Bolsavik.com, News Report, Posted: Aug 24, 2011

 The San Diego Padres baseball team designates its Labor Day game as “Vietnamese Culture Day” and will feature Vietnamese pop star Ý Lan to sing the national anthem at the game.

This may be a signal that baseball is trying to make itself become familiar to the Vietnamese community. Of the three top American sports, it is somewhat, well, interesting, that the most American of them all is least watched by the Vietnamese-Americans.

The Padres may be trying to reverse that.

For its game against the Giants (by the way, we’re talking about the MLB champion baseball team from San Francisco, not the football team from New York that Vietnamese are more familiar with) on September 5, the Padres will celebrate Vietnamese culture with a pre-game ao dai fashion show, a Viet band from Orange County, and Y Lan will open the game with the national anthem.

Y Lan comes from a famous Vietnamese artistic family. Her mother Thai Thanh was the top pop diva of her days, with a career that started in the 1940s and lasted all the way to the 1980s in the U.S. Thái Thanh was among a very small number of South Vietnamese singing stars not to resume their singing when the communists took over the country.