Vietnamese Americans' hatred of communism shouldn't inhibit free speech

What are some of the signs that an immigrant community has successfully blended into mainstream society?

Off the top of my head:

* Its children have done well in the public school system.

* Workers have found meaningful jobs across the occupational spectrum.

* People have begun taking part in the political system and run for public office.

* The "majority" in society has come to consider the immigrants as part of the overall community fabric.

Those are just one man's observations and hardly amount to an official checklist. But if you accept it as a working model, you have to agree that the Vietnamese immigrants who came in the 1970s and established themselves in Orange County have pulled off something of a miracle. Overcoming one cultural and social obstacle after another, the now-ensconced Vietnamese Americans who created Little Saigon fit comfortably into the American story of assimilation achieved by European and Latin American immigrants of previous generations.

I've written before that the Vietnamese immigrant experience is a particularly amazing story, considering that the adventure for thousands of them began in small boats that eventually landed them in a country utterly foreign in every sense of the word.

Successful and amazing, that is, except for one lingering issue in Little Saigon: the tolerance of political expression. And particularly as we've seen again recently, freedom of expression when it butts heads with art.

Because of the devastating rupture of Vietnamese society during the war years and the pain it inflicted on immigrants and their families, memories and vengeance run deep in many Vietnamese Americans. Anything that smacks of the current Communist government of Vietnam or its wartime legacy of yesteryear has the power to inflame.

The thing is, not all Vietnamese Americans share that sentiment. They realize that you don't have to be a communist to acknowledge communism's existence or to refer to it in art or writing or public expression. But as more and more Vietnamese American artisans and public figures have done just that, they've become the target of self-avowed, ardent anti-communists who bridle at any legitimacy -- real or imagined -- given to Ho Chi Minh and his legacy.

Last weekend, Vietnamese American artists opened an exhibit in their Santa Ana center that rekindled the old arguments. They told a Times reporter that that is exactly what they intended to do, openly raising the issues of freedom of political expression in Little Saigon.