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--------The war at home
BY ANDREW LAM | SAN FRANCISCO -- Several years ago in Hanoi I watched an old woman take down a faded picture of Ho Chi Minh, leaving a conspicuous white space on her living room wall. Eventually, her teenage grandson covered it over with a poster of Pamela Anderson. For a while now, Uncle Ho's faded pictures have been routinely taken down in many Vietnamese households, replaced by something more au courant -- a Kiss or AC/DC rock band poster, a color TV set or, better yet, a family altar with incense smoke wafting. No one comments, no one cares. But if taking down an old icon is uneventful in Vietnam, putting it up turned out to be a much messier affair across the Pacific. In Little Saigon in Orange County, Calif., a Vietnamese immigrant named Tran Van Truong, once a refugee himself, put up a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store and inflamed an entire Vietnamese community. Protest raged on every day for six weeks and an enormous South Vietnamese flag -- yellow with three red horizontal stripes -- now flies in the parking lot across from Truong's store. From an outsider's point of view, the whole episode might seem absurd. The war of attrition between two archaic icons -- the poster of a long dead Communist leader and the flag of a country that no longer exists -- is as jarring as, say, waiters dressing up as Mao Tse-Tung and serving nouvelle cuisine dim sum in a posh joint on Santa Monica Boulevard. Yet ask any Vietnamese protester outside Truong's store and he or she will recite stories of incredible suffering and unbearable loss. An uncle killed by the Viet Cong during the war; a brother lost at sea trying to flee oppression at home; a father sent to a reeducation camp; a best friend killed in the decade-long war of occupation in Cambodia; cousins suffering for years in the malaria-infected New Economic Zone. None of these personal histories registers on the American imagination these days, let alone plays out in the American media, whose radar homes in first and foremost on the issue of free speech. Historically, it's been a curious curse of the South Vietnamese to lack the talent to play to the American media (think of the famous black-and-white photo of Gen. Loan executing a Viet Cong soldier in front of the camera during the 1968 Tet -- never mind that the same Viet Cong had killed an entire family an hour earlier, off-camera). The media portrayal of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in Little Saigon is reduced to that of a rabidly anti-communist community, once persecuted by communism, now intent on persecuting a solitary man standing up for what he believes in. But does the American media expect the Vietnamese community not to react? Does it not remember how the Vietnam War itself nearly tore America apart in the late '60s and '70s? Why should America expect any less passion from those who actually endured that bloody conflict? Besides, the Vietnamese protest is tame compared to other possibilities. Imagine what would happen to a Cuban in Miami who put up a poster of Fidel Castro! N E X T+P A G E+| Truong is a narcissistic ass |
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