Merchant Wins Free Speech Ruling

A Little Saigon video store owner won a court ruling Wednesday that allows him to hang a Communist flag at his shop, triggering a furor that ended hours later with his collapse in a confrontation with protesters.

Hundreds of Vietnamese Americans, enraged by Truong Van Tran’s plans to display the flag of Communist Vietnam and a picture of Ho Chi Minh, gathered outside the Santa Ana courtroom in the morning. Passions reached a peak when Tran returned to his Westminster store in the afternoon to find a small group of protesters waiting.

“Someone approached [Tran], spit in their hand and then tried to wipe it on him hard,” said Westminster Police Lt. Bill Lewis. “It didn’t look like much of a blow. There was some hesitation, and then he fell to the ground.”

Several protesters chanted “Let him die! Let the Communist die!” but Tran, 37, did not appear to suffer serious injury, Lewis said. He was taken to Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, where officials only described his condition as stable.

The protests followed a Superior Court judge’s decision to lift her earlier ban on the display of the flag and picture in Tran’s store, saying that his 1st Amendment rights must prevail over concerns about symbols that are “indisputably offensive” to Vietnamese Americans.

Tran is “far from blameless” in sending letters challenging anti-Communist groups to confront him, Judge Tam Nomoto Schumann said, but the display at his store constitutes political expression, the most protected form of speech.

The decision was greeted with stunned silence and anger by 400 protesters outside the courtroom, many of them refugees and former prisoners of the Communist regime.

“We are very disappointed,” said Thang Ngoc Tran, head of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, a nonprofit social service group. “But the decision doesn’t change what’s in our hearts. We hate communism, and we want everyone to know that.”

Protester Ky Ngo said the community felt betrayed by the ruling.

“Ho Chi Minh is a murderer,” he said. “It’s like waving a picture of Pol Pot in front of the Cambodian community or a picture of Hitler in the Jewish community. This is not freedom of speech. This is abuse of freedom of speech.”

Later that afternoon, a small crowd of screaming protesters met Tran as he arrived at the store with his wife and two children.

Tran got out of his car, calmly listened and then told a reporter, “I think I have a right to do it.” After one protester wiped his hand on Tran’s face, the store owner fell.

Protester Chau Carey defended the group’s anger: “We have the freedom of speech too,” she said.

Police say they repeatedly have warned Tran to notify them if he planned to return to his store so they could provide an escort, Lewis said. This was the second time a confrontation between Tran and protesters turned physical: On Jan. 19, he was struck in the head by a demonstrator as he left his store.

“What we had continually told Mr. Tran was that if the judge ruled in his favor, he was to get in touch with the Westminster police so we could escort him and keep the peace. He did not do that,” Lewis said.

Inside the hospital emergency waiting room, Tran’s wife, Kim Nguyen, said her husband has undergone two open-heart surgeries and was still very weak.

Nguyen deplored the crowd’s violence. “I think it’s time for them to use speech instead of the fist,” she said.

The controversy first erupted Jan. 18, when protesters gathered outside Tran’s Bolsa Avenue store, Hi Tek TV and VCR.

Carrying out promises made in letters to community leaders, Tran had displayed the flag and photo to express his right of free speech. Although he said he is not a Communist, he contends that the current Vietnamese government has improved life in that country.

At the request of Tran’s landlord, Schumann on Jan. 21 issued a temporary restraining order that required Tran to remove the flag and photo and required protesters to keep their distance from his store, which has been closed since the trouble began.

The judge Wednesday left in place her order that protesters not “interfere with the ordinary, peaceable operation” of the business.

Schumann rejected the landlord’s argument that Tran’s provocative letters were the equivalent of “fighting words” that don’t have 1st Amendment protections.

In essence, the judge’s ruling allows free speech on both sides, said attorney Ron Talmo, who represented Truong Van Tran, along with the American Civil Liberties Union.

“This is a victory for speech. He gets to put up his flag, and they get the right to demonstrate,” he said.

Stuart Parker, an attorney representing protesters, said he is negotiating with police over ground rules for future protests. He predicted that the protesters will continue until the flag and photo are gone.

That day may come soon. The landlord served Tran with a 30-day notice on Jan. 20.