San Jose’s Vietnamese monument ‘Thank You America’ stolen

Two thieves using a commercial truck made off with a monumental sculpture of a Vietnamese soldier during a brazen theft at the Vietnamese Heritage Garden last month, police said.

The San José Police Department last week published a 17-minute surveillance video showing the bandits tying a rope around the 9-foot sculpture during the theft in the early morning hours of June 21. Police said the thieves also took several flags from the site.

Police were called to respond to the garden around 1:24 p.m. that day after the theft was discovered and, less than two hours later, found and recovered the stolen statue from near the Coyote Creek Trail and Highway 280.

But the truck used to commit the crime was also discovered to have been stolen days earlier from a local business. The suspects have not yet been identified.

San Jose’s website notes that the city commissioned artist Tuan Nguyen for the monument, titled Thank You America, which was completed in 2024 for display in the community garden, which opened two years earlier.

The monument features two bronze figures—the south Vietnamese one, which was stolen—standing next to an American soldier.

“The monument is a symbol of Vietnamese Americans’ gratitude for the Americans and Vietnamese who risked or lost their lives in the cause of freedom, democracy and human rights,” the city said on its website.

The city noted that Tuan was commissioned to create the sculpture based on a similar monument he previously created in the city of Westminster, with the San Jose version modified and customized based on community input.

San Jose boasts some 140,000 Vietnamese residents, making it home to the largest population in any city outside of Vietnam. The city noted that residents had long wished for a monument to display gratitude for being welcomed by the United States as refugees.

Tuan himself was born into a family of wealth and royal lineage in Saigon and his early life was insulated from the war until the city fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975, according to his website.

His architect father was taken away to a “reeducation” camp and the family’s compound was divided up.

Upon his return, Tuan and his father began sculpting together. Tuan himself later tried to escape but was captured and taken to a forced labor camp, where he sculpted his fellow prisoners in red clay from the camp’s floor.

He spent six months in the prison camp and 18 more months in hard labor conditions before his family was able to secure his release, according to his website.

Tuan later spent two months navigating Vietnam’s jungles and eventually escaped to Thailand through Cambodia. In Thailand, he spent a year in a refugee camp before being transferred to the Philippines, where he learned English and later gained sponsorship to come to the United States as a refugee in 1988.

Councilmember Bien Doan, whose district sits at the heart of the city’s Vietnamese community, noted in comments to The Mercury News that monument was previously vandalized in March.

The motive for the recent theft remains unknown.

Follow along with other art crime stories at Urgent Matter’s art crime tracker.