Who You Calling Ho

Photo by Myles RobinsonIn early 1999, thousands of Vietnamese Americans rallied in Little Saigon to protest the appearance of a diminutive poster of Ho Chi Minh hanging in a strip-mall video store. The Weekly wasn't alone in observing the most obvious irony—that the mob's attempt to censor a pro-Ho shopkeeper was itself sort of, well, totalitarian. But Nick Schou went further, discovering evidence that the real danger in Little Saigon was not communists, but right-wing terrorists. "While the FBI boasts of its ability to track communist spies in Little Saigon," he wrote, "the agency prefers not to discuss a far more serious threat to life and liberty in the Vietnamese community: right-wing extremists . . . suspected of being responsible for at least five unsolved murders in Vietnamese communities throughout the U.S. since the early 1980s—all of them execution-style killings of Vietnamese journalists."