Bolsavik.com

The whole thing about F.O.B. II has pretty much boiled over with most people, but a low-level rumbling is still constantly going in emailing lists, forums, web sites, and a handful of print publications from out of town that are a little late to the debate.

A Vietnamese-American columnist at UCLA’s Daily Bruin (go Bruins!) added her thoughts to the mix here, in a piece entitled “Censorship of exhibit more offensive than art itself.”

The piece was picked for distribution by U-Wire and has appeared in other papers across the country such as the Minnesota Daily here.

Nam-Giao Do - born in the U.S. of refugee parents - did not mince words.

Excerpts:
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The man is back! After some disastrous performances in San Jose and in Asia, Ly Tong re-established himself as the leader of the Vietnamese community by doing what has always worked for him in the past - commit a crime and then brag about it.

Ly Tong went from fool back to hero again in an act of vandalism that’s widely applauded by the protestors.

Last week, Ly Tong came to Santa Ana and joined the protests against the F.O.B. II: Art Speaks exhibit. That’s Tong on the right, with Cung The Tran, a leader of the Nguoi Viet protest and a defendant in the paper’s lawsuit.

As Ly Tong told it in an email he sent out to a vast number of people (text in Vietnamese here), he and another person approached one of the curators of the closed exhibit, told her they’d come all the way from Houston just for this and asked her to let them in.

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The OC Register added to the mix its thoughts about the shut down of FOB II: Art Speaks in a column by Richard Chang on the paper’s Arts Blog, here.

Excerpts:

The protesters, mainly older Vietnamese residents of Orange County and Southern California, chanted slogans and denounced the curators and organizers of the exhibit at a news conference today. They said the image was pro-communist and threatened a larger protest over the weekend. “F.O.B. II” was due to close on Sunday.

The protesters brought pictures of a girl in a bikini with the yellow star on her butt and a Ho Chi Minh bust in the toilet. They called that “real art.”

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While I’ve written some stories about Vietnamese protests in the past, I don’t know the whole history behind the protesters and their concerns. Yet, it seems like they have a lot of power if they can shut down an art exhibit that featured a lot of different kinds of work, much of it non-political, plus get two editors at a local paper fired.

I thought the United States was a place where freedom of speech and expression are protected by the Constitution. But apparently, those rights are not fully protected or respected in certain communities here.

The Bolsavik is curious: Whoever made that “real art” - where the heck did he get the bust of Ho Chi Minh and the red flag bikini bottom?

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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As previously scheduled, the organizers of VAALA’s “FOB II: Art Speaks” exhibit held a panel discussion. Titled “Slant or Slander?: Community, art, and media coverage,” the panel instead got entangled in arguments over freedom of expression and a photograph that includes images of the current Vietnamese flag and a bust of Ho Chi Minh (read here).

One audience member, Bui Kim Thành (standing and speaking in the picture - see also here) drew hearty applause when she managed to spontaneously give in one breath a description of the government of Vietnam as, and the Bolsavik paraphrases from memory: “the hoodlum terrorist atheist barbaric hooligan mafia communist VC.”

While she’s at it, Mrs Thành also said that President Bush had been conned by the “terrorist mafia communist Nguyen Tan Dung” the Vietnamese prime minister.

Cal State Fullerton journalism professor and panelist Jeff Brody at one point cited social science studies showing that people’s tolerance of differing viewpoints tends to depend on three factors: education, religious devotion, and age. According to these studies, conducted starting in the 1950s, the highly educated tend to be most tolerant, the highly religious tend to be least tolerant, and the degree of tolerance tends to decrease with age. Not sure why he brought it up, but that made some members of the audience really unhappy.

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VAALA’s “F.O.B. II: Art Speaks” exhibit in Santa Ana was featured in the L.A. Times here, and the Times story prompted a call for (what else?) more protests of art.

And don’t say the Bolsavik didn’t warn you.

The Bolsavik did predict here that the exhibit would be this year’s hottest event.

Calling the exhibit “extraordinary in this historically anti-communist community,” the Times’ My-Thuan Tran quoted some of the organizers of the show like so:

“We felt this prevailing fear around the Vietnamese community after the foot bath incident,” said Tram Le, one of the curators. “I felt the community was on this slippery slope, that we were not progressing toward having open dialogue and being more tolerant of different political viewpoints.”

The group hopes to change the mood in Little Saigon through art.

“I think that we were trying to confront that fear head on,” said Mariam Lam, a UC Riverside assistant professor of literature and cultural studies, and board member of the art group. “We are trying to say that the community should be a safe space for people, even protesters.”

The idea of free speech apparently didn’t sit well with some people, and they were particular ticked at this art work by Long Beach City College professor Brian Doan, as shown on the L.A. Times’ web site:

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