It took me two tries to understand Professor Valverde’s essay, “Creating Identity, Defining Culture and Making History from an Art Exhibit”. In my first reading (during which I was extremely tired and not thinking straight), I wasn’t reading very closely: I thought that the point of the essay was to show how an art exhibit was wildly misinterpreted, triggering a barely coherent protest and showing the ugly face of dogmatism. However, in my second reading, I realized that what Professor Valverde was trying to get at wasn’t just about an artist’s work being misunderstood, it was about a community-wide phenomenon whose symptoms were displayed in ostracizing artist Huynh Chau’s artwork. After denouncing Chau as having communist connections and accusing her of desecrating the former Republic of Viet Nam’s flag in her piece “Connections”, dogmatic anti-communists within the diasporic Vietnamese community protested the Vietnamese-American newspaper Nguoi Viet Daily for being communists. The significance of the protester’s actions was not lost on me: creating artificial divisions between “us” and “them” allows their dogma to go unchallenged. Think George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Before the invasion, his approval ratings were at an all-time low, but when he announced the invasion, is approval ratings shot up significantly. To challenge Bush would be un-American, just as challenging the rabidly anti-communists would result in one being labeled a communist. Luckily, such dogmatic ideals rarely last long: Professor Valverde points out that after a while, the extreme McCarthy-esque rhetoric of the extreme anti-communists began to alienate many members of the Vietnamese community. Ironically, the best cure for dogmatism within a community is dogmatism itself. As the Vietnamese community changes, I have to wonder, what will the political landscape look like in the near future?

Melody Yee

Section 2

Asian American Studies 2