Being Free in America Means Letting Other People Speak Out

When I was a young girl growing up in my little village in Vietnam during the civil war between North and South Vietnam, at different times, soldiers from both sides appeared and ordered all the villagers to come out and protest against the other side. And they said that anyone who didn’t would be shot on the spot.

Like most villages then, ours had no electricity. So it was always very dark and frightening when we would stumble out and follow orders to march up and down, shouting slogans against the other side. But between life and death we did what we were told, without the freedom to think and decide which side we belonged to. Such villagers were victims who could not read, write and decide, but only take orders from whichever side brings the guns. And don’t forget that by the end of the war, more than 2 million Vietnamese had been killed.

Like so many others around the world, many of my fellow Vietnamese tried hard to get out of that country and find freedom in the U.S., where some have lived now almost 30 years. With the Vietnam War over for almost 25 years, I thought I had found freedom here in the U.S. But for the past 10 years, I have been protested against by my fellow Vietnamese in the U.S.--sometimes in large, organized demonstrations--because they keep insisting I am a Communist. This is because I have often said the struggle should be over, that the suffering should end, that I would like to see reconciliation among all Vietnamese.

In the meantime, some of the sons and daughters of the protesters and those like them often have worked hard for me to come to their colleges and universities to give lectures about these issues. How sad it is that on some of those campuses, organized protesters from the Vietnamese community were demonstrating against me outside the lecture hall while inside their sons and daughters had gathered to listen and learn. This younger generation of Vietnamese Americans has been educated about American culture and American freedom of speech. Most of them understand that I have the right to tell my experiences and my thoughts, and that when their parents threaten me and disrupt my lectures, they are actually destroying the very freedom they sought when they came to the United States.

There is no freedom among us Vietnamese in the U.S. when these things happen. Why bother to come to the country of freedom if some Vietnamese have no right to put up pictures in their homes and shops, or to speak out their ideas, including ideas that are unpopular.

What is happening in Little Saigon now--the attacks on the owner of the video store who displays the Communist Vietnamese flag and a portrait of the late Communist leader Ho Chi Minh in his window--shows that some members of the older generation of Vietnamese still don’t understand about the freedom of the U.S., the country that gives equal rights of free speech to even those who say the most obnoxious or unpopular things. To seek that freedom for their families was why hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled, many even drowning in the sea as boat people in that attempt.

In the kind of Vietnamese village where I grew up, there was no education or free newspapers for Vietnamese to learn about their rights or express them. But here in America, we have those things. So everyone who comes to America should learn about freedom of speech in the U.S.? I have never met the shop owner, Truong Van Tran, but I see that he understands about his freedom of speech. I hope there are other Vietnamese living here who also understand and who will let every one among us live out the freedom we struggled so hard to find without being hurt or threatened.