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A California Democrat running for the US House of Representatives claims he’s “fluent” in Vietnamese — but has been enlisting a translator to help him answer questions during campaign events and media interviews.
Derek Tran, an employment lawyer and Vietnamese-American who is running to unseat Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.), has boasted of being “the only candidate that speaks fluent Vietnamese” in California’s plurality-Asian 45th Congressional District, which includes parts of Orange and Los Angeles counties.
“Being able to communicate with these older Vietnamese[,] I plan on organizing door-to-doors with my campaign,” Tran told the Orange County Register in October 2023.
“The story of my family, my upbringing — that really resonates with voters,” he told Politico in a profile published that same month, which noted that Tran is an Army veteran and his parents were refugees.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has also touted Tran as “a candidate fluent in Vietnamese,” while Tran’s campaign includes messages in Vietnamese on its website and has produced ads in which only Vietnamese is spoken.
But when appearing for interviews with Vietnamese-language outlets, Tran has several times tripped over his words and needed an interpreter to step in.
During a Feb. 23 interview with Saigon Entertainment Television (SET), a California-based, Vietnamese-language TV station, Tran stumbled right out of the gate when asked a question in his purportedly native tongue.
“In my 10 years working as a lawyer, I’ve done a lot of cases dealing with employment law, discrimination, harassment and really wrongful termination,” Tran told his interviewer, before going on to discuss his legal career.
A female translator seated next to Tran politely corrected him.
“The question was how many years you serve in the Army,” she said. “So let’s address that and then I will cover the rest.”
“Oh,” Tran replied, smiling sheepishly.
After Tran was asked another question in Vietnamese, he looked expectantly at the translator for help.
“If you can make a change in Congress, what change would you make to help the Vietnamese immigrants’ community in the US,” she obliged.
“One of the things I want to make sure our Vietnamese community understands is that when I get to Congress the Vietnamese community will not be forgotten,” Tran pledged in English. “You will have a voice; you will have someone that’s going to listen to your concerns.”
At another point, the interviewer stressed to the translator how important it would be for her to restate in English his question about whether Tran would stand up to the Chinese Communist Party.
Four days later, the same translator sat down with Tran for an interview broadcast on Little Saigon TV, asking questions of the candidate in English while repeating his responses in Vietnamese after he spoke.
Tran used the same system when speaking to Asian-American voters during a June 8 campaign event.
Despite apparently not speaking the language, Tran doesn’t think his background needs explaining, only his opponent’s.
“Michelle still tries to run on that she’s a refugee or she tried to flee communism. No, that’s not true at all,” Tran told Punchbowl News in May. “She came to this country for economic gain. That’s not the same as losing one’s country after the fall of Saigon in ‘75 and having no home.”
Steel’s parents fled North Korea during the Korean War, married in South Korea and later emigrated to Japan. The California Republican and some of her family members would eventually relocate to Los Angeles.
Vietnamese is the third-most-common household language for residents of the 45th District, after English and Spanish.
The 45th is one of several battleground districts that will determine control of the House in November, with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rating the race as “lean Republican.”
Neither Tran’s campaign nor the DCCC immediately responded to a request for comment.
