Oakland (Special to ZennieReport.com) – Turns out Bryan Azevedo, San Leandro Vice Mayor, was one of the 52 people who flew to Vietnam on August 17th, 2023. The FBI Raid on Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s Home (as part of a multi-address sting that included the Mayor’s Maiden Lane property, the home of California Waste Solutions (CWS) Andy Duong, David Duong’s home on Skyline Blvd, and the Vietnam American Business Association on Embarcadero), as well as the media focus on Mayor Thao, David Duong (here), Andre Jones (here), Andy Duong (here), and Renia Webb (here) completely masked any view of what the Vietnam trip was actually about, and who went. (Your fan dollars help Zennie62Media, Inc. grow! Chip in here!)
Zennie62Media happened to find an account written by The San Leandro Times in an online search. Since the publication doesn’t actually use a Php-based news platform (like WordPress), the document print was not easily findable via search. This reformation of the San Leandro Times article by Mike McGuire will help.
The San Leandro Times piece is important because, prior to this find, the Vietnam Trip was painted in the media as an mostly-Oakland-affair, but the real picture is that many more representatives of East Bay Area cities and business organizations went on the trip beyond people from Oakland.
Note that California Waste Solutions is not mentioned in this account, nor is the Vietnamese-American Business Association in Oakland, or The Port of Oakland, but the Vietnamese-American Business Association in San Jose, is. So, who paid for whom on the trip is more complicated, and could also point to possible actions that mistakenly or legitimately triggered the FBI Raid on Mayor Thao’s Home June 21st, 2024 at 6 AM PST. Read the account given by San Leandro Vice Mayor Bryan Azevedo and form your own conclusions.
San Leandro Vice Mayor Bryan Azevedo Tells The San Leandro Times About The Trip To Vietnam.
We’re trying to put San Leandro on the map,” City Councilman and Vice Mayor Bryan Azevedo said of his recent trade delegation visit to Vietnam. While our place on local maps is secure, Azevedo means the ones consulted by overseas businesses and countries looking for trade partners. He pointed out that the latest figures show that about 15 percent of San Leandrans are Vietnamese-American, while 37 percent are Asian-American.
Some of those residents own businesses that might be interested in trade, he added. Azevedo joined some 50 other local officials and business people on the 12-day trip sponsored by the Vietnamese-American Business Association in San Jose.
Among his companions were Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, Alameda County Supervisor Lena Tam, Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez, and Azevedo’s favorite new person he met on the visit, actor Danny Glover. Glover wore a San Leandro hat Azevedo had given him at several official events. “Now if Glover can just introduce me to his friend Tom Hanks,” Azevedo mused.
Bryan Azevedo did, however, invite Glover for a tour of San Leandro in the weeks ahead. Glover accepted, but they are still working out the exact date. The group was plunged into a whirlwind of meetings, industrial tours and conversations with leaders. They had a little time to see a few sights, but not much, he said.
The group visited the chambers of commerce in Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City. Ken Maxey, Comcast Government Affairs Representative and Member of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors, was one of several business leaders in the delegation. “We got to Vietnam at one in the morning, and our first meeting was at 7 a.m.,” Azevedo said.
Bryan Azevedo saw the highlight of his trip as his meeting with the nation’s prime minister, Pham Minh Chinh, who surprised him by cracking a succession of jokes. He also quoted Abraham Lincoln at one point. “Politicians here don’t crack jokes nearly so often. In fact, voters often don’t like it if they do, especially at meetings,” Azevedo said.
Vice Mayor Azevedo also met with mayor Phan Van Mai of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon, and some continue to call it that). And as a councilman himself, he met with the city councils in Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City
The delegation visited two different automobile assembly plants, two ports, a waste treatment facility and several other industrial operations. “We don’t just want to buy things from them, “ Azevedo said. “We want to sell them our products, too.”
He was impressed with how modern the car plants were. On the other hand, the shipping ports in the Bay Area are still a bit ahead. One area he would like to see our ports learn from, though, is in rapidly converting to renewable energy. Vietnam will use 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, he said.
“But talk about housing unaffordability, even compared to here,” he said. The average port worker makes the equivalent of $200 a month, and the average house costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Azevedo was also struck by how friendly ordinary Vietnamese, as well as public officials, were to Americans, several decades after a war there. He also noticed that streets were safe, even for women and children at 1 a.m. While we in the Bay Area worry about how many murders this month, the 1.9 million people living in Da Nang have not experienced a murder there since 2019, he said. “Traffic is organized chaos, though,” he said.
Azevedo loved the food, with restaurants all following a single outstanding culinary tradition rather than reflecting the wide diversity of national- ities we’re used to in restaurants here.“I found myself missing that food diversity at times,”he said, “But I’ve never eaten so well in my life.”
Stay tuned for updates.
More. Much more to come on this subject related to the Mayor Thao Vietnam Trip.