open hostility,
due largely to mutually unintelligible cultural frameworks and resultant fear of the Other
(see Orbach 1983). Some fishermen responded to these pressures by moving south, where
they met up with members of the rapidly growing Vietnamese communities in Orange and
San Bernardino counties and began to establish a presence in the Southern Californian ports
of Ventura and Long Beach/San Pedro.
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To my knowledge, no social science discipline has so far considered these small
communities and their particular struggles at the edge of US society worthy of its attention.
Therefore, I will use this chapter to provide a short overview of what I have learned about
three distinct groups of Vietnamese fishermen, the trawlers of Long Beach/San Pedro and
the longliners and hook and liners of Ventura.
The Long Beach Trawlers
Pier 268-B in Fish Harbor does not exude prosperity. It reaches into the murky wa
ters that lap the shoreline of this southwestern comer of Terminal Island (see Illustration 2
on the following page). Around it, the visitor finds a largely dilapidated landscape of vacant
plants and empty lots, that belies a much more prosperous past. Only 50 years ago, 14 can
neries dotted the area and adjacent San Pedro, processing sardine catches at one time from
some 500 boats and making Long Beach the busiest fishing port in the lower 48. The sar
dine fishery collapsed in the 1950s. A replacement anchovy fishery succumbed to over
fishing and cheap supplies from Latin America soon after. And again in the 1980s, overseas
competition forced processors of tuna to shut down one by one (see Kronman 1995a and
Ferrell 1995).
One particularly disturbing closure involved the San Pedro Fishermen’s Cooperative
Association which bought Starkist’s mackerel cannery on Terminal Island in 1987. Re
opened under the name United Food Processors, the cannery struggled from the beginning
against under-capitalization and poor management. These factors contributed frequently to
late payments to supplying association members who soon began to turn away from their
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own creation preferring to sell their catches to the highest bidder on the dock. Bankruptcy
followed in 1992 (see Kronman 1995a, 8-9). What makes this closure so disturbing, yet in
dicative of the industry’s plight, is how completely a self-centered attitude blocked the fish
ermen’s perception of the potential benefits of collective action and group solidarity. The
label ‘America’s last frontiersmen’ sounds scary in this context, as it signifies eventual ex
tinction.
Illustration 2. Pier 268-B
1 1
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In early 1995, two canneries remained in Fish Harbor. One, operated by Heinz, to
this day turns fish into pet food. The other, Pan Pacific, then barely existed under the pro
tective umbrella of Chapter 11. The story of Pan Pacific offers an illuminating example of
the speculative logic of capital at work (under the conditions of flexible accumulation—see
Harvey 1995, 343ff). As one long-time employee explained to me, the company had been
acquired only a few years back by a group of New Jersey investors who specialize in buy
ing businesses cheaply only to off-load them dearly later. When the investors realized that
they had gotten this one wrong, they withdrew their funding support, and Pan Pacific began
its inexorable slide towards bankruptcy. The danger to over 100 jobs did not figure in their
equation. Earlier this year, however, a white knight appeared in the shape of a consortium
made up of the owner of a fleet of purse seiners, one tuna processor and one buyer-cum-
processor from Thailand. These were industry people who recognized the value of a Fish
Harbor cannery. The consortium eventually bought Pan Pacific, and its dock has been busy
since, with tuna boats arriving in short succession to unload their near-shore catches of the
July-to-October season.
Where does that leave the Vietnamese fishermen? Still at tattered little Pier 268-B,
adjacent to the Heinz and Pan Pacific canneries. It is the home of a constantly shifting fleet
that, at the latest count in October 1996, numbered seven trawlers (one of which was up for
sale by its seriously ill owner), two lobster boats, one hook and liner (which had come down
from Ventura last summer), and one gill-netter. The boats’ condition does not inspire great
confidence in their sea worthiness. With wooden hulls of uncertain vintage for the most
part, these boats had ended up in Vietnamese hands after nobody else wanted them. With
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mechanical skills that had been honed by years of war-time experience to make do without
‘original’ spare parts, most owners barely manage to keep their vessels afloat and operating.
In the last two years alone, five Vietnamese boats from Fish Harbor have sunk under a vari
ety of circumstances, with an equal number of lives lost. According to Coast Guard sources,
rotting timber may have contributed to some of these losses. Another frequently mentioned
suspect is top-heaviness caused by too liberal alterations to the superstructure and fishing
gear.
Gear changes have been a frequent occurrence, as the Vietnamese respond with re
markable flexibility to changes of market and law. The latest major change of law and gear
dates back barely six years when Proposition 132 stopped the practice of gill netting in Cali
fornian state waters. Under circumstances that led to a major court case, which I will de
scribe in the following chapter, the majority of the Fish Harbor Vietnamese switched to
trawling for sea cucumber, shrimp and halibut in the early 1990s. Trawling, a dynamic
fishing technique, ’’consists of dragging [trawlers are often referred to as draggers—BK] a
large, funnel-shaped net through the water behind one or two boats so that the fish are swept
into the mouth of the net and trapped in the small tail or cod end [see Illustration 3 on the
following page, which was taken from Austin 1983—BK]. Every several hours the net is
hauled up and the fish dumped or dipped into the hold” (Blue Book 1967,43; see also Sco
field 1948, 8-11).
A captain, who is often also the owner, and one to two deckhands operate each boat.
Over the past 18 months, the number of single-handed operations rose, as the economics
deteriorated due to smaller catches and lower prices especially of halibut, that is being im-
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ported in increasing quantities from the Gulf Coast of Mexico, and expensive legal alterca
tions predominantly with Fish & Game.
Tow cable
Headrope
Bridle
Illustration 3. Bottom trawl in operation
The net income from near-shore trawling (between three and 12 nautical miles off
shore) in southern California is marginal. According to one Fish Harbor Vietnamese, $500
could be earned last year on a good day of fishing for shrimp and sea cucumber. After sub
tracting $100 for diesel, $15 for engine oil, $30 for food and water, plus various miscellane
ous expenses which include about $600/year in permit charges, a boat owner was left with
about $150 per outing, which he shared equally with his crew. $50 per day and person on a
boat with a three-man crew brought a fisherman's monthly take-home pay to about $1000 to
$1200. Even if these numbers had been higher, as conversations with other fishermen sug
gested, they were—and still are—being severely reduced for many by one or more fines per
year of up to $2000 each, plus the possible need to replace impounded gear for another $4-
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5000. The latter amount includes about $2200 for the legal 454-inch net used to catch sea
cucumber and halibut outside of the three-mile line in waters deeper than 25 fathoms (150ft
or about 46m), $500 for the steel doors that keep the net open, $800 for the winch, $200 for
the cable and $400 for welding, etc. It does not take great mathematical skill to arrive at a
bottom line that leaves little room to maneuver.
Then, why are these 20-odd people still fishing? As might be expected there is no
single or simple answer. Some like Em Van Nguyen don’t know anything else. He was
borne in 1942 into a family of fishermen from Kien Giang, a major South Vietnamese
fishing port near the Cambodian border. Em achieved a certain degree of success there,
owning at one point 10 non-engine-propelled boats. He left his homeland on August 15,
1981 with a wife and 10 children. For years he had been harassed and blackmailed with the
threat of ending up in a reeducation camp for having served in the South Vietnamese Army.
Em made it to the US rather quickly, arriving even before 1981 was out. He returned to
fishing because he felt quite old already and unfit for onshore work. In 1982, he moved
from California, where he had landed, to Louisiana but returned five years later. Around
1992— Em could not remember exactly when—he bought his present boat, a small trawler
that he moved in the summer of 1996 to Ventura to fish from there for sea cucumber and
halibut.
There are other, younger, fishermen, at Pier 268-B, with a fair command of the
English language who have done schooling in the US and first tried their luck onshore. A
good example of this group is Johnny Nguyen who barely remembers his departure from
Vietnam in 1978. The family had lived in Vung Tau, a deep-sea port near Saigon, and his
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father had served in the South Vietnamese Military Police. Once in the US, young Johnny
was sent to school. He finished high school in Orange Grove, California, before getting an
onshore job, first on a computer assembly line and later in a video-recording business.
Laid off from his last job in mid-1994, he decided that the best way out of this badly
paid uncertainty was to have his own business. A couple of visits with friends to Fish Har
bor contributed to the decision in August of the same year to buy a fishing boat for $26,000.
Payment was made in cash from his own savings, plus some money from the family. But
additional equipment was needed that Johnny financed with the help of a friend and a loan
from a Vietnamese fish buyer. He has since found many reasons to regret this move, first
discovering his own susceptibility to sea sickness, then the irregularity of income as the re
sult of bad weather and equipment failures, and finally the hassles of run-ins with authority.
For the same money, Johnny said, he could have partnered with somebody and bought a
small store or coffee shop. How realistic a proposition that would have been, I am not sure,
as I noticed a tattoo at the base of his right thumb, which, as someone told me later, could
identify him as a gang member.
Whether once a gang member or not, Johnny’s reason to go to sea also had a lot to
do with his father who told me in a separate conversation that he had been fishing in Viet
nam before joining the South Vietnamese Military Police. This career move made him and
his family of 12 children leave the country in 1975—not in 1978 as his son had remem
bered. The family spent the next 14 years in Louisiana and Texas, where he captained fish
ing boats from 1977 to 1989. In that year, they moved to California. After graduating from
high school, his son Johnny worked for a couple of years in what everyone considered to be
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low-paid jobs, without much prospect for advancement. Hanging out with friends in Fish
Harbor, Johnny eventually decided in 1994 to pool funds with those friends and buy a fish
ing boat. The father became the captain of the boat and teacher o f his son, until that son fi
nally opted out of the fishing career a few months ago and passed the apprentice’s mantel to
his younger brother.
The stories of Em and Johnny are fair representations of the odysseys that many
Vietnamese fishermen now in Southern California have experienced since leaving their
homeland. They also illustrate quite well the range of motives leading to a life as a trawler
from Pier 268-B. Language, meaning lacking English proficiency, came across in many of
my conversations as the lead cause for not making or, in some cases, not even trying it on
shore. Where the attempt was made, the lure of being one’s own boss and of possibly higher
incomes provided the justifications to work the ocean. But how well does this varied col
lection of people get along with each other?
On the surface, the atmosphere at Pier 268-B has a certain congeniality to it. As the
LA Times journalist Eric Slater observed in an expose published in March 1995: “At this
dock, each man shares his expertise with the others. The owner of one vessel welds the net
spool on a friend’s boat while several other men help Nguyen delve into his faltering en
gine. Those who speak the best English translate intricate rules.” In the next paragraph, he
continues: “The group fishes the same way, often sailing en masse, all boats tuned to the
same frequency. If one vessel has engine problems, another will tow it back to port. When
one comes upon a burgeoning shrimp bed or school of rock cod, the radio crackles with di
rections for the others” (Slater 1995,13).
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It does not take much digging to exhume from this placid appearance the skeletons
of animosity, distrust and outright sabotage. Equipment is being borrowed without the
owner’s consent. Sometimes, a borrowed piece is returned damaged, but no compensation
is offered. Shady selling tactics lead to much finger-pointing, and probably as much misin
formation is given to fellow Vietnamese fishermen over radio frequencies as non-
Vietnamese fishermen routinely exchange among themselves.3 As I will explain in the
chapter on micro settings, these skeletons have made it very difficult for this group to step
beyond merely peaceful pier-side coexistence and organize into a force that those on the
other side of the fence, buyers, regulators and enforcers alike, are willing to respect and lis
ten to.
This sketch of the Vietnamese fishermen in Long Beach would be incomplete with
out a glance across the harbor’s Main Channel to San Pedro. By the time of this writing in
the fall of 1996, its Pier 73 was home to a fleet of mainly Italian- and Croatian-controlled
purse seiners, three Vietnamese trawlers and about seven hook and liners that had come
down from Ventura during the summer but were said to be heading north again soon. At the
same time, two of the aforementioned three trawlers had moved across the main entrance
channel to Long Beach Harbor to escape the squabbling in Fish Harbor.
Until this influx, just one Vietnamese fisherman, Long Nguyen, operated his trawler
out of San Pedro, having chosen this location deliberately to separate himself from what he
3 Most fishermen, irrespective o f their ethnic background, are individual hunters, not amenable to acts o f solidarity in the
normal course o f their highly competitive work. The exception are so-called code-sharing groups. Fish buyers in their
never-ending search for steady supplies are often their originators. These groups use elaborate secret radio codes to lead
members to a good prospect while trying to keep competitors away.
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described to me as the troubles of Fish Harbor. Originally from North Vietnam, where he
was bom 49 years ago, Long moved south to Saigon after the Geneva Agreement had split
his country into two in 1954. The victory of the North Vietnamese forces in 1975 made him
move again, this time across the Pacific to North America Five years of service in the
South Vietnamese Army had taught him to live for the moment, a lesson that he has refused
to unlearn even after his arrival in the US. Between 1976 and 1993, Long fished from San
Francisco, Moss Landing and Berkeley. In 1985/86, he became Vice Chairman of the Viet
namese Fishermen Association of America (VFAA—more on this organization in Chapter
4). After a short interim stint of hook and lining in Mexico, Long arrived in 1994 in Fish
Harbor where he was told that trawling for sea cucumber was the most promising endeavor.
So, he bought a boat—the most confidence-inspiring of the Vietnamese fleet— rigged it up
as a trawler, got a sea cucumber permit and went fishing, always by himself and always
only when he felt like going out. In early 1996, the Long Beach court took this permit away
from him again for having obtained it under illegal circumstances (which I will describe in
Chapter 3). Unlike most of his Fish Harbor compatriots, Long is quite eloquent in English.
He is a member of the Los Angeles County Commercial Fishermen’s Association, which I
believe helped his entree into the predominantly white community at Pier 73. In October
1996, Long and another elder from Fish Harbor left Long Beach with their two boats for an
exploratory trip north to San Francisco, to explore whether fishing from there would be
more lucrative and less troublesome than off the Southland.
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The Ventura Longliners
If ever a reader of this thesis has seen a Vietnamese-owned and operated trawler or
hook and liner, he or she would probably sympathize with my original intention of working
with the fleet of longliners that had made Ventura their home port in 1993. Compared to the
former rickety craft that all too frequently are making headline news after another sinking or
life- and limb-threatening accident, the longliners are substantial vessels (see Illustration 4).
Their steel hulls measure about 80 ft in length and displace close to 100 tons. Two 350-hp
engines allow for maximum speeds of about 10 knots. Modem navigation and communica
tion aids help finding the way and fish. Yet, going to sea on a longliner is not without risk.
The engine room of one of the Ventura boats, fishing at the time from Fiji, caught fire in
early 1995. Unable to extinguish the fire, the crew abandoned the sinking vessel and was
picked up unhurt by a containership en route to Japan.
Illustration 4. Vietnamese longliner in Ventura harbor
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The Ventura longliners’ fishing grounds are 500 to 1000 miles offshore, a distance
which forces boat and crew to be at sea for an average of three weeks each trip. During the
season, which runs roughly from July to February, the boat makes about one trip per month.
Longlining involves the setting of a 25-mile long line to which baited hooks are attached.
For the next 10-12 hours, the boat runs up and down that line to pick up whatever the hooks
have caught. This is called hot-lining, a method to ensure that as many fish as possible are
brought on board alive, which increases their marketability (see Kaitz 1990 for an article on
his hands-on experience on a Vietnamese longliner in the Gulf of Mexico). According to
one Vietnamese captain I spoke to, 20-25,000 pounds of mainly tuna and swordfish can be
caught on a good trip and sold for between $80,000 and $100,000. The first $2 out of every
$10 earned go to cover running expenses for the trip. Another $4 go towards the boat,
leaving $4 to be split among the five-man crew and the captain who usually gets about 1.5
to 2 shares. A bad trip easily means financial losses for boat and crew.
The purchase of a longliner represents the pinnacle of a Vietnamese fisherman’s ca
reer—if one excludes the ambition of a career onshore, say, as a fish wholesaler—and is the
result of hard work, frugality and very strong family and community support. Unlike the
fishermen in Southern California who live widely dispersed throughout the predominantly
Asian communities of Orange and San Bernardino counties, Gulf Coast Vietnamese have
frequently settled in tightly knit enclaves at the fringes of existing fishing communities (see,
for example, Maril 1995, 218-220 on the Vietnamese fishing community in Palacios,
Texas). These enclaves provide economic and social support systems that allow their mem
bers to free themselves rather quickly from welfare. They are conducive to the pooling of
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funds needed for upward mobility through the stages of crewing on somebody else’s boat,
owning a small coastal shrimper, and finally buying a deep-sea longliner.
By the early 1990s and as fish stocks dwindled, long-line fishing in the Gulf was
threatened with extinction. At this point a Louisiana-based Vietnamese fish buyer, Ken
Trinh, entered the picture. Ken, whom I estimate to be in his mid-thirties, comes from a
Vietnamese-Chinese family hailing from Can Tho in the Mekong delta. His father ran a rice
mill and his mother a construction materials supplies business. After Vietnam's reunifica
tion in 1975, the family was forced “to move to the jungle” for three years. In 1979, when
the border war with China erupted, the Trinhs, like many other Vietnamese-Chinese fami
lies, were suspected to support the PRC aggression. Pressured by the Vietnamese govern
ment, the paid a ‘departure fee’ and left the country by boat. Their travails lead via the Ma
laysian island of Pulau Bedong to Peoria in Illinois. There, Ken started working as a busboy
in a restaurant for $2.90 per hour. This job was followed by training to become welder and
the unsuccessful search for a job in this trade in Houston, Texas. Instead, Ken found a job in
a Stop & Go convenience store that earned him $4 for every of the 16 hours he worked
daily seven days a week, until 1982. By that time, he had learned the basics needed to buy
his first convenience store. Soon after, he acquired a second store. Recognizing the problem
to develop a convenience store chain without a business system like Stop & Go's, Ken fi
nally wrote off this ambition, married and sold store number two.
The marriage was Ken's point of contact with the fishing industry. His wife came
from a fishing family. Joining his new sister-in-law, who had the industry background but
no language skills, in business, Ken started Jensen Seafood, a fish wholesale business lo-
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cated on Houston's Jensen Drive. The business thrived on the back of reliable supplies from
Vietnamese-owned boats. Soon, the company shop in Dulac and Houma in Louisiana. As
the Louisiana red fish began to disappear in the mid-1980s, Ken closed the Houston office
and concentrated on shrimp which he sold to fish processors in Louisiana. At the same time,
Vietnamese fishermen, who had settled along the Gulf coast, started replacing their smaller
vessels with twin-engine longliners targeting swordfish and tuna in deeper waters. But in
the early 1990s, the swordfish fishery in the Gulf was in trouble because of over-fishing.
When Ken realized the problems this would pose to the fishermen who had supplied
him reliably for so many years, he decided to return the favor. Jensen Seafood entered into a
joint venture with South East Seafood from Florida to explore alternative longline fisheries.
The joint venture, named Hi-Seas Fish, Inc, first explored the waters off Costa Rica. It then
moved to the Western Pacific near Fiji before finally arriving offshore California. The latter
was chosen as the best location. High-quality swordfish and tuna can be delivered fresh
from the boat to the Californian market without first going to Hawaii and then being air
freighted.
Hi-Seas first contacted the San Pedro harbor authorities to inquire about access to
pier facilities. The response was negative. But Ventura, the relative newcomer to the scene
of commercial fishing, did welcome the company, and the first four boats docked there in
August 1993. Ken had in the meantime bought the icehouse and the re-fuelling dock to
support the fishing operations. Catches in the fall and winter of 1993/94 were good. They
were so good that many more boats followed bringing the number quickly close to 20 ves
sels. Among them were two ‘American’ boats (the two vessels on the left in Illustration 5)
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whose ‘Cajun’ crew’s lewd behavior for redirected the animosities of the port’s long-time
residents away from the Vietnamese. Their clean-looking boats and withdrawn and hard
working crews were now considered welcome additions.
Illustration 5. 'Cajun' and Vietnamese longliners moored side-by-
side in Ventura Harbor in February 1995
From February to September of 1994, however, the longliners found that swordfish
had moved closer to Hawaii forcing boats to return with smaller catches. After the spring of
1995, Ventura's high ancillary costs and declining catches led to falling economic returns
and the gradual departure of boats. To keep the Hi-Seas venture going despite reduced sup
plies from the Ventura longliners Ken rented space in a run-down warehouse district at the
fringes of downtown Los Angeles. There he started in November 1994 an auction of fresh-
fish imports from Ecuador, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Indonesia and Sri Lanka (see Illustra
tion 6 on the following page). The product was mainly swordfish and tuna, airfreighted into
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Los Angeles International Airport on ice. Catches that longliners had landed in Ventura the
day before supplemented the imports.
I visited the auction—a first for LA—a number of times and found it a very lively
affair that brought onto the trading floor a cosmopolitan mix of white-American, Japanese,
Korean, Taiwanese and Vietnamese buyers. Open five days a week from about 10 am to
noon, it offered buyers easy access to extra product on days when demand outstripped sup
ply. But, despite its appreciative audience, the auction was ultimately short-lived. It closed
its doors in mid-1995, the result, as Ken explained to me, of supply fluctuations from his
longliners and the threat of legislative action by the California Senate.
Illustration 6. LA fish auction on April 3,1995
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Trying to legislate the weaker out of existence has been a common theme in Cali
fornia where commercial fishermen face the vested and well-organized interests o f sports
fishermen and, less frequently, of environmental groups. I will discuss this tension in the
following chapter. For this summary regarding the Ventura longliners, it will suffice to say
that the sports fishermen’s lobby has tried hard in recent years to stop deep-sea longliners
from operating out of Californian ports. The latest initiative, Senate Bill (SB) 885, was in
troduced by Republican Senator Mountjoy from Arcadia in early 1995. It claimed that “the
fisheries offshore California are being depleted by unregulated commercial fishing in the far
offshore zone”4 (Bill Analysis 1995,2). Boats, which had left the depleted swordfish fishery
in the Gulf o f Mexico were seen as added threats to fisheries far offshore California (see
also Eldridge 1995, n p). SB 885 wanted to “allow no more than 25 fishing vessels to land
at California ports with fish caught by longline far offshore. Such boats would be required
to have non-transferable and revocable permits, available only to vessels operating far off
shore this year [1995-BK], Boats landing at California ports to offload fish caught far off
shore would file notifications before departure and upon arrival, and carry transponders to
allow monitoring of their positions” (Bill Analysis 1995,1).
The bill never made it out of committee, though, largely due to a rare concerted lob
bying effort by a coalition of various commercial fishermen’s associations, seafood proces
sors and fish buyers. The coalition capably demonstrated that the bill was selective—tar
geting only longliners—speculative—take action now, study the problem later—and, ulti
mately, counterproductive, as permit limitations “could force fishing in order to maintain
4 The far offshore zone defines all waters beyond the 200-mile US Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
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the permit, an outcome at odds with the bill’s intent to protect the fishery” (Bill Analysis
1995, 6). It also demonstrated at least in this one instance that the industry could overcome
division, infighting and all those other signs that characterize a group of people failing to
see their common interests and enemies.
Despite the success, by mid-1996, the number of Vietnamese longliners in Ventura
had dwindled to three. Ken still had equity in one. A Vietnamese engineer who resides in
Ventura and who had bought the vessel from Ken now owned the second. The third re
maining longliner belonged to a Gulf Coast Vietnamese who owns another two which had
already returned to their Louisiana homeports. After buying out his Florida partner follow
ing an acrimonious tussle in January 1996, Ken looked for and finally found another part
ner—this time, Vietnamese—to handle the Ventura buying-end of the business. Ken has
returned to Louisiana to focus on his Gulf-Coast business activities.
According to sources in Ventura, the number of longliners, both ‘American’ and
Vietnamese, landing fish from far-offshore California had gone back up to ten by October
1996. But these very recent developments came a little late for me who, by the autumn of
1995, felt that the intention to produce an ethnography on the Ventura longliners had lost its
Other.
The Ventura Hook and Liners
The second major group of Vietnamese fishermen in Ventura are the hook and lin
ers, with about 10 boats in operation as of this writing (fall, 1996). Another five boats had
moved south last summer to San Pedro (four) and Long Beach (one) to be, as one industry
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source put it, closer to the seasonally shifting fish. Hook and lining is a passive fishing
technique whereby two or more lines with non-baited hooks are set from the boat’s stem
and kept afloat by a set o f buoys (see Illustration 7). As the Blue Book puts it: “The fish
traps itself by simply running into the hook” (Blue Book 1967,49).
Illustration 7. Hook and line tubs on top o f a wheelhouse
From the limited contact I have had with this group, I gather that many Vietnamese
hook and liners in Southern California switched gear from gillnetting, the preferred method
of harvesting rockfish (also known as scorpion fish). The switch was forced upon them in
1990 by the much-debated Proposition 132 to abolish the use of gillnets within California
State waters (up to 3 miles from shore). After its approval by the electorate, Proposition 132
entered California’s statute books as the Marine Resources Protection Act of 1990. Those
who did not gillnet were previously engaged in the trapping of slime eel, also known as
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hagfish, a primitive eel-like fish sought after for its skin by Korean handbag manufacturers.
This market had collapsed by the early 1990s.5
Illustration 8. Hook and liner unloading rockfish in Ventura in
September 1996
If one believes the Long Beach trawlers, hook and lining is hard work with rela
tively meager return. Minh Long, one Ventura hook and liner who, unable to find reliable
crew, had put his boat up for sale, described it to me. Boats go out in groups for their 60-
mile, 18-hour runs to San Nicholas and other Channel islands; there they spend three to six
5 Two Visual Anthropology students from USC produced a short documentary on one Ventura-based Vietnamese hag-
fisher in 1991 entitled Paper Captain.
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days, depending on the weather, repeatedly setting two to four 1200-ft lines which catch up
to 3000 pounds of rockfish (see Illustration 8 on the previous page). In spring 1996, rock-
fish fetched about $1.35 per pound. When I asked him about the distribution of income,
Minh confirmed the formula which I had heard for the longliners. In his example, the first
$800 are set aside to cover running costs, like ice, fuel and food. The remainder is split in
two. One half goes to the boat (i e, the owner); the other is split evenly among all members
of the crew. This division deviates slightly from that of the longliners whose captains re
ceive a higher share compared to deckhands.
Minh also told me his story which I am summarizing here because it mirrors others
that I have heard from Vietnamese who only became fishermen in the US. Minh was bom
50 years ago in Phan Thiet, Thuan Hai province, east of Saigon. He was drawn into the
swirl of the post-1975 exodus from Vietnam because he had been a member of the South
Vietnamese Military Police. He and his wife left in mid-1976. In December of the same
year, they arrived in Monterey after a brief stop in Othello, Washington. A friend had told
Minh that Monterey was a good place to get into commercial fishing, a profession that was
said to pay much better than onshore jobs available to Vietnamese refugees. He was lured
by the prospect of “easily making between $1000 and $2000 per week”, but had initial dif
ficulties breaking into the ranks of the Italian-dominated industry. To survive, Minh took a
welder’s job in a boatyard. “But one day, a crew member on one boat got sick. I was hired
for one day only, but when the skipper saw how quickly I adapted to the job, he fired the
other guy and gave me the crew position.”
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For the next three years, Minh worked as a fisherman at night and a car mechanic
during the day. In 1980, he had saved $60,000 with which he bought a steel-hulled, 48-ft
boat to fish for squid, anchovy and mackerel. At the same time, he says, he had become
Vice President o f the Oakland-based VFAA. In 1984, enforcement by the US Coast Guard
o f the Jones Act, which forbade non-Americans to own and pilot commercial fishing ves
sels over five tons, forced Minh to sell his boat.6 He moved with his family to Sacramento
where he bought a house with an attached garage that he turned into a car repair shop. He
bought cars at auctions, fixing and selling them afterwards at a profit. Life was good until
1991, the Gulf War and the onset of the subsequent recession. Minh was forced to sell his
car dealership, but continued as a mechanic until 1993 when his son was killed in front of
his house and eyes in a car accident. The traumatic experience caused Minh, his wife and
the remaining five children to leave Sacramento at the end of that year and settle in Oxnard.
There again he worked as a car mechanic first. In 1994, he bought his present boat, a small,
not very pretty vessel with a cement hull, which he considers safe but now wants to sell.
Minh ended his story with a reference to the future which he saw for him to be in Alaska.
Having heard that jobs and pay were better there, he and a friend were planning to move
and try their luck as fishermen again.
6 Throughout the 1980s, Vietnamese fishermen in California faced Coast Guard harassment under the pretext o f the Jones
Act. Some, like Minh, left the industry as the result Others tried to circumvent the Act by “hiring what they call ‘paper
captains,’ usually Anglo deckhands who are paid to sit and pretend to be the masters o f the boat” (Dunn, 1989, A1— this
article provided the aforementioned USC students with the idea for their film). After protracted court battles spear
headed by the VFAA, the 200-year old law was amended in November 1990 to exempt “immigrants or refugees who’ve
been lawfully admitted to the United States as permanent residents, who will be regarded as citizens for the purposes o f
operating fishing vessels” (Unnamed 1990, A-14).
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I did ask Minh about his and the other hook and liners’ relationship to a Vietnamese
fish buyer, which another source had described to me as one of control. Apart from ac
knowledging that this buyer owns equity in several boats and is the sole taker of rockfish in
Ventura, Minh sidestepped the question. He left me in the dark as to whether this relation
ship is mutually beneficial like the one between buyer and longliners described earlier, or
relies on cultural affinity and economic wherewithal to produce dependency beneficial to
the buyer alone. Minh also confirmed my impression that, unlike their compatriots in north
ern California and, as I will show in the next two chapters, in Long Beach and San Pedro,
the Vietnamese hook and liners in Ventura are living in relative harmony with their sur
rounding community, as well as with US authority.7
7 There has been a very recent exception to this impression. In late November 1996, a game warden on the Channel Island
o f San Miguel arrested two Vietnamese fishermen from one of seven hook and liners that had taken shelter near the is
land from rough weather. The two were caught with dozens of, mostly immature black abalone, a protected species fac
ing extinction from over-fishing and a bacterial disease called withering foot Although everyone agrees that the Viet
namese had scooped the abalone from the rocky beach for immediate consumption, the case highlights their spotty
knowledge o f the law, as well as their contradictory relation to its enforcers. One Vietnamese, who acknowledged being
a fisherman, was found to have no commercial fishing license. The opposite was discovered to be true for his compatriot
who claimed to be no fisherman and only to have come along for the company. Fish & Game records showed that he
had a commercial fishing license. Both have pleaded innocent to the charge o f illegal taking o f a protected species.
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C h a p t e r 3
MACRO SETTING
The previous chapter’s main purpose was to familiarize the reader with the three
groups of Vietnamese fishermen in Southern California with whom I had varying degrees
of contact over the 18-month study period. My final choice to concentrate on the Long
Beach trawlers was driven by three reasons. The first two were negative: By the summer of
1995, the number of longliners was on the decline, and my main contact with this group,
Ken Trinh, had closed his fish auction and moved back to Louisiana. At the same time, sev
eral attempts to establish a working relationship with the Ventura hook and liners had not
been fruitful. The third, positive, reason was the appearance of Long Beach trawlers on Los
Angeles headlines (see, for example, Slater 1995). This suggested a willingness to talk to
non-Vietnamese, which I found confirmed once I visited Pier 268-B. The Slater article also
hinted on some of the Rappaportian problems and situations which, I felt, made the group a
suitable target for an anthropology of trouble and action (see Rappaport 1993).
This chapter will throw light on those problems that Vietnamese fishermen have
with institutions and expressions of US society—hence the chapter title: macro settings.
The most troubling institution I encountered was fisheries management, as it has been prac
ticed over the past 20 years in this country in response to collapsing fisheries, the most
troubling expression a fixation of the US political mainstream in the 1990s with curtailing
government, especially on federal and state levels.
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At the heart of all trouble that fisheries management poses to commercial fishermen
of all persuasions and complexions, is the private exploitation of a public resource, fish.8
There is probably little debate about the need to manage fish to ensure that it is available not
only for this generation of fishermen, traders and consumers, but for many more to come.
Management becomes a contentious issue, however, once the players encounter each other
on a supposedly level playing field that has been severely ‘un-leveled’ by that driving force
of capitalism: ‘me first’.
Writers from Karl Marx to David Harvey have articulated very eloquently the un
precedented speed and development dynamic of capitalism. It has rationalized the previ
ously God-given right of some to usurp a disproportionally large share of resources in the
socially questionable pursuit of maximum profit. To make this disturbing fact more palat
able, an ideology has been devised that encourages every member of society “seines ei-
genen Gliickes Schmied zu sein”.9 Consequently, those who fail have only got themselves
to blame. Or do they? Widespread hostility across racial, gender and income lines suggests
that the preferred reaction is to blame the next one down on the pecking order. Only, once at
the bottom, where can frustration and rage be directed? Upwards, of course, through actions
that frequently violate dominant norms.
The Long Beach trawlers of this thesis are near or at the bottom of the pecking or
der, and, as the various examples of close encounters with US law and authority cited in this
chapter suggest, they are engaged in an uphill struggle. This struggle is further complicated
8 A phenomenon now better known under its racier label: rape o f the commons.
9 A German proverb that translates roughly into: to be the architect of one’s own fortune, that most American o f all
dreams.
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by the political climate in the US of the 1990s that is generally hostile to the disadvantaged.
It has been shaped by economic and political power holders who have set their neo-liberal
sights on active government equaling it with waste and blaming it for budget deficits and
debt (see Block 1996, Paget 1996 and Vickrey 1996 as but three examples of a growing lit
erature that takes aim at neo-liberal positions).
At Pier 268-B, this climate has contributed over the past 18 months to a growing
hostility between the fishermen and, especially, Fish & Game wardens. Incomprehension
on the fishermen’s part of the logic behind many legal provisions and their enforcement is
facing off against growing frustration among Fish & Game officials, who at the end of 1996
see themselves severely understaffed and under-equipped in the face of an unrepentant
Vietnamese clientele. The result has been a vicious cycle of the former acting by the book
and the latter responding with what seems to be defiance. This chapter includes examples of
this cycle and sketches of my own attempts to break it and direct the two sides towards
mutual understanding and appreciation, which by and large have failed to make an impres
sion.
Fisheries Management: Managing What for Whom?
Aside from an unfriendly and uncaring ideology, the institution and tools of fisher
ies management represent the Vietnamese fishermen’s most formidable adversary. The
worlds of Vietnam and North America could not be further apart in this respect. Those who
fished in Vietnam before leaving uniformly describe their home waters as totally unman
aged. With few exceptions, they went out on small-engine or muscle-powered craft, set
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their nets or lines, and took everything they caught home for the market or own consump
tion (see Illustration 9). Technological limitations ensured that over-fishing did not become
a problem (see also Maril 1995,210-211).
Illustration 9. Fishing in Halong Bay, near Haiphong
How different the environment which they found off Southern California! Since
Chinese (sic!) fishermen first demonstrated in the 1860s that the seas of the State and not
just its gold mines could be exploited commercially (see McWilliams 1995, 87-88), fishing
had become a formidable industry in California. Although not organized like industries in
the rust belt, it had taken to factory processes and increasingly capital-intensive technical
advances with abandon. Prodded by the earlier-described ideology of the ‘Gliickes
Schmied’, fishermen were, as this century progressed, competing against each other ever
more fiercely by taking to the seas in ever bigger, more efficient boats. They supplied on-
and offshore factories that had an insatiable appetite for fish, in order to keep the processing
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machines running and the bottom line in the black. This ‘conspiracy’ of ideology cum effi
ciency inexorably led to the collapse of fishery after fishery. The Californian sardine fishery
in the 1950s was an early example. The ‘cod war’ off Newfoundland two years ago signaled
the international extent of the problem.
Responses to emergency have been mostly knee-jerk. The first step was usually a
moratorium on the collapsed fishery. That this affected the livelihood of many could easily
be rationalized away: where there are no fish, there can be no fisherman. The 1950s and
60s, when the first fisheries collapsed, were still the years of strong and relatively stable
economic growth for US capitalism. “Living standards rose ... crisis tendencies were con
tained” (Harvey 1990, 129), and a general sense of optimism prevailed. Government subsi
dies helped affected fishermen either to find employment onshore or to switch fisheries.
Public funds were also ploughed into studying fisheries. The result was a steadily increasing
number of reports on the growth or decline of various fish stocks, recommendations on how
to sustain fisheries in face of increasing effort and measures to be put in place ensuring
compliance with management priorities by industry participants.
Until 1976, efforts at fisheries management were made primarily at the state level,
with the Pacific states of Washington and Oregon taking the lead in developing active man
agement programs. California, although world-renowned for its research efforts in marine
biology, did not share the problems of its northern neighbors with declining salmon and
ground-fish1 0 stock and, therefore, did not see the need for state-sanctioned management.
'0 Ground fishes live at or near the bottom o f the ocean. They include flat fishes, such as halibut and sole, and rockfishes
belonging to the family o f scorpion fishes.
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Most Atlantic and Gulf States continued their laissez-faire approach, with a modicum of
regulation. With the international recognition of the 200-mile EEZ, a federal management
layer was added under the aegis of the NMFS which until now reports to the US Depart
ment of Commerce." The legislative basis was the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and
Management Act of 1976. With the establishment of eight regional councils by 1977, fish
eries management had become a national topic (see Magnuson 1990, Sec 302).
Durrenberger (1996)—borrowing extensively from Townsend and Wilson (1987)—
describes the prevalent model for fisheries management, as it is employed nationwide. It
combines economic and biological factors:
This model, known as the Schaefer-Gordon model, assumes that any stock
will grow according to how many individuals there are in it. The larger the
population of fish, the faster the growth. Since fishing reduces the popula
tion of fish, it affects the stock’s growth.... The model also assumes that the
more people fish, the more fish they will catch. Each hour of fishing results
in catching the same fixed portion of the stock. Therefore, if the level of
fishing effort is constant, the catch depends on the size of the stock. ...
When growth and catch are equal, the system is in equilibrium, and neither
grows or diminishes. ... (Similarly), there is equilibrium when there are no
(economic) incentives to either join or leave the fishery. ... Fisheries man
agement should be able to maximize all these values. ... The basic assump
tion is that the number of fish today determines the number of new fish in
the future. If one can control the level of fishing effort, one can control the
future catch (Durrenberger 1996, 9Iff).
But nature has often been found not fitting linear management assumptions. This is
especially true for the levels of “recruitment, or the addition of new fish” (Durrenberger
1996, 93), which appears to be influenced by a multitude of environmental factors, most of
*' The US Congress is debating a Republican initiative to dismantle the Commerce Department as part o f that party’s
drive to reduce federal government.
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which change from year to year. Stock size was found least influential. Durrenberger con
cludes with Townsend and Wilson: “If this is so, there is no justification in trying to control
the populations of different species, except to be sure that they do not fall below the level o f
viability. As long as they remain above the minimum level, management based on the usual
assumptions—quotas, limits of effort, and so on—are irrelevant to the size of the species in
the future” (Durrenberger 1996,93—my emphasis).
In addition to the seeming biological futility of conventional management practices,
participants in management forums appear to have done their best to prove that they do not
fit the mould of the currently dominant model of public policy. This model assumes con
sensus to be the most like outcome of bringing diverse interests to the negotiating table. The
observed result of this divergence of participatory reality and assumptions has been policies
that frequently achieve the opposite of what they were intended to do (see Durrenberger
1996,94). At the bottom of this conundrum, Durrenberger—following Smith (1990)—sees:
all kinds of social relationship and ways of thinking that determine how to
view fisheries and nature in general. To be part of a group is to agree with its
basic assumptions (of what is right and wrong). If someone disagrees with
such assumptions, ‘everyone’ knows that the person is dumb, crazy, or way
out of line. These assumptions lead to a trap, because ‘those who assume
that others who, like themselves, possess an expertise in fisheries also as
sume that these others hold a set of assumptions in common. ... Of course,
they do not really agree with one another’s assumptions, because they come
from different communities with different interests and different outlooks.
Even when they try to agree, they cannot. Like scientists from different
schools of thought, they begin to doubt the others’ sanity as they find that
the others do not understand basic reality in the same way that they do (Dur
renberger 1996,94-95).
As this process matured over the past 20 years, two diametrically opposed groups
and views of nature have emerged. The scientific fraternity, that feeds public-sector man-
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agement efforts, believes in nature as an orderly system. Its individually studied and under
stood components have the tendency— et ceteris paribus—to achieve equilibrium. “Devia
tions from it are consequences of fishing” (Durrenberger 1996, 96). Fishermen, on the other
side, “see nature as unpredictable but not random. ... [Furthermore], whatever the sys
tems—market, weather, fish stocks, fisheries management processes—they are continually
in disequilibrium; they are not even trying to get into equilibrium” (Durrenberger 1996, 96-
97). If the description of the problem were complete here, we could conclude that drawing
on the fishermen’s expertise and its—contrary to public perception—considerable respect
for conservation needs would provide a promising basis for reformulating fisheries man
agement policies.
But there are still more factors at play that compound rather than alleviate the prob
lem of managing fish. One very US-specific factor is the political trend of the past 20 years
to call into question government’s right to govern in an increasing number of areas. The in
cessant call for smaller government (heard in many if not all quarters) has at its ideological
core assumptions that individual citizens are very capable of managing their affairs and do
not need the tutelage of the state. It came in response to growing deficit spending and in
creasing government debt levels which had reached worrying levels at the end of the
Reagan presidency. Addressing financial instability through drastic cuts of government
budgets has become the theme of the 1990s.
The impact of reduced funding on institutions dealing with fisheries and fishermen,
like the NMFS, the US Coast Guard, and the management and enforcement arms of Fish &
Game has been serious. Whenever I visited their offices, I heard little else but complaints
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about lost funds, manpower and equipment. Staff members frequently expressed a sense of
futility in the face of the ultimately impossible: having to handle a given or even increasing
number of responsibilities with a steadily shrinking budget. Added on, I encountered much
cynicism towards the political elite in state and federal capitals, which were said to be more
concerned about maximizing benefits for themselves than seeking to ensure well-being for
all members of society.
But most disturbing has been my observation of increasing aggressiveness towards
those most reliant on the services of these agencies, but least apt to comprehend the com
plex machinations behind the ceaseless pestering and, occasionally, outright harassment: the
Vietnamese and other small-time commercial fishermen. Their response, not surprisingly,
has been, both deliberately and inadvertently, a search for ways to subvert institutional ef
forts of management and enforcement, that are considered irrational and discriminatory—
very much in the spirit of James Scott’s (1985) Weapons o f the Weak.
The Sea Cucumber Case
The sea cucumber case, brought to court in Long Beach in the summer of 1995,
demonstrates how limited the survival chances are in this country for a small, unorganized
group of immigrant fishermen in the face of powerful single interests influencing legislative
processes to produce a patchwork of often contradictory and at times discriminatory pre
scriptions and proscriptions that even a trained legal practitioner sometimes has trouble
making sense of. The case also illustrates the system’s present inability to entertain propos
als that place short-term demands on a severely reduced resource base, even if these propos-
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als promise long-term solutions to the antagonisms that plague the relationship between
Vietnamese fishermen and fisheries mangers and enforcers.
The sea cucumber, according to the second edition of Random House’s CD-ROM
dictionary, is a marine invertebrate, “having a long, leathery body with tentacles around the
anterior end.” Two subspecies are found and fished in Californian waters:
the giant red sea cucumber {Parastichpous californicus), also called the
California sea cucumber, and the warty sea cucumber (P parvimensis). The
warty sea cucumber, which yields a more desirable product and brings a
higher price, is generally harvested by divers and makes up a small percent
age of the total landings. The giant red sea cucumber is largely caught by
trawling in southern California,... Most of the California product is shipped
to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Chinese markets within the United States. The
most common product form is dried (Kalvass 1992,44).
Illustration 10. Corpus delicti: the sea cucumber
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This innocuous looking creature (see Illustration 10 on the previous page) became
the center of “a yearlong investigation into the most extensive case ever of local fisheries
poaching” (Lewis 1996, Al), which commenced in October 1994. In the course of the in
vestigation and the subsequent court case, 20 fishermen, the majority of them Vietnamese
from Fish Harbor, San Pedro and Ventura, were implicated and ultimately convicted for
“the unlawful taking of sea cucumbers [or] using and possessing a sea cucumber permit
obtained by fraud and deceit” (Lewis 1996, A 10).
The above quotation from Kalvass (1992) contains two hints as to why this hap
pened. One hint is the reference to trawling as the preferred method to catch the Giant Red
Sea Cucumber in Southern California. Trawling has been for many years a major thorn in
the side of the well-organized sports fishermen. They have done their best to get this gear
type and fishing method outlawed, after they succeeded in eliminating gill nets in California
State waters about five years ago. At that time, the dolphin-killing deep-sea drift gill nets,
used by Taiwanese and Korean vessels in the Pacific, provided the bugbear to persuade the
Californian electorate to vote for Proposition 132. Now, it is the image of the industrial
factory trawler scooping from the oceans everything that gets into its way, target or not,
young or mature, resulting in the destruction of many marine habitats, that is borrowed by
sports fishermen to back up their appeals to politicians in Sacramento to outlaw all trawling
in coastal waters. The conscience-stirring image of trawlers raping the ocean hides a much
more mundane reality. Sports fishermen, especially operators of so-called party boats—li
censed pleasure boats allowed to take paying customers out for late-evening fishing excur
sions—do not like coming across trawlers working the relatively confined waters of the San
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Pedro Channel between Long Beach and Catalina Island. Their presence presumably spoils
the image of exclusivity.
The second hint of trouble in the Kalvass quotation are the Asian destinations for
the Californian sea cucumber harvest. Chinese gourmets consider these “bottom-dwelling
marine invertebrates” (Smirl & Maytorena 1995, 16) a delicacy for which they are prepared
to pay top dollar. This permits the buyer, who frequently doubles as processor, to demand
upwards of $20 per pound for the dried product while offering the supplying fishermen $1
for every pound of raw sea cucumber. Even if one subtracts processing cost and the con
nected loss of weight, a very healthy profit is assured. The prospect of such profit was likely
in the mind of Frank Mateljan, a San Pedro-area fish buyer of Croatian descent, who ap
proached the Vietnamese fishermen in Fish Harbor probably sometime in the later part of
1992 with the suggestion to switch to trawling and sea cucumbers. Still hurting from the
Proposition 132-induced loss of making a living catching rockfish with gill nets, the Viet
namese probably saw this suggestion as a godsend, particularly, since it included an offer of
financial assistance for the necessary gear change and the assurance to take care of the paper
work.
Taking care of paper work meant obtaining from Fish & Game an annual permit
that had been imposed on the previously open—that is, unmanaged—fishery earlier in the
same year. The provisions of the sea cucumber permit entered the FGC as Section 8396 af
ter a legislative initiative by San Pedro assemblyman Felando in 1990 had wound its way
through the process as AB 89. As the story goes, Felando, who hails from a prominent Ital
ian clan of San Pedro fishermen, got wind of some problems with over-fishing of sea cu-
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cumbers in Alaska and felt the urgent need to protect this precious resource for future Cali
fornian generations. Recognizing that virtually nothing was known about this creature, but
that landings had increased from insignificance in the mid 1980s to “147,000 pounds in
1990 at an ex-vessel value of $36,000 (sic?)” (Kalvass 1992,44), Felando proposed a total
moratorium for a number of years to study the sea cucumber’s biology and the
sustainability of its harvest. But the Southern California Trawlers Association (SCTA),
whose president, a trawler from Santa Barbara, is often cited for having pioneered the sea
cucumber fishery in California in the late 1970s (see Kronman 1994, 28), learned about AB
89 and started a lobbying effort to avoid closure. A two-year tug-of-war ensued which
ended in a ‘compromise’. Fish & Game biologists were never invited to contribute their
knowledge or voice their opinion on this piece of legislation.
The compromise replaced the moratorium with a limited-entry system that required
permits and the keeping and timely submission of catch records. These records, in turn,
formed the basis of all that was left of previous research intentions—a meaningless bean-
counting exercise as long as nobody cared to investigate the sea cucumbers’ population,
habitat and migration patterns. This would have required funds from steadily shrinking cof
fers—an impossibility in the budget-cutting climate of the 1990s.
To qualify for the revocable yet non-transferable sea cucumber permit, a fisherman
has to “prove to the director’s satisfaction that the applicant landed a minimum of 50
pounds of sea cucumbers during any calendar year, or portion thereof, from January 1,
1988, to June 30, 1991, inclusive” (FGC, Section 8396). Satisfactory proof is a landing re
ceipt issued to the applying fisherman by a licensed fish buyer who certifies that he has
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bought from the applicant on a specific day X pounds of Y fish for the amount of Z. The
law requires the buyer, who is issued books of these receipts by Fish & Game, to submit
copies to the Department’s head office in Sacramento twice a month (see Smirl & Mayto-
rena 1995,17).
Although 50 pounds seem insignificant in comparison to the 160,000 pounds of sea
cucumbers landed in California in 1990, this amount effectively limits the access to a public
resource to an exclusive club of probably less than 100 fishermen. Most Vietnamese, who
were either still gill netting during the 1988-1991 window or working boats out of State,
could not become members ... if it had not been for the greed and ingenuity of Mr Matel-
jan. By the time the 1993/94-permit year began on April 1, he had extended loans to re-rig
boats and furnished doctored landing receipts to a number of Vietnamese fishermen in Fish
Harbor. Their permit applications were accepted without question, which, ex post, made
accuser and accused wonder about Fish & Game’s bureaucratic aptitude. Some fishermen,
who had heard about this new way of earning a living but felt they could do without Mr
Mateljan, did their own doctoring and got their sea cucumber permits, too.
This sham would have probably gone undetected for much longer than it did, if it
had not been for a number of net seizures by Fish & Game wardens after alleged incursions
by Vietnamese trawlers into District 19A—Santa Monica Bay which is off limits to most
commercial fishing—and some finger-pointing by SCTA officers who were surprised to see
so many new members join the (sea cucumber) club (see Smirl & Maytorena 1995, 16 and
Kronman 1995b, 21).
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The Long Beach office of Fish & Game responded in October 1994 with an official
investigation. In the summer of 1995, charges were filed against Mr Mateljan and a total of
20 fishermen, mostly Vietnamese but also including two Koreans, one Cambodian and one
Hispanic. The first five court dates ended in continuances to allow the fishermen to find le
gal representation. Some fishermen, not interested in participating in the sea cucumber fish
ery any longer, opted out of the process early by pleading no contest and accepting a $1000
fine plus three years of probation. It was my impression from the beginning—shared by
other observers—that the prosecuting city attorney, a specialist in environmental cases, had
little sympathy for the law which he was asked to enforce. Viewing it as a protectionist ar
rangement discriminating against the late-coming Vietnamese fishermen (see Lewis 1996,
A 10), the prosecutor was prepared to negotiate a settlement.
The problem was that most of the accused Vietnamese had no legal representative
who could have negotiated on their behalf. The public defenders system would have been
stretched to extremes if it had had to find attorneys from the private sector to represent one
defendant each as prescribed by law which forbids one public defender representing more
than one client in the same case. Visibly intimidated by the surroundings and puzzled by the
process, the fishermen initially asked me to speak on their behalf in court. Having doubts
about the legality of such a representation, I declined their request. Furthermore, I did feel
very strongly—and the fishermen went along with this—that a Vietnamese attorney would
introduce a degree of comprehension of case and process that a non-Vietnamese public de
fender, even with the assistance from a well-meaning court interpreter, or I could not possi
bly offer. Indeed, I had observed numerous triangular exchanges in the corridors of the
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Long Beach court that confirmed in my mind the insufficiency of translated words, if
meanings do not get translated as well.
My attempt to identify a willing Vietnamese attorney through the Vietnamese-
American Bar Association (VABA) did not produce any names. I found sympathetic ears
but sensed a lack of interest in going out on a limb in this case while facing an already
heavy workload. By accident, I met then a young Vietnamese lawyer who felt that this case
would allow him to give something back to the community and afford him the right expo
sure at the beginning of his, hopefully, promising career. He did not, however, have the
material wherewithal to offer pro bono representation. I arranged several meetings with the
fishermen who expressed appreciation for the opportunity of professional assistance. But in
the end, only a handful were prepared to shoulder the expense. This did not prevent the oth
ers from coat-tailing during the proceedings. These were dominated by closed-door meet
ings between the defending attorneys and the prosecuting city attorney, which I was invited
to join. From the beginning, the spirit of those meetings was to reach a settlement that
would avoid what would have been for both sides a very costly main trial. At its core was
the acceptance on one side that wrong had been done and a readiness on the other to keep
the door open for the fishermen to continue making a living.
Half way through the six months long sea cucumber case, I learned that California
Assemblyman Firestone had put forward AB 2628, legislation that would replace the arbi
trary language of Section 8396 with another that combined the concern for the resource
with a recognition of how little everyone knew about it. The early versions of AB 2628 fo
cussed on a maximum number of permits that would have (a) left room for the Vietnamese
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latecomers and (b) allowed for transfer of permits. This turn of events encouraged everyone
involved in the sea cucumber case to explore a case strategy that would avoid revocation of
the existing permits and, thus, leave the door ajar for the Vietnamese to reenter the sea
cucumber fishery legally.
An add-on to this strategy, which I proposed, assumed that all players involved—
fishermen, Fish & Game and prosecution—viewed the sea cucumber case as the
culmination of a crisis which had shaken the minds of everyone sufficiently to cause them
to be willing to entertain even untried means to break the vicious circle of mutual ignorance
and resultant hostility. I suggested that, as part of the court settlement, the Vietnamese
fishermen be given special permits that would be conditional upon their active participation
in a research project to improve the understanding of the sea cucumber fishery. Such a
project, I felt, would have given both sides a unique opportunity to observe the other at
work without the usual trappings associated with facing each other from opposite sides of a
fence.
Although virtually everyone conceded that this was a good and quite workable idea,
the system ultimately had no room for this little bit of imagination. The most credible
excuse for the official thanks-but-no-thanks was the severe shortage of funds: We have
barely enough money and people to meet our current responsibilities. How can we justify
diverting any of these scarce resources to the design, execution and evaluation of such a
project? I tried to address this concern by suggesting that the fines likely to be paid by the
fishermen be directed towards a sea cucumber study. Again, the system proved unyielding.
It prescribed that the fines from this case be split 50:50 between Los Angeles County and
Fish & Game. The latter would incorporate that ‘extra income’ into its general budget, with
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no mechanism in place to channel money to specific purposes. Once again, the longer-term
potential of changed attitudes and their beneficial effects on an industry in dire need of
change were ending up on the altar of short-term expediency.
The sea cucumber case finally ended in late March of 1996, with all sides feeling
bad. Those fishermen, who felt there was hope to reenter the fishery under a changing legal
regime, plead no contest to one charge of unlawfully taking sea cucumbers and accepted in
return a $2000-fine—a heavy burden for most—plus summary probation extending from
one to three years. Encouraged by the Vietnamese lawyer, this group appeared shortly
thereafter at the Fish & Game permit counter in Long Beach to apply for a 1996/97 sea cu
cumber permit. To the amazement of everyone involved, including the Fish & Game war
den who had led the investigation, all got new permits, again no questions asked. The un
derstandably frustrated warden has since warned the fishermen that their sea cucumber
permits would be subject to a forthcoming hearing in front of the Fish and Game Commis
sion, a body of political appointees, which acts as the final arbiter of Fish and Game law in
California. While such a hearing would give the fishermen the theoretical chance to prove
eligibility and retain their permits, industry observers familiar with the case and the emo
tions surrounding it doubt that anyone will succeed. The main obstacle to potential success
is in my opinion the unwillingness of the Vietnamese fishermen to organize and develop
with the help of outsiders like lawyers and professional negotiators a collective voice and
stance that could be heard and respected. I will return to this issue again in the following
chapter which deals with the micro setting of this small community.
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Unwelcome fallout from the sea cucumber case has included major changes to AB
2628 as it moved through the legislative stages before ending up as Section 8405 to be in
cluded in the FGC in April 1997. Although my sources in Fish & Game insist that their
agency did not lobby for those changes, I have a hard time believing this. At the heart of the
change is the elimination of the ceiling of some 130 permits, contained in the bill’s earlier
drafts, and its replacement by a threshold made up of successful applicants who can prove
the 50-pound landing during the 1988-1991 window as prescribed by the ‘old’ law (see
FGC, Section 8405.1 [a] and 8405.3 [b]). To make matters worse, the new law excludes an
alternative qualification available in the ‘old’ law, which permitted rejected applicants to
appeal with documentary proof that “he or she had a vessel and trawl gear capable of fish
ing for sea cucumbers under a purchase contract, construction, or conversion between Janu
ary 1, 1992, and May 1,1992, and who otherwise was unable to meet the minimum landing
requirements” (FGC, Section 8396 [i]).1 2 Thirdly, the initially simple and unconditional
transfer of permits was loaded with provisos that seem to have been designed specifically to
exclude forever from this fishery Vietnamese fishermen entangled in the sea cucumber case
(see FGC, Section 8405.2 [a & b]). It appears that the lobbyist for the commercial fishing
interests, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations either succumbed to
those pressures or felt that the changes were in the interest of its members. To add insult to
injury, a very recent proposal for a study of the sea cucumber fishery was shot down by
California Sea Grant, despite the reviewers’ recommendation to fund the project.
* 2 [ have since learned that this clause had been included to accommodate one Santa-Barbara trawler, permitting him to
qualify. This is Californian legislation at its single-interest-best
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Santa Monica Bay, Halibut, etc
Of course, the story of the sea cucumber case cannot be read in isolation. I have al
ready referred to the new legislation that was supposed to replace an arbitrary, discrimina
tory law with something less arbitrary, less discriminatory, and opening a perspective of
inclusion for the Vietnamese fishermen. At the beginning of the sea-cucumber story, I also
pointed out alleged incursions by Vietnamese fishermen into Santa Monica Bay that par
tially triggered the Fish & Game investigation.
Santa Monica Bay, or District 19A, “includes ocean waters and tidelands to high-
water mark between Malibu Point and Rocky Point” (Digest 1995, 43). The District is
closed to all commercial net fishing. Its muddy, fairly flat sea floor makes it the preferred
home of the sea cucumber and other ground fishes. Outside, the water depth steadily in
creases, and the sea floor becomes rocky. According to Vietnamese fishermen, the still flat
areas outside District 19A are occupied by a sequence of (permanently?) set gill nets, fur
ther limiting their room to maneuver. In my interviews, I have encountered repeated claims
by Vietnamese of unjustified boardings by Fish & Game or the US Coast Guard. State
ments like the following were common: “I was fishing outside and, maybe, during the re
trieval of the net, the boat drifted near or across the line.” But there are also others who ad
mit to the adrenaline-pushing sensation of giving law and authority a run for their money.
They go into the Bay for a quick, usually very rewarding, trawl.
Fish & Game’s virtual inability to patrol the District effectively adds spice to this
cat and mouse game. In recent years, the Department’s Long Beach station has lost two pa
trol vessels to the efforts of an over-zealous budget cutter in Sacramento. It now relies on
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two open skiffs that turn the hardiest warden into a heap of frustration and anger after, in the
words of one officer, “one whole night out there, chasing Vietnamese trawlers, some even
with their navigation lights turned off’. Policing has not become easier after a sharp person
nel reduction that brought the number of wardens in South Los Angeles County down from
seven to two. It should also be noted that these wardens have to deal with everything from
observing the opening of the dove hunting season on September 1 to responding to anony
mous tips, frequently from sports fishermen, that someone is fishing in a closed area.
Itself severely handicapped offshore, Fish & Game now relies increasingly on the
support of US Coast Guard cutters and, occasionally, helicopters from bases in Marina del
Rey and on Terminal Island. These cutters are manned by frequently rotating crews which
over the years have been forced to take on an ever-expanding range of responsibility with
steadily shrinking resource levels. Coast Guard boardings, often conducted under aggres
sive ‘rules of engagement’ that take their cue from boarding suspected drug traffickers off
the Florida coast, have become very much resented by commercial fishermen facing under
trained rookies who jump on board their boats armed to the teeth (see Kronman 1996).
Adding language difficulties to the equation does not make for many happy encounters
between the US Coast Guard and Vietnamese fishermen.
Alleged misconduct by Vietnamese fishermen is not exhausted with fraudulently
obtaining sea cucumber permits and fishing in closed waters like Santa Monica Bay. A third
infraction, that may have far more serious repercussions than seizures of fish and gear, is the
landing and sale of so-called shorts, halibut that are shorter than the legally prescribed 22
inches (see FGC, Section 8392). Shorts became an issue after the conclusion of the sea cu-
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ciimber case, when Vietnamese fishermen, uncertain over the status of their newly obtained
1996/97 sea cucumber permit, started targeting halibut which then was fetching about $4.50
per pound. Possibly encouraged by the willingness of their two main Korean buyers to take
and pay $2 for undersized halibut that earn those buyers roughly the same as legal halibut at
the Orange County fish markets, some fishermen certainly and knowingly broke the law for
short-term gain. Other fishermen have been condemning—to little avail, I must add—this
attitude as shortsighted and irresponsible for jeopardizing not only tomorrow’s catch but
also placing the whole community in a very negative light.
And what a negative light these seizures of shorts from various vessels, trucks of
buyers and market shelves have thrown! The sports fishermen jumped at the opportunity to
bombard the public and politicians with predictions of Sodom and Gomorrah in Californian
waters and demand tough action with the implicit aim to get rid of all trawlers. Under pres
sure, Fish & Game officials looked for and found a ready-made solution: Section 8833 of
the FGC which states flatly: “In Districts 4,19, 19A, 20,20A, and 21, trawl nets or dragnets
may not be possessed” (FGC, Section 8833 [a]). According to a non-Vietnamese trawler I
talked to, this provision has been on the statute since the 1930s, without ever being en
forced.
Within days of this discovery, Fish & Game wardens appeared at Pier 268-B and
warned the Vietnamese trawlers not to go out fishing, as their gear was in violation of the
law. Confusion reigned supreme. A delegation of angry Vietnamese went to the offices of
both Fish & Game and the NMFS demanding proof for this claim. There was initial hope
that Section 8833 would not apply to federal waters that extend beyond the state’s three-
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mile line. This hope was fuelled by a court decision, won in early 1993 by the VFAA, lim
iting the effect of Proposition 132 to state waters, as federal law permitted gillnets south of
the 38th parallel. But both NMFS officials and the lawyer who had acted on behalf of the
VFAA confirmed that no similar preemption existed in the area of trawling. Federal
ground-fish regulations do not include halibut, a peculiar exclusion blamed on peculiar
politics at work during their formulation.
For a moment, the survival of the Long Beach trawlers seemed in grave danger.
Then Fish & Game officials, obviously wanting to lower anxiety levels, stepped forward
and identified among the exceptions permitted under Section 8833 (b) the spot and ridge-
back prawn permit. This non-restrictive permit, which most Vietnamese have— it costs only
$30 per year—allows up to “1000 pounds of incidentally taken fish per trip, except for sea
cucumbers that may be taken in any amount” (FGC, Section 8842 [b]). Fishing for both
species is seasonal. No ridgeback prawn can be taken between June 1 and September 30,
while spot prawn is off-season from November 1 to January 31 (see Digest 1995,40f).
Unfortunately for both parties, this solution immediately gave rise to more prob
lems. While most Vietnamese were experienced sea cucumber fishermen, few knew where
to find the prawn. Prawns and sea cucumber seldom cohabit. Furthermore, 1 ‘ / 2-inch nets—
measured between two adjacent knots—are permissible for shrimp and prawn trawling. 4‘ /2
inch is the minimum mesh size for sea cucumber and other fish. Caught between a rock and
a hard place, quite a few Vietnamese trawlers have chosen to go fishing with the 1 '/2-inch
shrimp net. They hide behind the excuse that “I was trawling for prawns, but I wasn’t
lucky”, when wardens stop them and find only ‘other fish’ but no prawns. The problem
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with this excuse is that 1 '/2 -inch nets scoop up everything in their path, most of it subse
quently discarded over board dead for being undersized or else forbidden by law.
Fish & Game has responded to this new trouble with frequent dockside checks de
manding landing receipts and logbooks. The latter have to be sent regularly by fishermen to
Sacramento, an obligation that few Vietnamese seem to be taking seriously. One ‘delin
quent’ fisherman blamed his failure on inertia rather than malevolence: “Sending these log
books was much easier in the past when Fish & Game supplied them together with stamped
envelopes. Now, I have to interrupt what I am doing, find an envelope and buy stamps ”.
Again, the penny-wisdom of budget cutting had done away not only with a convenience,
but also, much more importantly, with “an incentive not to break the law”. One astute in
dustry observer once described to me the absence of such incentives as the cardinal failure
of all fisheries management.
Examples of Cross-Cultural Miscommunication
If the reader now feels that his/her head is spinning, he/she should try to imagine for
a moment how much the linear narrative of this description hides of the crisscross multi
plicity of frequently disjointed events that, not surprisingly, are taxing the average fisher
man’s mind beyond what he can comprehend. Not one visit to Fish Harbor has gone by
without a question directed to me about this or that rule, or a complaint uttered about per
ceived unjust treatment by a Fish & Game warden, or a rumor cited that, for example, fish
ing at night, customary among the Vietnamese trawlers, was about to be forbidden. Al
though some fishermen, especially the younger ones, understand the letter of the law, most
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do not. And those who do have frequently demonstrated to me their inability to grasp the
rationales underlying many pre- and proscriptions, a considerable challenge even for the
much better educated.
But language cannot be and is not the only explanation for the never-ending run-ins
of the Long Beach trawlers with US authorities. The sizeable literature produced over the
years to help Americans to appreciate Vietnamese culture traits contains hints. One such
hint claims a ‘pluralistic’ approach to life taken by Vietnamese people, that contrasts radi
cally to the American preference for ‘monistic’ solutions “adopting only one in every type,
class and category. ... Laws (for example), which prescribe only one avenue as being the
legal and acceptable one, are said to collide head-on with the Vietnamese pluralistic ten
dency to reject One and the Only and to seek ‘the other possibilities’ (LIRS n d, 18-19).
Phrased differently, “there seem to be many norms by which to judge an action, and in
dealing with right and wrong, although the Vietnamese embrace right, they do not always
reject wrong out of hand” (LIRS n d, 19). The text concludes that “life, for Americans is a
series of Armageddons, great and small, daily to be waged between good and evil, the out
come of which must be the triumph of good. There must always be a winner, and the win
ner must always be good. For the Vietnamese, there is no Armageddon. The presence of
both good and evil is recognized in the Mainstream of Life which is a blend of both. And
‘lifemanship consists in successfully existing or surviving, as best as one can, in the main
stream”’ (LIRS n d, 19-20).
After 18 months near Vietnamese fishermen, this reasoning seems in line with my
own observations of their modus operandi. For most, California’s FGC is a compilation of
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abstractions with little bearing on the task at hand, namely to survive by exploiting the
ocean. While some appreciate the need to adjust to the law of the land that took them in,
they soon throw their hands up in despair when coming face to face, day in day out, with an
American system that carries care and tolerance on its lips but relies on institutions and
mechanisms that brook no deviation from the narrow path of what is considered right.
This was confirmed when I accompanied one younger fisherman (Johnny from
Chapter 2) to a court appearance in Orange County. Insisting that he had not wronged but
feeling in no position to argue his case to an omnipotent authority with any chance of suc
cess, he declined the offer of a public defender and agreed to negotiate a settlement with the
prosecuting district attorney. When he came out of the meeting room, his face betrayed a
deep sense of anger and disbelief. Instead of letting him go with a slap on the wrist in return
for his cooperation—Asian courts customarily offer clemency to the accused who readily
admits guilt, a double-edged sword, mind you—the district attorney, in Johnny’s words,
“pushed me in a comer and left no way out”. The verdict was $1800 in fines, plus three
years of summary probation and no return of his fishing gear, the crime two counts of fish
ing within three miles and using a net with a mesh size of less than the permitted 4 ‘ /2 inches.
"That doesn't make sense”, he uttered, “they confiscated my net in February and returned it.
They must have measured it then and found it to be legal. How can it be another size now?
But they have my net. I cannot prove anything.” As he was talking, he got visibly agitated,
and his father, who was there as well, looked angry, too. The DA's strategy had caused
Johnny to loose face not only to authority but also to his family, a very shameful experience
to anyone still influenced by Confucian principles of propriety (see Nguyen 1990, 37-39).
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Remembering remarks, which he made to me before going into the DA’s chambers, about
being half Vietnamese, half American, uncertain where his allegiance lied, I exited.
This and the lessons which can be drawn from the sea cucumber case are not en
couraging for the Vietnamese trawlers in Long Beach/San Pedro. The sea cucumber case
brought to the courtroom floor individuals from both sides of the dispute, individuals whose
candor and solid grasp of case and players encouraged me to look for a light at the end of
the tunnel. Unfortunately, the system itself proved utterly incapable of offering more than
the image of an oncoming train. Lateral thinking and the proposals that resulted from it
found no room in the Californian scheme of things. I now see both sides in the whirl of a
vicious cycle. Frustrated officers from understaffed and undefunded government agencies
are pitted against immigrant fishermen with few tools to decipher the maze o f rules and
regulations supposed to guide their actions.1 3 The cycle is fuelled by powerful moneyed in
terests that drive legislative processes and keep government agencies of all descriptions un
der a funding siege with the single objective to secure maximum benefit for themselves.
Future texts may list the Vietnamese fishermen of Southern California among the early vic
tims of a wider-reaching spiral that is drawing more and more segments of US society
closer to the margins.
*3 For example, as o f this writing in January 1997, Fish & Game has been unable or unwilling to update the English por
tion of a bilingual Vietnamese-English Summary o f Commercial Fishing Laws, which the Department and California
Sea Grant had co-produced in the mid-1980s (see Dewees, Harmon n d). I volunteered to get the update translated into
all needed languages whh the help o f co-students.
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Chapt e r 4
MICRO SETTING
Organize or Vanish?
On page 50 of this thesis, I noted with regret “the unwillingness of the Vietnamese
fishermen to organize and develop ... a collective voice and stance that could be heard and
respected”. It is true that I find this unwillingness troubling, as it leaves both group and in
dividuals very vulnerable to the whims of a capricious and opaque system.
It is not as if the Vietnamese have never tried to organize or that there were no
precedents. For well over 10 years, a Vietnamese fishermen’s association existed in Oak
land, the VFAA. Bringing together community activists and fishermen, this organization
has had considerable success in fighting what was considered discriminatory legislation.
The most prominent success was the defeat of Proposition 132’s claim to enforcement out
side of California’s state waters, which a United States District Court threw out in 1993.
The VFAA has also shown the way for fishermen to become part of the management proc
ess through offering their knowledge and advice in fisheries-oriented research projects. A
good example is the Saltonstall-Kennedy-funded study of gear alternatives to help “increase
productivity in the Californian hagfish fishery, and to reduce fishing mortality of small hag-
fish” (VFAA 1992, 1). The VFAA has also had its dark moments when, for example, one of
its senior officers was accused of having ‘redirected’ funds into his own pockets. Whatever
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the truth behind those allegations, this troubling event pales against the Association’s pre
mature end in 1994. Then, steadily decreasing funds from predominantly federal sources
forced the VFAA Board to redirect its attention and efforts away from Vietnamese fisher
men and towards welfare recipients of various ethnic backgrounds (see Kyung 1994, 37-
39).
In the Southland, the Long Beach trawlers tried to set up a fishermen’s association
in early 1995. This effort was in response to a flurry of net seizures by Fish & Game for
fishing in closed areas. It coincided with an attempt to bring the Department to court for
civil rights violations in conjunction with those seizures. The fishermen had approached the
Los Angeles-based Asia-Pacific Legal Center for assistance. This entity investigated their
complaints but ultimately found no cause to proceed. This also meant the untimely end to
this attempt at bringing the fishermen together, for, I believe, three reasons. Least influential
was probably the experience of failure as a group to get back at Fish & Game, the target of
great disdain and worry. A more troublesome reason was the strong feeling among quite a
few Vietnamese fishermen—expressed to me again and again—that the driving force be
hind this attempt to organize was a fisherman who was himself deeply implicated in wrong
doing. Finally, people resented this seemingly quite ambitious individual’s covert efforts to
use his position in the association to further his own agenda, the establishment of a fish
buying business.
When I pointed out that these were not insurmountable obstacles, they retorted with
an argument that I have found much harder to tackle: “Vietnamese”, many said, “don’t or
ganize well.” Thinking of the incredible organization needed to allow a small nation like
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Vietnam to stand up to the world’s biggest economic and military power for nearly two
decades, I found this claim difficult to accept. As I couldn’t find a receptive audience for
this particular line of reasoning among the fishermen, I checked the Vietnamese-American
refugee literature and discussed the problem with Vietnamese intellectuals and community
organizers. They all concurred with that earlier statement and blamed a particularly Viet
namese “difficulty in subordinating personality to rationality in group enterprises” (LIRS n
d, 24; see also Tri 1993,61-62).
The explanation for this difficulty can be found in the rural setting of Vietnamese
society, with its strong reliance on the extended family unit for social orientation and “secu
rity in a potentially hostile environment” (Nguyen 1990, 33). The nostalgic image fre
quently used to illustrate this reliance is the “tall bamboo hedge” (Nguyen 1990, 33), which
once surrounded every village. Everyone outside o f this bamboo hedge, Vietnamese or not,
was eyed with considerable suspicion, a trait not conducive to collective action beyond very
narrow family and village confines.
The reality of the Long Beach trawlers could not be more different. Spread out over
most of Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties, the fishermen only encounter
each other closely at Pier 268-B on Terminal Island. Once the nightly trawl is finished, the
catch sold at the pier, and necessary repairs on boat and fishing gear are completed, the
Vietnamese fisherman heads for a late breakfast at one of the Vietnamese noodle shops
along Long Beach’s Anaheim Boulevard. There sometimes one or more of his colleagues
joins him. He then drives home. That home is freeway miles away from the home of any
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other fisherman and provides no incentive to cultivate social contacts beyond the occasional
telephone conversation.
Only on one occasion during the 18 months that I was working with them did the
fishermen as a group approach one of the Vietnamese self-help organizations, the Vietnam
ese Community of Southern California (VCSC). Like the first attempt to organize, this ini
tiative was brought about by what the fishermen perceived as extremely unwarranted action
by Fish & Game.
This time, it was the earlier described ‘discovery’ of FGC Section 8833 and the po
tential threat to all trawling (see Chapter 3). One of the two instigators for this unusual col
lective action was Johnny, whose boat had been stopped for illegal trawling for halibut a
couple of days earlier. The other was a relative of a fisherman from another boat that also
had been stopped and found with 75 shorts (undersized halibut) in its tanks. Both Vietnam
ese are young, fairly eloquent in English and resolutely against being kicked around by Fish
& Game wardens. Upset about the Department’s inability or unwillingness to provide a
clear interpretation of the meaning and implications of Section 8833, the two had proposed
to engage the VCSC in an effort to publicize the fishermen’s misgivings towards Fish &
Game.
The meeting took place in April 1996 at the VCSC offices in Westminster, Orange
County. It was attended by about eight fishermen and presided over by the organization’s
Secretary General. He had called to the meeting four senior editors of various Vietnamese-
language publications who expressed their interest in finding the facts of the current quag
mire and use their influence to help if their findings justified it. It was decided to compile
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the fishermen’s complaints into a report that would be submitted collectively to Fish &
Game for joint discussion. At that point, I left. The meeting was being conducted in Viet
namese, and Phat had been unable to join me. In a telephone conversation the next day, the
VCSC Secretary General sounded upbeat, describing the meeting as very useful and the
fishermen as ready to organize. The report would be completed within a week. On this
positive note, I left for a three-week trip overseas. Once back, I picked up the telephone
again to find out what had happened. The response was disappointing. I was told that the
journalists had drafted the report and sent it to the fishermen for circulation. But the report
never made it out of that circulation. Why? I believe that, as the immediate problem of
having to deal with Section 8833 gradually disappeared behind the chance to continue
trawling under a shrimp or prawn permit, so did the sense of urgency to act collectively.
Throughout all my subsequent conversations with the fishermen, I addressed this is
sue again and again. The virtually unanimous response was: “ Yes, we agree that as indi
viduals we are powerless. Yes, we need to organize. B u t...” That is where the talk usually
drifted towards this or that suspicion about another fisherman borrowing welding equip
ment without returning it, or returning it damaged, one crew member allegedly opening the
valves that caused one Long Beach trawler to sink in Ventura harbor, a third fisherman
continuing to land shorts and selling them to the fish buyer, and so on. “Well, why don’t the
‘good guys’ gang up and tell the ‘bad guys’ to stop being bad”, was my usual interjection.
“Oh no, we can’t do that. The ‘bad guys’ will eventually come to grief, anyway.” The no
tion that by that time Fish & Game might have given up making that distinction and instead
chosen to throw all Vietnamese into a single pot labeled ‘nuisance’—the sudden blanket
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enforcement of Section 8833 could be the first sign of this happening—never seemed to
sink in.
Rather than becoming organized, fishermen began last summer to vote with their
boat engines. Two trawlers left Pier 268-B. They joined Long Nguyen who had made San
Pedro’s Pier 73 his home years earlier after finding the squabbles among the Fish Harbor
Vietnamese insufferable. Two more trawlers, the only remaining holders of uncontested sea
cucumber permits, moved up to Ventura. And, most recently, Long and one other Long
Beach trawler ‘set sail’ for what they hoped would turn out to be a more promising and less
troublesome north, San Francisco Bay.
My conversations with some captains and crew of the remaining 10-odd boats at
Pier 268-B in the fall of 1996 suggest that most accept the risky status quo of playing cat
and mouse with Fish & Game, the Coast Guard, and anyone else prepared to exert domina
tion. How long this will last? I do not know. But I suspect that, unless they change their
minds about organizing and starting a dialogue with US authorities, as well as with other
‘American’ fishermen, the older Vietnamese fishermen will gradually retire. The smarter
ones will find their entry into an onshore alternative, while the remainder may face a Fish &
Game prepared to prosecute and fine them out of existence.
In Rome, Do as the Romans
I have found this catchy advice come quite easily to many ‘Americans’, fishermen
and government agents alike. Behind its simplicity they hide their exasperation about not
knowing how to deal with Vietnamese fishermen who seem quite unprepared to embrace
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wholesale the ways of doing things in their host country. What this advice conveniently ig
nores is that, for its first 150 years, US history was dominated by wave upon wave of immi
grants mostly from Europe, who by and large showed no respect for the ‘Romans’ they
found when stepping ashore. In the name of superiority, progress, profit and a throng of
other ‘unfermented’ concepts, these immigrants battered their hosts, the North American
Indians, into submission. To suggest to new immigrants, especially those from non-
European environs, that they should leave behind whatever they believed was right and
proper before stepping off the airplane is dishonest in the light of this history.
From the very beginning, the official US effort to accommodate refugees from that
small country across the Pacific, which it had tried for more than a decade to subdue, has
focussed on providing work and shelter. Cross-cultural adjustment and communication did
not matter much. The Vietnamese refugee was simply placed into the same drawer that held
all other immigrant categories. But unlike regular immigrants, who choose to come and are
ready to adapt to the rules prescribing the pursuit of the American dream, refugees seldom
have this luxury. Most are forced to leave by circumstances beyond their capacity to prevent
or circumvent. Quite a few Long Beach trawlers had served in the South Vietnamese mili
tary and faced lengthy incarceration in re-education camps. Those of Chinese descent and
who had not left right after the end of the war in 1975 faced tremendous pressure to depart
following the short border war with China in early 1979. Then, there was Long Nguyen
from San Pedro, who had fled already once, to the south of the 17th parallel which separated
the ‘Communist’ north from the ‘non-Communist’ south after the expulsion of the French
colonial power in 1954.
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The majority of Vietnamese fishermen are in the ‘second half of their lives’. Few
have received more than the most rudimentary education. Acquiring English language skills
that would open opportunities to work onshore has proven to be an insurmountable hurdle
for many. Going back to what many thought they knew best, fishing, has been a natural im
pulse. But how much did and do they know about fishing? If ‘American’ fishermen are to
be believed, the Vietnamese are ‘good’ fishermen, very determined, hard working ‘hunters’,
with a keen sense for their prey. They are also very flexible, switching to new fisheries if
old ones decline or new ones offer better returns. Underlying this is a sense that everything
swimming in the ocean is a potential target, whether for profit or personal consumption.
And this is where more problems begin and turn many ‘good’ Vietnamese fisher
men into ‘bad’ fishermen. They find themselves up against a competitive system that has
already carved the ocean into jealously guarded ‘zones of influence’. Once defined, these
zones are frequently enshrined in law by those in power and with scant respect for anything
but their own interest. The instinct of the Vietnamese to go after everything that swims is
curtailed in the name of an impersonal, abstract law that flies into the face of their concept
of government by “men, with their individual idiosyncrasies, their strengths and weak
nesses” (LIRS n d, 14). Expecting authority with a human face, they face instead Califor
nia’s convoluted FGC. Very few efforts have been made to explain the law beyond a per
functory this-is-what-is-says-period. More troublesome, the fishermen are often left with the
impression that the officer whom they approach in the afternoon for clarification does not
know what his colleague exclaimed to be right in the morning.
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Formal and informal rules of the game are sparingly explained to the fishermen out
side of courtrooms. Very few US officials have a notion of what makes those Vietnamese
tick. 1 have encountered quite a few flustered accounts about fishermen expressing, for ex
ample, consent when confronted with this or that claim or statement only to be found in
breach of the same claim or statement less than 24 hours later. Little did the raconteurs
know about the Vietnamese sense of propriety which prescribes reluctance “to contradict, to
disappoint, and generally to cause unease and discomfort in others” (LIRS n d, 17), even
more so when these others represent institutions of power. Courtesy and deference preclude
a plain ‘no’. A Vietnamese ‘yes’ on the other hand does not carry the unequivocal meaning
of the English ‘yes’. “It can mean ‘yes’, but in general usage it merely means ‘I am politely
listening to you’, and it does not at all mean that ‘I agree with you’” (Nguyen 1990, 38).
Once understood, it should not surprise that a “Vietnamese ‘yes’ in word can turn out to be
a ‘no’ in deed” (LIRS nd, 17).
The list of similar examples illustrating the cultural chasm between the Vietnamese
fishermen and their US counterparts can be extended ad infinitum. Referring back to the
Vietnam war, the American author Frances Fitzgerald has probably come up with the most
poignant encapsulation of the quandary: “To find the common ground that existed between
them, both Americans and Vietnamese would have to re-create the whole of the other, the
whole intellectual landscape” (Fitzgerald 1972, 7). To expect resource-stripped Fish &
Game wardens to tackle this monumental task on their own initiative is a bit far-fetched.
However, they could lend their voice to collective efforts that would make the Vietnamese
fishermen feel welcome in Rome and give them an incentive to do as the Romans.
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Chapter 5
THE PROJECT
The purpose of this chapter is to describe my work on updating and re-editing a
safety training video originally produced in 1987 by California Sea Grant for Vietnamese
fishermen in northern California. The project included a fieldwork portion which aimed at
identifying the best possible route of delivering the safety message to the Vietnamese fish
ermen in Southern California.
Background
Although relatively few in number, Vietnamese fishermen, operating out of the
ports of Long Beach, San Pedro and Ventura, play a noticeable and occasionally conten
tious role in the urban economy of the Southland region. They supply a market of predomi
nantly Asian immigrants with fresh fish. But they do this with tools and methods that fre
quently create difficulties with other fishermen and regulatory agencies.
Economic necessity has forced many Vietnamese to acquire boats that no one else
wants. Their ragtag fleet of rickety vessels is prone to mechanical failure and sinking in ad
verse sea conditions. Vietnamese fishermen are accustomed to a system back in Vietnam
that is long on rules and short on enforcement, and are handicapped by language problems.
They frequently encounter US Coast Guard boarding parties enforcing regulations that have
little sympathy for a daredevil approach to safety on the open sea.
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Recognizing the dilemma in 1987, California Sea Grant collaborated with the US
Coast Guard and the VFAA to produce a 60-minute safety training video in the Vietnamese
language. The tape aimed to familiarize fishermen in northern California with safety
equipment requirements and the procedures to be followed in emergencies. Free copies of
the video were given to the Vietnamese Fishermen Association of America (VFAA), but
the main channel of dissemination was expected to be paid orders from individual fisher
men. Few such orders materialized.
Nine years later, Vietnamese fishermen in Southern California still operate on the
extreme margins of economy and safety, while regulatory requirements for costly equip
ment additions have grown in number. In 1994, four Vietnamese fishermen lost their lives
when their boat sank. It may have possibly collided with a bigger merchant vessel in a ma
jor shipping lane off Orange County (see Collins, Do 1994b, If). Two other boats sank in
the region in the same year (see Collins, Do 1994c, If), while a third caught fire near an off
shore oil platform (see Collins, Do 1994a, I & 12). No one was hurt in the latter incidents.
In early 1996, one Long Beach trawler capsized while being towed back to port by another
Vietnamese boat. The captain of the capsized boat drowned. A second crewmember was
rescued. Finally, in March 1996, another regular from Pier 268-B had a close call when,
according to a Coast Guard report, his net picked up a Spanish anchor (sic!) that got entan
gled in the screw and caused the boat to take in water. Luckily, the Coast Guard was able to
respond quickly and dispatch to the scene a diver who freed the net from the screw. The
trawler was then able, pumps running, to limp home under its own power.
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My conversations with concerned Coast Guard officials and the knowledge of the
1987 video led to a proposal to USC Sea Grant in the fall of 1995 to fund a project that
would entail bringing the earlier version in line with the Commercial Fishing Industry
Safety Act o f 1988. This Act is “the first comprehensive safety legislation ever enacted spe
cifically for commercial fishing vessels in the United States” (Magno, Hiscock, 1991, 10).
My proposal also suggested that anthropological fieldwork be conducted to identify the best
possible delivery route for the video. This combination—plus the project’s compactness and
support pledges from Coast Guard and California Sea Grant personnel to contribute time—
helped the project get off the ground.
Cross-cultural Communication at Work
In the following, I will discuss the fieldwork component o f this project. My field
work coincided with the final months of the sea cucumber case described in Chapter 3. The
case, I hoped and hypothesized, would provide the involved fishermen with a heightened
sense of crisis and urgency that, in turn, would entice them into organizing as an officially
recognized association. The safety training video was to become one item on the long list of
services that the association would offer to its members.
To test those assumptions, I searched for and found Craig Trinh “Phat” Huynh, a
Vietnamese graduate student from UCLA, who was about to finish his own Masters thesis
on Vietnamese-owned manicure salons in Southern California. In the following months,
Phat proved to be an invaluable assistant, not only for his language capabilities but also for
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his cultural sensitivity which balanced my own sometimes rushed observations and conclu
sions.
To avoid any impression of intimidation on the part of the fishermen, we chose an
unstructured interview style complemented by note taking. Phat would arrange with the
prospective interviewee over the telephone a convenient time and place to meet. While this
worked on some occasions, on others we had to go to Fish Harbor without prearrangements,
hoping that some fishermen would be present and willing to talk to us. This turned out to be
fairly easy, as the fishermen seemed to appreciate our regular presence during their court
appearances and felt that talking to us would be the least they could offer in return.
Our conversation usually began with questions about the interviewee’s personal and
family history. We found a geographic concentration of fishermen coming from various
smaller South Vietnamese port towns to the east and south of Saigon. One Vietnamese
trawler from the nearby port of San Pedro traced his history back to the north of the country,
which he fled in 1954. The majority had left Vietnam as adults with minimal education and
no English proficiency. This proved to be an insurmountable hurdle for many seeking on
shore employment once in the US. Only two Vietnamese boat owners had left their home
land as infants and subsequently benefited from public schooling in America.
Talks with those two confirmed a distinct generation gap between the older fisher
men and their younger compatriots. The younger men show all symptoms of feeling neither
here nor there. Eloquent in colloquial English, they resent the heavy-handedness of US offi
cialdom. They are also prepared to fight for their rights. One young lobster trapper told me
that in the coming season, which stretches from October to March, he would have a gun on
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board to defend his traps that had repeatedly been vandalized by competitors during the
previous season. Despite their posturing, these men still live with their parents and thus re
main very much influenced by traditions. This leaves the younger generation with the quan
dary of knowing on one hand that new, possibly collective, forms of action are required, but
sensing on the other that communal values, with their focus on respect towards the elder,
prevent them from spearheading such action.
Their situation is very different from that of their parents, some of whom, after up
to 20 years away from home, retain most traits of their cultural upbringing. What, for ex
ample, appears to ‘Americans’— fishermen and government agents alike—as a vexing dis
regard for both formal and informal ‘rules of the game’, I found to be mere extensions of
what the refugee literature has termed the “heart-oriented culture” (LIRS n d, 13) of the
Vietnamese. Apart from an inclination to “feeling sorry for oneself, indulging in self-pity”
(LIRS n d, 13), the heart-oriented culture drives the Vietnamese to be “more interest[ed] in
how men feel, react and transact with one another than how nature functions or how things
in the physical environment operate. Thinking is directed towards morals and ethics and the
formulation of rules of conduct for man, rather than towards the physical environment and
the discovery of laws and principles that govern the operation of nature” (LIRS n d, 14).
This Weltanschauung has its roots in centuries of philosophical framing by the three con
structs of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Only Buddhism takes here the role o f re
ligion. Roughly half of the interviewees described themselves as Buddhists, adhering at
varying degrees to its pre- and proscriptions. The other half admitted their adherence to the
Catholic faith.
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Our hopes to identify through those affiliations a church-supported delivery route
for our safety video, however, proved elusive. For something like this to work, a fairly
compact choice of domicile is required, a virtual impossibility in the suburban landscape of
Southern California (see Orbach 1983, 332 for a similar observation about the Bay Area
Vietnamese and Maril 1995, 218-220 for his contrasting description of the Vietnamese bay
shrimpers in Palacios, Texas, who came from the same village in Vietnam).
We also considered disseminating the safety message through the wives of the fish
ermen. This plan floundered on the same hurdle, physical distance between community
members. We had placed our original hope on a reference in the just-quoted Orbach article
that “it is not uncommon in the Bay for Vietnamese females to own boats crewed by Viet
namese males” (Orbach 1983, 341) and that these women take a public stand in defense of
their ownership position. In our conversations with Long Beach trawlers and some of their
wives, we were not able to confirm a similarly active role, although some wives were the
nominal owners—not very different from American wives who own while their husbands
operate to escape the expropriating potential of litigation—and quite a few helped out on
the boat or stood by their husbands during court appearances.
Following the ‘personal’ segment of our conversation, Phat and I usually brought to
the table the objective of this exercise, namely, to produce a safety training video for the
Vietnamese fishermen. Their response was never negative, although some waved the sug
gestion off with remarks like: “I basically know what there is to know about safety.” But, it
also took never more than a few sentences on the subject to switch to more pressing issues.
In the face of so many adversities, we were often left wondering whether the threat of death
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only becomes a problem when it stares you in the face. Until then, the never-ending struggle
for making ends meet against multiple odds is much more real.
During the four-month period from January to April this year, Phat and I managed
to interview at length about 10 Vietnamese fishermen, nine Long Beach trawlers and one
Ventura hook and liner. This series was brought to an abrupt end when Phat was seriously
injured in a motorcycle accident last June, right after my return from a three-week trip over
seas. I had lost my Vietnamese voice and critical mind.
Video Production
Shortly after USC Sea Grant had approved my project’s funding in late 1995, we
organized a small focus group to provide guidance on topical issues, as well as on video
production and distribution. USC Sea Grant delegated two representatives, Pat Hartney and
Phyllis Grifman, with their respective expertise in project management and outreach pro
grams. John Richards from California Sea Grant’s Santa Barbara office was familiar with
the 1987 video project. From the Long Beach Coast Guard office, Fran McClain, the civil
ian manager of this agency’s Courtesy Dockside Program, volunteered his service. This
Program offers fishermen the opportunity to have their vessels checked for equipment com
pliance and certified with a special Coast Guard decal meant to lessen the troubles of
boarding at sea. Tri Dinh Tran, lecturer from San Jose’s Evergreen Community College,
who was spending the 1995/96 academic year as a visiting professor at UC Irvine, provided
advice and critical opinion on cross-cultural communication issues. Rounding off this group
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was Peter Biella, a faculty member of USC’s Anthropology Department, who doubled as
principal investigator for the project and camera operator.
Altogether, the focus group met four times over a nine-month period. The first two
meetings discussed the fieldwork arrangements and the reworking of the original 60-minute
video that had been produced in 1987. For this purpose and the subsequent reediting proc
ess, California Sea Grant provided the edited master on %-inch videotape. It was finally
agreed that the original be broken into three individual modules, each on one tape, each
with a distinct topic. The topics followed the original sequence. An introduction into the
equipment requirements preceded the instructions on the emergency use of VHF radio. The
third module provided navigation basics to help the fisherman confirm a location in the
event of an emergency. While considered a valuable addition, a possible fourth module
dealing with boat modifications, stability, and general maintenance was found to be beyond
this project’s budgetary constraints.
The first module, entitled “Safety Gear and Equipment”, took its prescriptions from
those parts of the Commercial Fishing Industry Safety Act of 1988 that cover uninspected
vessels (see Illustration 11 on the following page for a summary). With the exception of the
Ventura longliners fishing beyond the 200-mile EEZ, all Vietnamese fishing boats fall into
this category. They also operate within three to 12 nautical miles from shore. As the law
counts the Channel Islands as part of the shoreline, Vietnamese hook and liners fishing near
those islands are, therefore, not required to have expensive survival crafts on board.
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Distance from Shore (Nautical Miles)
0 -3 3- 12 1 2 - 5 0 > 5 0
PFD/tmmeralon Suit
Ring Life Buoy
Survival Craft
Survival Craft Equipment
Distress Signal*
EPIRP
Fire Extinguishing Equipment
Backfire Flame Control
Powered Ventilation
Dissaving Equipment Markings
Marine Sanitation Oevices
Running Lights
Shapes
Sound Producing Devices
FCC Ship Station License
Numbering (State-Reg Vessels)
First Aid Equipm ents Training
Guards for Exposed Hazards
Chart of Area
C oast Pilot
Light List
Tide Table
Com pass
Anchors & Radar Reflectors
General Alarm System
Communication Equipment
High Water Alarms
Bilge Pumps, Piping, Dewatering System
Electronic Position Fixing Devices
Emergency Instructions
Instructions, Drills & Safety Orientation
DocumentlOfficlal Number
Primary Equipment
All Gas-Powered
Vessels
Additional Equipment
Additional for Documented
Vessels
Illustration 11. Safety equipment requirements
The introduction of mandatory equipment in the first module starts with Personal
Flotation Devices (PFD) including life jackets, ring buoys and immersion suits. Special at
tention is paid to the proper markings of PFDs, their storage and to tips how best to get into
those immersion suits that greatly enhance survival chances even in the relatively warm
waters off Southern California. Fire extinguishers are classified and basic maintenance sug
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gestions given. The listing of navigation lights and day shapes required under different op
erating conditions follows. Sound signaling devices and flame arrestors for gasoline-
powered boats round off this portion. It is followed by the introduction of several safety
items which the Coast Guard recommends, such as VHF radio, Emergency Position Indi
cating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), radar and radar reflectors.
Module Two was copied unchanged from the 1987-original. It offers advice on how
to use VHF radio in an emergency situation, especially, when making a mayday call. It in
cludes bilingual aids to assist the caller to identify his boat properly, give the coordinates of
his position and provide the number of crew on board and information on the nature o f the
emergency. The same approach was chosen for the third video module that instructs fisher
men how to use Loran C, navigation charts and visual pointers to determine their position at
sea.
The shooting of the portions needed to update the first module took place in late
June of 1996 under the supervision of Fran McClain from the Coast Guard. Peter Biella
shot the material on High-8, assisted by my wife and myself. I was very lucky to have
found earlier the Vietnamese ‘face and voice’ from the 1987 video, Due Nguyen from Sac
ramento, who offered his collaboration in the re-shoot, as well as the language skills which I
so sorely needed after the loss of Phat. Shooting took less than one day and was greatly fa
cilitated by the hospitality of the Southern California Marine Institute. I subsequently edited
the three modules on the Anthropology Department’s AVID, a Macintosh-based non-linear
editing system. For this, I transferred the original %-inch and the High-8 materials to Beta,
which I then used for digitizing. This work took about one month. Editing the Vietnamese
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narration proved to be a challenge as I had no competence in this language. But it sharpened
my ears. The only technical problem worth noting was the partially damaged control track
on the 3 /4-inch original, which caused image losses and forced me to re-digitize the damaged
portions from a lower-quality VHS copy.
Delivery
The third and the last focus group meetings concentrated on the delivery of the re-
edited video to the Vietnamese fishermen. My fieldwork with Phat had led me to believe
that giving each and everyone a copy would be the best way to ensure that the message ar
rived. To get an idea whether the message would also be getting through, I proposed to at
tach a short survey form with a stamped envelope—taking my lead from Fish & Game’s
experience with un-retumed logbooks. After some discussion, it was agreed to test the wa
ters for a workshop one more time using the just described form-cum-stamped-envelope
approach.
I drafted an announcement of the video’s completion, coupled with the request to
return a portion with name, address, telephone number as an indication of interest in a
workshop. I hand-delivered the form to the Vietnamese fishing boats in Long Beach, San
Pedro and Ventura. Of the 15 forms distributed in Long Beach and San Pedro, I received six
back, plus one from Ventura.
Based on this return, the focus group decided to arrange a workshop in Long Beach
at the Southern California Marine Institute on spec, accepting the possibility of low or even
non-existent turnout. Saturday, November 9, 12 noon were the agreed date and time. Once
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more, Due Nguyen came from Sacramento. Fran McClain, John Richards, my wife and I
rounded off the delivery party. To break the ice with the hoped-for audience, we had ar
ranged for some Vietnamese food from a Long Beach noodle shop. By 12:15, and despite
brilliant weather for fishing, five fishermen, one wife and three children had arrived. The
lunch, interspersed with conversations that focussed again on the latest encounters between
fishermen and Fish & Game, prepared the atmosphere for showing the video, which we did
one after the other, with short breaks in between that were filled with lively discussions
about what had been seen. At the end, the fishermen requested that we prepare a bilingual
emergency procedure card that they could keep handy in the wheelhouse. We agreed to do
that and handed out copies of the videos to the participants. As Fran McClain put it on the
way out: “If this helps save just one life, it was worth our while.”
Post Scriptum
One part of the project, which we were unable to deliver, was a training manual to
help trainers conduct workshops in other parts of the US. A draft manual had been produced
following the 1987 video production. Unfortunately, misunderstandings among the institu
tional backers prevented its completion. Although I was able, with the help from California
Sea Grant staff, to locate a close-to-final version of the Vietnamese translation which Due
Nguyen had produced, I had no similar luck with the English base document. The prospect
of having to translate the Vietnamese translation back into English to allow for an updating
edit and then translate it once more into Vietnamese ultimately proved too much work with
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too little fad in g left in my budget Perhaps, someone else can pick up this piec
have had to leave it.
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C h a p t e r 6
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Revisiting Rome
18 months ago I set out to understand the existence of less than 50 Vietnamese fish
ermen who had been dislodged from their homeland by a vicious war and its aftereffects,
and washed ashore in Southern California after 1975.1 thought them to be a compact and
quite comprehensible Other. But the closer I looked at the conditions of their physical and
economic survival, the further away I was drawn from the confines of their respective
moorings in the ports of Long Beach, San Pedro and Ventura. Ultimately, I was thrown
headfirst into the cauldron of present-day US politics and economics.
The picture that has gradually emerged is not pretty. I found the fishermen sur
rounded by a US society deeply at odds with state and government, shaped by an ideologi
cal mainstream that seeks salvation in laissez-faire prescriptions that date back to the early
years of capitalism. These prescriptions are the normative extensions of a crude ‘me-first’
philosophy of the powerful that preaches maximizing individual gratification, sees social
responsibility as something best left to charities, and looks to the next one down on the
pecking order to blame if things go wrong. Complexity is ‘manhandled’ into short, atten
tion-grabbing statements of ‘reality-as-it-is’ which conveniently mirrors the elite’s percep
tion of reality. The results of all this are often ugly and sometimes bizarre. Money infests
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virtually every nook and cranny of the official political system (see, for illustration, the cur
rent debate over electoral campaign financing). Stock markets rally when unemployment
figures rise.
What does this have to do with the Vietnamese fishermen? Blatantly money-driven
single-interest politics, that determine the outcome of many legislative initiatives in Wash
ington and Sacramento, hold the key to their professional survival—and, probably, that of
most other small-time commercial fishermen. The unwillingness—for the sake of smaller
government—to allocate public funds for the better management of the public resource,
fish, poses a serious threat to both the resource and the people whose livelihood depends on
it. Finally, the cancellation of America’s post-Depression social contract is creating an at
mosphere at the personal level that breeds insecurity, fear of and hostility towards the
other’s motives, adding to the fishermen’s marginalization.
Although I have encountered an encouraging number of individuals very willing to
help the Vietnamese fishermen out of their predicaments, the systemic obstacles to a lasting
solution are enormous. Any lasting solution would require an active investment in time and
people to draw these fishermen into the realm of an environmentally aware and responsible
fishing industry. This itself is only in the very early stages of its making, and it goes beyond
‘politically correct’ words of non-discrimination. Until this happens, nobody should be sur
prised to find Vietnamese or other fishermen breaking laws that in their abstractness seem
to care for anything but their wellbeing. Suggestions “to simply do as Romans” are missing
the point.
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What Is to Be Done?
Having pinpointed the problem at the system level requires a search for systemic
solutions. I feel very strongly with Immanuel Wallerstein the need for “unthinking social
science” (see 1991, 1-4). The analysis of human contexts should be rid of the linear prem
ises, fixation with equilibria and the hubris of universality which have their collective ori
gins in the 19th century. It is my contention that complexity, non-linear interaction and
“nonequilibrium ... as a more usual source of order” (Wallerstein 1991, 33) provide much
better starting points for a social science that transcends disciplinary particularism and ‘et
ceteris paribus’.u And, once again, echoing Wallerstein, I would like to suggest that in
these final years of the 20th century we are again approaching one of those bifurcation
points, that characterize complex systems in crisis, yet, at the same time, provide social ac
tors with a very rare opportunity to expand “the range of choice ... the degree to which free
will prevails over necessity” (Wallerstein 1991,235).
One of the more immediate choices should be based on the recognition that “our
wealth is socially acquired, even if the appropriation happens privately” (Greffrath 1996, n
p). “We [therefore] must”, said the social-democratic President of the Czech Republic,
Milos Zeman, in a recent interview with the German weekly, Die Zeit, “link the invisible
hand of the market with the visible hand of society” (Scmidt-Hauer 1996, n p). Zeman drew
this conclusion looking at the social shambles created by less than five years of neo-liberal
ideology and its relentless preaching of ‘me first’. What took Czechs this relatively short
•4 The economist’s preferred refuge to protect the elegant simplicity o f his formulae from the disturbing influences o f the
‘real world’.
84
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time to realize should be no challenge to any critical observer of the US scene, who had the
opportunity to witness nearly two decades of efforts to amputate the visible hand.
In this spirit I will finish with a few more ideas about what could be done to im
prove the lot of the Vietnamese fishermen in Southern California—some of them requiring
more unthinking than others. Certainly demanding the most unthinking is a suggestion that
developed out of a remark by a Ventura hook and liner. Shaking his head about the prospect
of Vietnamese fishermen to organize a collective voice, he told Phat and me: “The best
thing would be for Fish & Game to stipulate that you have to join the Fishermen’s Associa
tion if you want to get a fishing license. No membership, no license.” We interpreted this
remark to suggest a professional Society for all commercial fishermen—a la Bar Associa
tion—that among many other services would offer vocational training and administer sub
sequent skill tests before issuing fishing permits.
I can hear the howls of disapproval from those last frontiersmen out there. But then,
what prospect do these people have under the current regime, short of extinction? In my
opinion, a professional Society for all commercial fishermen offers many advantages.
Foremost among them is the aspect of self-management that would relieve government
agencies like Fish & Game of their management prerogative and enforcement monopoly.
Fish & Game’s raison d ’ etre would instead become the balancing act between the interests
of Society and society. And even if the present money-orientation of mainstream politics
cannot be eliminated in the short term, the Society would constitute a formidable voice that
would be far less easy to ignore than the present cacophony of multiple, conflicting inter
ests.
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Some fishermen’s associations have already tried partial approaches to the self
management idea, for example, through members’ assessments on landings to fund re-
source-related research, data banks, market development efforts, etc (see Kronman 1995,
89ff on the, ultimately, failed attempt of self-management by the sea urchin divers). Self
policing has also been tried by some with some success, according to Fish & Game sources.
In the interim, and assuming that the political mainstream in this country will sooner
rather than later overcome its paranoiac fear of active government, I recommend the fol
lowing thoughts and measures to improve on any government agency’s relationship to
Vietnamese fishermen:
1. Assume that they are willing to act according to the laws of the land if only anyone
cared to teach them. The present status of their knowledge is rudimentary at best and
fragmented, and more often than not the result of tickets and court appearances;
2. A relatively quick and easy beginning would be bringing up-to-date a bilingual
English-Vietnamese Summary o f Commercial Fishing Laws co-produced by Fish &
Game and California Sea Grant sometime in the late 1980s (see Illustration 12 for a
sample page [Dewees, Harmon n d, 8]). I have repeatedly suggested this to Fish &
Game and offered USC student assistance to have it translated into whatever lan
guage is required;
3. Use the Summary as a guide to train Department officers sufficiently in the same
law to put them in a position to give consistent advice across individuals. If a fish
erman points out inconsistencies between opinions he received, take them seriously
and ensure that they are resolved to his satisfaction;
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T«y C rf
5onta Crux
Caa xtl dung
Ixifi trong i»
Khu 19A ( t r J 1
khi 9e'b2t
•oi)
Oao Santa
Catali
K H U 20
o San Clewnfce
fC TAY
Trong Khu 19r Ichong &#c dung
Ittfi trong vdng 750 fa et each
eau tiu,ben,cang,33p, ho|c
d£ chfn song
Oi£j 8693(g): Cac tau danh ca^
H u Oo ho$c c6 M j 8Sng trong cac
Khu 17,18*19, vi 20A khong Aide
xi/'dyng hofc mng theo Itfdi
a£c c6 a6*t Iddi nho hdn
4-1/8 inchea.
-Oi€u 8724: -O U dc dung U*Si
rpr (li/Ai ch&) co aat liJ&i
to i thidu 8 incheo trong
cac Khu 10,17,18, vd 19.
tiieu 8833: C m x J dung, hogc aang
X iA S i ra trong cac Khu 19,19A,Z0,20A
va 21
Son Oicgo
Illustration 12. Sample page from the Summary o f Commercial
Fishing Laws
Introduce a point and ‘traffic-school’ system that would give the offending fisher
man a chance to make good—up to a threshold number—through attending classes,
if available, or the reading of relevant materials, the absorption of which would be
tested afterwards;
Restructure the system of fines in such a way that it ensures value-added, either
through funding remedial measures like those proposed in Point 4 or by adding to
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the cumulative knowledge of the fishery which might have been impacted by the in
fraction;
6. Incorporate into punitive measures the possibility for the fisherman to contribute in
any other form to the industry knowledge. One possible form could be the issuing of
permits made conditional upon the fisherman’s participation for a set time in an in
dustry- or fisheries management agency-sponsored research effort. I suggested this
route for a group of Vietnamese fishermen who stood accused in 1995 of having
obtained with fraudulent means permits in the limited-entry sea cucumber fishery;
7. Replace wherever feasible punitive sanctions with ‘incentives not to break the law’,
that drive the message home that fishermen and fisheries-related agencies do not
have to be adversaries.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Knoll, Bernd (author)

Core Title Living on the edge: Vietnamese fishermen in southern California

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Visual Anthropology

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Agriculture, Fisheries and Aquaculture,anthropology, cultural,OAI-PMH Harvest,sociology, ethnic and racial studies

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-12184

Unique identifier UC11342225

Identifier 1384901.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-12184 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1384901.pdf

Dmrecord 12184

Document Type Thesis

Rights Knoll, Bernd

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA