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VAALA’s F.O.B.II: Art Speaks, after an eventful seven-day run, closed its visual display on Thursday, three days ahead of schedule. Its performance portion has been moved to another location (at 209 N. Broadway — see more below). VAALA’s press release follows the jump, but first, some thoughts.

Something said by UCI Professor and Department Chair Linda Vo in the L.A. Times fanned some anger because of the word “test” which was translated into Vietnamese as something like “throwing down the gauntlet.” The Times story here attributed this statement to Vo, without quotation marks:

“The exhibit will test the Vietnamese American community, said Linda Vo, chair of UC Irvine’s Asian American Studies department.”

Anyway, leaving aside the no-doubt-intentional mistranslation, if indeed the exhibit was a test, then the self-proclaimed community, let’s say, did not pass.

How did the community not pass? It failed to respect the freedom for which it claimed to seek when leaving Vietnam.

In the words of Nguoi Viet’s Ky-Phong Tran here, “Freedom of speech is not just being able to say what you want and speaking your mind. That dear friends, is the easy part. TRUE Freedom of speech is that AND more so: listening to someone yap about something you disagree with, something you might morally or politically abhor, and grinning and bearing it.”

Now protesting is fine. Protests are forms of expression too.

The Bolsavik, for one, has a very expanded definition of freedom of expression. At FOB II, someone spit on one of the photos on display. An L.A.-based reporter asked the Bolsavik if he thought that was free speech too and the Bolsavik said yes, to the extent that the damage is not permanent then not only it is speech but it should also be protected speech. Spitting on something you despise is an age-old form of expression that the law and morality should respect — short of allowing destruction of property.

The problem is not with protesting. No. The problem is with the way the protests are organized and called. The Bolsavik’s mailbox, which monitors the right-wing listservs, lit up with something like 200 emails a day over this exhibit, and a fair guesstimate is that 90% are vulgar and maybe 5 or 6 are threats of physical violence including murder and arson.

But even that is not the whole problem. The whole problem is, instead of having a protest to express an opposing viewpoint, the protests are intended to - and called for as a means toward - shutting down ideas and expressions they don’t like.

Which is, of course, legal and all. But it proves that the protesters are not lovers of freedom or democracy or human rights or whatever else they claim they are in favor of.

And that, dear readers, is what’s wrong with this picture.

So, as mentioned above, the self-proclaimed community failed. But, hey, not badly.

Here and there in the whole saga are nuggets of instances where people who disagreed with the organizers wanted to carry out a dialogue.

Even at the meeting of the protest organizers, there were isolated words from some men who once held guns to fight for freedom to allow the exhibit curators to address the body. Those few men were outnumbered and the group refused to talk to the curators, but those men did speak up in favor of dialogue.

Hints, therefore, that, kicking and screaming though it may be, this community is slowly dragging its way out of the dictatorial ways of its country of origin.

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Dana Parsons (pictured) put in his two cents in an L.A. Times column today entitled “Vietnamese Americans’ hatred of communism shouldn’t inhibit free speech.” Click here.

Excerpts:

Street protests are about as American as you can get, but the scent of political repression too often has hung over these “anti-communist” confrontations. Sporadically in Little Saigon over the years, political and media figures, shop owners and average citizens have been subjected to fearsome threats if they’re perceived to be pro-communist.

The problem is that it often hasn’t taken more than depicting the flag of Vietnam to incite angry protests. The Vietnamese American artists told The Times that they didn’t set out to offend but felt that they shouldn’t censor themselves in creating art.

They are on the right side of this argument.

It is a hard pill to swallow for some in Little Saigon. I’ve even argued in the past that we should cut some slack for the people especially pained by the war years. Yes, they have over-the-top reactions to all things communist — reactions that don’t conform to American traditions of political freedom of expression — but it’s too glib to tell them to forget the past and get on with things.

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Not sure if “naturalization” is the right word to apply to Texas-born Lee Nguyen whose parents are born in Vietnam, but the news is Lee (whom fans call by his first name) will get himself Vietnamese citizenship on April 1 (of all the dates to choose from!) as part of the deal of playing for Hoang Anh Gia Lai, reports Voice of Vietnam radio here.

Click here for all entries about the former Gatorade National Boy Soccer Player of the Year, member of the national under-20 squad as an 18-year-old, and Soccer Times and Soccer America’s Freshman of the Year.