Opinion: An imaginary scare in O.C.

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Lan Quoc Nguyen is president of the Garden Grove School District Board of Education.This is a response to an article in The Times. If you would like to respond to a recent Times article, editorial or Op-Ed in our Blowback forum, here are our FAQs and submission policy.

The Red scare, as described in ‘A Vietnam War in O.C.’ by Nick Schou, only exists in the mind of the author. The Op-Ed makes no effort to explain what Viet Weekly did or why the protesters reacted the way they did to the newspaper.

Let’s make one thing clear: Freedom of speech does not apply unless it involves government action to restrict someone’s speech. Private citizens, on the other hand, are bound by the rules of minimum decency, mutual respect and sensible responsibility. One cannot hide behind free-speech protection to insult others and expect them to sit still. The protest against Viet Weekly is purely a reaction from the community to an obnoxious member and it has nothing to do with freedom of speech or freedom of the press.

The ongoing protest against Viet Weekly is a natural response from those who have felt insulted by the publication over the years. The author mentions the article that is often cited as the basis of the protest, but that is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Viet Weekly always boasts of having found a new form of journalism by a young generation of reporters in Little Saigon. In reality, these self-styled journalists have managed to insult some person or the community in almost every issue of the publication. When the call for protest came, it brought together all elements in the community to build up a perfect storm against the newspaper.

Schou’s Op-Ed mentions a few incidents in which Vietnamese journalists were harmed in the 1980s. Those incidents were no more common than violent acts targeting abortion clinics in the United States. With hundreds of Vietnamese publications sprouting up all over the U.S., none of them has been able to whip up the kind of anger that we’ve seen against Viet Weekly.

Judging by the intensity of the protest against Viet Weekly in the last few months, the reaction has rivaled only the protest against Mr. Tran Truong, who displayed the Ho Chi Minh portrait and a Vietnamese community flag at his video store in Little Saigon in 1999. We know now that Mr. Tran Truong only intended to provoke the community and he was able to insult his fellow Vietnamese in the worst possible way. Mr. Tran Truong had the right to display the communist objects, and the community has the right to express its objection. In the process, there was no violation of anyone’s free speech because no government action was involved to curtail anyone’s right.

So far, the protests have been very peaceful considering the level of anger that the protesters feel toward Viet Weekly. There’s been no report of any incident at these protests. Police have often commended the protesters for their discipline and self-restraint in working with authorities to maintain law and order for themselves and others.

To really understand the level of anger that these protesters feel, imagine if a major publication in town, such as The Times, repeatedly ridiculed victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack for years and years. Now put yourself in the shoes of the attack victims’ relatives or survivors who confront that kind of publication week after week. From that vantage point, one can then understand the sentiment that these protesters feel against Viet Weekly.

The communist nightmare may be a point of discussion in history class for many Americans, but it is a living experience for many Vietnamese Americans. Many of them are victims or have relatives or close friends who suffered at the hand of the communist regime in Vietnam. The persecution continues even today and did not end some 30 years ago, as many like to believe. Non-Vietnamese may not understand why a display of a communist symbol can invoke such intense reaction. But to many Vietnamese, these symbols bring back the nightmares that they lived through or risked their lives to escape from. They want to forget the past and get on with their lives, but they cannot tolerate the kind of provocation that Viet Weekly and Mr. Tran Truong exhibited to their faces.

We all have our own soft spots. To many Vietnamese, glorifying the communist regime or trivializing the suffering of the Vietnamese people under the hands of the communists is one of those spots. Viet Weekly has rubbed this vulnerable point not one time, but numerous times over the years. The protest as we see it is the only self-defense that these people have against the repeated insults that they take from Viet Weekly under the guise and protection of the freedom of speech.

The protest against Viet Weekly is only a natural response to the journalism menace practiced by the newspaper. To judge the protest against Viet Weekly, one must understand what the publication truly did to many of those protesters.