War isn’t a distant memory to them

I remember it being unusually warm for a winter’s night, but in my mind’s eye now, I wonder if I’m recalling the heat from the crowd more than the temperature.

What remains indelible, however, is the memory of that crowd, numbering in the low hundreds and filling the available walking and standing space at a strip mall along a stretch of Bolsa Avenue in Little Saigon. It was a restless but peaceful assembly of mostly Vietnamese Americans, still holding court after dark, long after the businesses had shut down for the night.

It was late 1999, a protracted moment, if you will, in Orange County history that let everyone here know that the immigrants who came over after the fall of Saigon a quarter-century earlier hadn’t put their painful past behind them.

Not by a long shot.

The street protest centered around a video store owner who displayed in his shop a picture of Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and the flag of the Communist government.

To those who had fled that regime and settled in Westminster and neighboring cities, the merchant had opened a wound. The crowd meant to dress that wound by running him out of business. Even after a local court upheld his right to display the flag and photo, angry residents made his life miserable.

Angry protesters wouldn’t let him open his store. When he tried again a few weeks later, someone in the crowd egged him. Someone spit on him.

On my first visit to the scene, I was sympathetic toward the protesters.

On my second visit a few weeks later, I was decidedly less so, sniping at them in print for their drawn-out unwillingness to respect free speech protections in their adopted country.

Those days seem like ancient history now. My sense of Vietnamese Americans in Orange County now is how much they have become part of the landscape, how seamlessly they appear to have assimilated into American society and custom.

Until, that is, another controversy erupted recently in Little Saigon, one strongly evocative of the passions that heated up the nights nine winters ago.

This time around, it involved a photo in a magazine published by a Little Saigon newspaper.

To many readers, the photo -- which depicted a piece of art by a UC Davis grad student and Vietnamese immigrant -- was disrespectful to the anti-Communist regime of the former South Vietnam and overly respectful to the Communist government.

The artist said people misinterpreted her work, but that didn’t quell the controversy.

Protesters paraded for eight days outside the newspaper offices. Eventually, two top editors were replaced. Management offered refunds to anyone who bought the magazine and was offended.

I could, in good conscience, repeat what I wrote nine years ago. I could say with conviction that creating and publishing art are protected under 1st Amendment rights. I could suggest that, nearly 30 years after the first large wave of Vietnamese refugees set foot in California, it’s time for them to get more fully with the program.

In short, I could scold.

But something is making me resist that impulse. It’s as if the passage of time since 1999, for example, only serves to underscore what a powerful effect the war in Vietnam had on those who grew up there.

Americans, in the main, celebrate freedom of speech as a prized concept (even when we wish the other guy would just shut up).

But for the most part, we don’t have to reconcile it with memories of a war that cost us our homes, our livelihoods and, in some cases, our friends and relatives.

To many Vietnamese Americans, that’s what the Communists meant to them. We say “get over it” and don’t mean it to sound glib, but can it sound any other way to many of them? Most of us haven’t had to “get over” having our country ravaged, our families escaping by sea, our loved ones assigned to refugee camps and then realizing we may never live in our native land again.

I have no problem calling the Little Saigon protests of 1999 and 2008 over-the-top. And I can’t make a case that the 1st Amendment applies only to some Americans and not others.

But I’m feeling a lot less judgmental about this group of Vietnamese in America than I once did. Perhaps these protesters of 2008 represent the last vestiges of the first generation who came to America with heavy hearts and long memories of things that most of us can’t conceive of.

Perhaps succeeding generations won’t bother to complain about what they perceive to be “pro-Communist” art of deeds.

But we aren’t there yet. The hurt persists.

I, for one, am hard-pressed to put a time limit on their pain.

The years obviously haven’t made it go away. It runs much deeper than most of us can imagine.

If only for that reason, I’m feeling like giving them a pass.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.