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:

Now, more than 30 years after the Vietnamese American community had been established, the freedom of expression that so many refugees yearned for is denied to them, by, unfortunately, members of their own community….

….

The closing of “F.O.B. II: Art Speaks” is another distressing example of how some community members not only protest to express their staunch anti-communist stance, but also use their protesting to shut down what they deem opposing voices and deny others their freedom of expression.

Instead of engaging in constructive dialogue with the artists, they refused to speak with the curators. Instead of communicating their ideas in a fair manner and being receptive to other ideas, they were too extreme in their refusal to listen.

Communities cannot thrive by thinking only in black and white terms. It is not progressive or healing to assume that someone must be a communist if they try to initiate dialogue about communism or relations between the Vietnamese American communities, here and in Vietnam.

….

We are united. Like all communities, we share a rich cultural heritage, a beautiful language and a war-ridden history. We share our wealth and expertise; many open-minded Vietnamese Americans regularly return to Vietnam for humanitarian, business and educational purposes. But to say that we are united under just one voice – one experience – would be a mistake. As the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association stated in their press release, we are “a stronger community because of our diversity and not in spite of it.”

.

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.

As they went through the exhibit, round and round, the co-curator was with them. And finally they arrived at the politically sensitive Black Room upstairs and came upon Brian Doan‘s photo (above right) and Steven Toly‘s painting (above left).

And then the co-curator turned to lead them out, and that’s when Ly Tong sprayed the art work. His friend, though, was not as fast and couldn’t take photos of the vandalism.

So they came back again and talked their way into the space again, took the pictures posted here, and then he stuck a thong bikini onto the picture of Ho Chi Minh‘s bust, had his friend take the picture to the right, and ran out.

To the idolation of the crowd, of course.

Heady from his success, Ly Tong took on another flag.

Over the week-end, Ly Tong claimed he snuck into USC, took a ladder from a construction site, climbed up the wall of the international student center there, and swapped the red-and-yellow-star flag hung there with a yellow-and-red-stripes flag. No photos for confirmation, though.

Not everyone is happy with Ly Tong’s theatrics, however. “Leader of the community,” though often self-proclaimed, is a coveted and profitable title. Some have expressed displeasure that Ly Tong the out-of-towner is inserting himself on their turf.

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.”

….

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.

And that, dear readers, is the silver lining in this picture.

Here’s the text of VAALA’s press release:

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.

So, I wouldn’t tell them anything glibly. Nor would I tell them they can’t protest an art exhibit.

In fact, I wouldn’t tell them a thing if they would tell me that they respect American protections of speech. And that artistic expression is a large part of that.

If they’re saying that, I’m not hearing it. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why the Westminster council would even come close to siding with people who want to take down art exhibits.

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.

In the picture, that’s Brody in the light blue shirt listening to protestor and fellow panelist Trong Doan (read here) in the dark blue shirt.

One audience member took Ham Tran (seated at left) to task, asking the director of Journey from the Fall (in Vietnamese: Vượt Sóng) how he could side with the display of communist symbols after making his movie which spoke so deeply to the South Vietnamese experience. Tran in his response almost said that he’d been back to Vietnam several times after Journey was out, but danced right around that fact.

So on and so forth. A dialogue thus was had, but mostly people just said their pieces and talked right past each other.

No surprise there. Communication is a learned skill, and this community is just beginning to practice peacefully discussing differences of political opinions.

And so sparks flew. But, as far as fireworks go, it was mild, by Bolsavikland standards.

Later in the evening, one right-winger named Rambo Pham (see his picture here) sent out an email claiming that a protest would take place at 10am on Monday morning; that’s today. In the email, Pham called the exhibit organizers the “sh*t-carriers for the mafia communists.”

*** UPDATE *** UPDATE *** UPDATE ***

No protests on Monday morning. Apparently people are regrouping and trying again for Saturday morning.

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:

In the photo on the wall, that woman’s shirt is the current flag of Vietnam. That bust on the credenza is the bust of Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader who’s been dead for 40 years but whose images are still taboo in Little Saigon.

So a group calling itself the “Thanh Nien Co Vang” (Yellow Flag Youth) is taking to the telephones and email, and calling for people to come out for a protest.

The Thanh Niên Cờ Vàng is no neophyte in the protest business. They have been one of the most ardent and regular people coming to demonstrate outside China’s consulate in Los Angeles over the Chinese occupation of the Spratlys and the Paracels, two archipelagos claimed by many countries including Vietnam.

*** UPDATE *** UPDATE *** UPDATE ***

Click here for the Thanh Niên Cờ Vàng‘s call-out for protest (in Vietnamese). The call-out is in a Word document email attachment with a name intended to convey some sort of urgency: “SOS.doc.“

It says, and the Bolsavik quotes in translation, “Knowing that this is a Free country, the organizers can show what they want, but that does not mean they can do what they want.”