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.
