Vietnamese want war exhibit in Calif. to include their voice

OAKLAND, Calif. -- The presidential campaign thrust the Vietnam War back into the national debate, but a different discussion about the war has emerged in Oakland, where a museum exhibit has stirred passions among Vietnamese-Americans who say their stories and experiences are not being adequately told.

The exhibit by the Oakland Museum of California is the first retrospective mounted by an American museum about the Vietnam War, from its beginnings as a pawn in Cold War gamesmanship to the more recent influx of Southeast Asian immigrants to US shores. The exhibit was expected to tour nationally, but that is now in doubt.

Titled "What's Going On? California and the Vietnam Era," the exhibit occupies 7,000 square feet and features about 500 items -- photographs, video clips, posters, album covers, documents, personal stories, and mementos -- that try to provide a view of the war from a California perspective.

Even before it opened two months ago, the exhibit was under fire. Last December, the museum dismissed its only Vietnamese-American staff member, after she circulated a memo criticizing the exhibit for mostly "catering to the US vet community and aging hippies -- not a diverse group."

Her dismissal, which museum officials said was not related to the memo, outraged Vietnamese-American activists across California. In response, the museum formed an advisory board and agreed to expand the exhibit to better reflect the experiences of Southeast Asian immigrants, who were uprooted from their homelands because of the war.

The museum also hired another staff member of Vietnamese descent, but he soon quit, saying the exhibit was more interested in nostalgia rather than a deeper, more meaningful historical examination of the war and its legacies in California and abroad.

"I don't think the Southeast Asian perspective was being incorporated thoroughly into the exhibit. It was more reactionary than it was sincere," said Ben Tran, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, who quit the project in June.

As it stands now, Tran said, he would not feel comfortable taking his parents to the exhibit.

Vietnamese-Americans, many of whom fought side by side with American soldiers, "never had a platform to tell their own story," Tran said, "and here their stories, their voices, are again being marginalized."

Museum officials said the exhibit was intended to be a survey of the war's impact on California and worried that expanding its scope would lose focus on the state's role during the war.

"We were concerned that the exhibit wouldn't be about California anymore," said Richard Griffoul, the museum's director of communications.

The state was undeniably an important hub of the war effort. More than 250,000 soldiers passed through California on their way to Southeast Asia. During the first decades of the Cold War, the state received the greatest share of contracts from the Department of Defense, according to the exhibit. The era also helped give rise to politicians such as Ronald Reagan, whose hawkish views would help him win the governorship of California in 1966.

California became the center of early antiwar demonstrations, which in turn helped give rise to the Free Speech Movement, the tie-dye culture, acid rock, and later the Black Panthers.

After the war, California became home to hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees. Between 1975 and 1985, more than 750,000 Southeast Asian refugees resettled in the United States. By 2003, there were nearly 2 million US residents of Vietnamese, Hmong, Laotian, and Cambodian ancestry, according to the US Census Bureau. Almost half now live in California. Other significant communities across the United States include the Boston area.

"This was never intended to be the definitive exhibit on Vietnam," Griffoul said. "All of it is still recent history, and it's still an open wound in the United States. We've tried to take an objective point of view, and I think we've taken some lumps for it."

Some of the criticism has been particularly harsh.

"What are the long-term consequences for California? It's not the hippies, or the Black Panthers, or acid rock -- it's the creation of this huge Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao population in California," said professor Peter Zinoman, who teaches Vietnamese history at the University of California at Berkeley. "That's what this war wrought for California, from a historical point of view. Now all these people are Californians, and this exhibit fails to get their story and their version of things."

The advisory board had its share of debates, too, member Joseph Do Vinh said. "We did the best we could; we got as much as we could," Do Vinh said. "I wasn't in the business of commandeering the exhibit. We weren't going to try and rewrite history, or argue the details of history. Our job was to make it relevant to Vietnamese-Americans. We wanted to work with the museum, not against the museum."