It’s All the Rage in Orange County

It was late. The air smelled like dirty dishwater. The wind scoured the mini-malls, reddening noses. It was getting cold. No matter. They huddled, grim-faced, around their pickets, the men in jackets, the women in head scarves, whipping each other up until someone would snap and suddenly shriek, “Communist! Traitor!” There was soup for the hungry, under a tarp where a two-liter bottle of Pepsi held down the leaflets.

So many leaflets. So much rage.

Fifty-some days now they’d been raging, here in Little Saigon. The picketers had made national news, running Truong Van Tran and his Communist flag out of town. That spasm of mob justice ended the Thursday before last, and you’d think they’d go home now, but no, Tran’s video store was just the warm-up. Within hours, a new protest was launched.

Now the offending eye in the body politic of Southern California’s Vietnamese emigre network is a Westminster city councilman named Tony Lam. For more than a week, the small, bitter core of the Tran demonstration--led by a rival pol named Ky Ngo, wearing a gold plastic name tag--has been congregating outside Lam’s Vietnamese restaurant, demanding his recall, hassling his customers, hoisting big pictures of him with devil horns and fangs.

Though Lam is a fellow ex-refugee, he had stayed away from the video store demonstrations on the advice of the Westminster city attorney, who warned that, as a city official, he had to remain neutral or the city might be liable for damages. The mob will have none of it. As a child of Vietnam, ripped from his homeland, they say, he had a different duty: to go ballistic at the word “communist.”

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To live in Southern California at the end of this century is to truly know how small the planet has become. The low-slung tracts and cheesy strip malls bustle with other nations’ epic conflicts--the gun runner in the ranch house, the bombing in the office park, the spy in the gated cul-de-sac.

It’s exotic, no? Puts a whole new spin on your average stretch of mud-brown stucco houses. Makes the people inside seem special, possessed of passions we complacent American-born types can’t begin to comprehend.

“Tony Lam will betray your country as he has betrayed us,” one of the protesters--a high school math teacher--intoned theatrically as he hoisted a big “Tony Lam Traitor Is Worse Than Communist” sign outside Lam’s Vien Dong restaurant. The subtext was clear: This is more than a grudge-fest. This is noble, something that only we, who have suffered greatly, can understand.

Well, here in the new country, we have a word for that subtext: Baloney. (Actually, we have a couple of words for it, but that’s the only one printable here.) What’s going on in Little Saigon now has just about nothing to do with the piquant thought of commie infiltration in Orange County and just about everything to do with political opportunism. And rage.

Rage amplifies. Rage exhilarates. Rage swells the small spirit, pumps it up in the face of the slings and arrows that, in every language, leave some people feeling unbearably demeaned. There’s just one problem: Rage doesn’t last. And, like any other drug, once it pumps up its possessor, it becomes a kind of hunger that only one thing will sustain: more rage.

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Tony Lam’s grown daughters were inside their father’s Garden Grove restaurant, at a Formica table beside the cash register. Ordinarily, they said, the place would be jammed. For more than a week, though, they’ve had to close at nightfall; there have already been fistfights, and they fear more violence.

Outside, a clutch of boys was pressed against the picture windows, leering at diners and waving crude drawings of genitalia. “Get a picture of that, I want it on video,” Jackie Lam told an employee. Her sister buried her head in her hands.

Outside, Ky Ngo rallied his troops in Vietnamese, in English, flying from group to group in a strange, Dick Tracy-looking plastic fedora that was yellow with three red stripes, like the old, anti-communist South Vietnamese flag. Jackie Lam muttered: “They don’t even know why they’re here.” The protesters jeered loudly, dully, proving her point, raging on.

Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com