COMMENTARY ON CULTURE : An Artist’s Anguish Portrays Struggle of Vietnamese Refugees : A work shown at an exhibition has helped a dream become the reality of the Santa Ana community center.

On this most enjoyable occasion, I would like to show you a painting that an old friend of mine gave me some 10 years ago.

This is a portrait of a woman done with a few calligraphic brush strokes in Chinese ink, in some ways not unlike the paintings of Be Ky, one of the Vietnamese artists whose works are also shown here, though the style may be different.

How do you judge the value of this painting? Is it worth $500, $1,000 or $2,000? I heard somebody say $3,000. No. You are all wrong. Although this portrait was done by a virtually unknown artist, at least unknown in the art market, it is worth $1.35 million. I repeat: one million, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I will tell you why in a moment.

Now, did you notice anything unusual about this painting? The woman in the painting conveys a profound sadness, but what is unusual is that she has neither a mouth nor ears.

The painter, who asked me that same question, did not paint a woman. He painted his own miseries. He painted the plight of people of his own generation when they first came to America.

“We have a mouth, but we cannot talk; and we have ears, but we cannot listen,” the old man explained. “It is like we are deaf and mute, being unable to communicate with most people in this unfamiliar land.”

The painter has since died, but his painting remained a haunting reminder of that anguish and frustration and the man’s message spurred us to work to help ease the plight of the older refugees.

Soon after, we, at the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc. started the first senior program in a Vietnamese-American community to provide a place for the seniors to gather and meet with old friends to have meals and recreation; to study English, and learn about life in the United States, a land that soon would no longer be foreign to them.

It was an instant success. A new, larger center was required in order to adequately meet the needs of the hundreds and thousands of seniors who had registered with us. On one typical day, about a hundred seniors would come to participate in our programs.

The painting was not just a reminder. It was an important tool for us in our search for donations and contributions.

Everywhere I went, I had the painting with me. I showed it to officials and potential donors. I didn’t have to talk much. I let the painting speak for me, or rather, for itself. And it has a strong message that doesn’t need to be explained.

It is all there, and it goes straight to your soul. It touches your heart. It speaks to your emotions, your compassionate feelings, without any intermediary. Isn’t that the essence of art?

Now you can see why I said earlier that this painting is worth $1.35 million.

That is the total cost, including the site and the construction of the Vietnamese Community Services & Asian Senior Acculturation Center at 1618 W. 1st Street in Santa Ana.

I don’t want to minimize all the contributions, donations and all the work, all the efforts that together helped to bring the project to successful completion. But I believe I can say, without much exaggeration, that this painting started it all and, through six long and arduous but most gratifying years, has been a most valuable prop for all of us involved in the project, the first of its kind in the nation.

As Shakespeare once said, about poets:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And, as imagination bodies forth,

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

So perhaps the same thing can be said about painters, or at least certain schools of painters: with their imagination, painters turn the forms of things unknown into shapes and give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. And that energy, once it takes form, will continue to move us.

Ten years ago, who could imagine that the Vietnamese Community Center, the two-storied, pagoda-like structure that now stands gleaming under the sun in Santa Ana would be born out of an emotion that passed through a painter’s mind?

I can think of no more concrete example of the interrelationship between art and the community and the role of art as a bridge between cultures.

Art speaks to us in many voices, from many cultures, and out of different times. But beauty, as truth, is one.

And when all these different voices are free to speak up, to express themselves in their own ways--as we all are in this land of the free--then, as they tend toward the same absolute ideal of beauty, they will blend together into one great symphony, indeed, one Great American Symphony.