Half a world away from California, I feel distanced from the controversy surrounding the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA)’s “FOB II: Art Speaks” exhibition and the subsequent protests. A former member of the Vietnamese American community, I recently moved back to Vietnam. I’m reminded of an editor of a literary magazine serving Vietnamese abroad who, having given up the position, stopped reading community newspapers or listening to community radio. “The controversies and bitter arguments simply seem less significant,” he told me. “It’s not that big a deal.”

Ironically, I am living in the country where the purported subject of the VAALA controversy should be a big deal.

For many decades, Vietnam has earned a reputation as an oppressive nation: leaders trample on the people’s basic rights, and won’t allow freedom of expression. The country remains under the rigid control of a corrupt set of leaders bent on maintaining their power under the banner and glory of a “new brand” of Communism.

Protesters in California are right in mentioning concerns about the lack of human rights and the records of the Communist party in Vietnam. They are right in evoking their years of harsh experiences since the Communists came to power and unified the country under their rule.

But the protesters have it all wrong when they attack the organizers and participants of the VAALA exhibit.

Vietnam is where the prostesters should be raising their voices–not over there, against VAALA and members of their own community.

While they see Vietnam and the Communist party as an enemy, they are not able or willing to face that enemy. Instead they have chosen to target those who wish to have a dialogue within the community, and they have sadly chosen acts of vandalism, old scare tactics, and oppression rather than reason, to express themselves.

Dialogues within the community, and within their new country is nothing new. Many attempts have been made to visit the painful history of the Vietnam war resulting in the presence of one and a half million Vietnamese in America.

But as I think back at those attempts at creating dialogue, I’m overwhelmed with sadness. Many such attempts have been marred by angry protesters unwilling and incapable of dialogue. This happened with a writers’ conference on the Vietnam War, at the University of Davis, in northern California, in 1995. At that event, I voiced my concerns that while writers and others from inside Vietnam were included, people from the community weren’t present. Yet, people in the community protested against me, simply for agreeing to be part of the conference.

It happened again at the San Jose Museum during an exhibition in 1996 that included artists from both inside and outside the country. Thousands protested the event, and as a guest curator trying to bring Vietnamese American painters and artists to the public, I was a target of insults, threats, and defamation. In 1999 similar protests happened at the Bowers Museum in Orange County: in order to be inside and give a talk on what themes some Vietnamese American artists were painting about, I was met with the same threats and insults, and someone tried to throw a pair of underwear on my head. A year later, in Oakland, Calif., an exhibition of lithograph images of Communist leader Ho Chi Minh sparked weeks of violent protests. I accepted to offer some comments in public during this affair–because I knew the insults, shouts, scare tactics, and the burning effigies, were gaining the protesters few friends outside their own circles. At a public forum, I berated the gallery owners for putting up the show with little consultation and understanding of community feelings. Yet I was shouted down, threatened, and had to be escorted out by the police, for trying to bring the voices of the protesters inside a forum, instead of having them outside, unacceptable to many.

Distanced as I am physically, the sadness I have known will not go away. What is happening in Southern California points to attitudes that foster no better illumination of the situation in the community, or inside Vietnam. Censorship in the community has never made sense to me, especially when those advocating it escaped Vietnam because of government control. The protests are brought up by the authorities inside the  country as proof of threat from "dangerous foreign elements", and thus an excuse to further maintain a controlling hand.

For many in the community, the wounds of war will remain forever fresh. But for some, dialogues will be impossible—I suspect the political dimensions the protesters offer as reasons for their disapproval of the VAALA’s aims and the exhibition mask deeper issues. There are cultural and linguistic barriers. Class, race, and economic disparity complicate the situation.

More difficult is the intransigent position they have forced themselves into. As purported fervent anti-Communists, their protests are necessary expressions of who they are, a vocal presence that may offer them a sense of confidence and identity. I think of people across the world, in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka and Iraq: forced into a desperate situations, whether being poor or on the wrong side of a political divide, they retreat into an intransigent position. Some will resort to acts of terror.

For many in the Vietnamese American community, the world has changed since their own experiences in war-torn or Communist-controlled Vietnam. Those who have visited or are living here know well how repressive the government is. It is not easy to accept such control, but they continue, however, to see gradual changes.

For the Vietnamese living inside the country, protests is extremely difficult. There is no freedom of expression–and their lives would be endangered if they were to adopt the kinds of tactics seen in Southern California.

That doesn’t mean they lack courage, or aren’t desperate to raise a voice.

I know plenty of writers, journalists, bloggers and artists who are.

They try, but without the freedom of expression known to people in America, they have chosen to do so within certain limits. In that way, they are having a dialogue within the country, and they have gained supporters.

For many Vietnamese Americans, the engagement in the past ten or 15 years with Vietnam is producing some results. Their money, professional skills, and civil ways are more valued. They are helping to open up the country. They won’t change the government or take down the Communist Party. But they, like many in Vietnam, are forcing a look at the issues, lending voice to civic leaders who are asking for reforms.

The protests in California, sadly, are not helping. While they give voice to a vocal desperate group, they are preventing dialogue towards a clear assessment of what’s happening in Vietnam—which was part of the intents of the exhibition organizers.

The protest won’t further any changes. Neither in California, nor in Vietnam. In that way, the protests serve no purposes to anyone but the protesters themselves.

bài đã đăng của Nguyễn Quí Đức

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• Từ Hôm Lọt Lòng / At Birth - 24.11.2009
• Từ em đến anh - 18.11.2009
• Hôm nay, giờ này / Today, at This Hour - 13.11.2009
• Một Bọn – Điêu Khắc Ta Thán của Nguyễn Thúy Hằng / THAT BUNCH OF WOMEN – The Sculptural Lament of Nguyen Thuy Hang - 06.11.2009
• Ngôn từ / Language - 03.11.2009
• Triển lãm VAALA: Nhìn từ bên trong - 04.02.2009
• The VAALA Exhibit – A View from Inside - 04.02.2009
• Một sự im lặng không chấp nhận được - 29.01.2009
• danh tướng kiến bạch đầu* - 11.11.2008
• Poems from a Work in Progress - 10.08.2006