Leave Thug Tactics to the Communists

Two weeks before the Central Dramatic Company of Vietnam was scheduled to perform at Cal State Fullerton, I invited three prominent members of the Vietnamese American community in Orange County to attend the play. They all politely refused. The first said she was ill. The second said he had an appointment, and the third said it would be political suicide to attend.

I admired the last man’s honesty. Right-wing anti-Communist groups in the Vietnamese immigrant community had announced they would demonstrate outside the campus theater.

About 200 refugees, carrying signs and waving flags, blocked the entrance to the theater on Sept. 25, the night of the first performance. As the crowd massed and chanted, six Vietnamese American students, fearful of being accosted, asked me, their professor, to help them get in. I escorted them to a side door so they could watch the performance of “Truong Ba’s Soul in the Butcher’s Skin.”

The students were among the bravest people on campus. If identified, they knew they could be roughed up and ridiculed as communist sympathizers. Or they might have been killed. In 1984, Edward Cooperman, a Cal State Fullerton physics professor who favored reconciliation with Vietnam, was shot to death by a Vietnamese refugee in his campus office.

Demonstrations and the political attacks by anti-Communists have scared Vietnamese immigrants from exercising their rights as citizens. The United States has reestablished diplomatic relations with Vietnam and lifted its trade embargo. American citizens, including Vietnamese immigrants, are free to travel to Vietnam, and Vietnamese can travel in the United States. Yet some elements of the Vietnamese community forget that the war is over.

The violence in the refugee community serves to silence political expression. I am positive that if there had been no intimidation, my three invited guests would have gladly attended.

The play tells the story of a kind gardener whose soul, through a mistake of the gods, gets trapped in the body of an uncouth butcher. The theme is a universal one of the struggle between body and soul. Theater professors discerned no communist theatrical propaganda.

It is unfortunate that some members of the Vietnamese American community use the same tactics of political intimidation as the Vietnamese Communists, who control the arts and press in Vietnam. Outside the theater, I heard many people demand that the performance be stopped. Cal State Fullerton was criticized for allowing the performance to go on. There was little tolerance for artistic expression by a Communist troupe.

As a communications professor, I am well aware that the same 1st Amendment rights that allow protesters to demonstrate on campus permit actors to perform unpopular shows. University administrators should be applauded for going on with the show and not caving in to political pressure. Tolerance of 1st Amendment rights is a lesson that needs to be taught.