A late note: On Miss Saigon and the power of seeing
It was an extraordinary evening in April 2017. In a Broadway theatre off the bustling transit hub of Times Square, I felt a heaviness in my lung. Like someone was squeezing the air out of me. Breathless. There was a standing ovation for the ending of Miss Saigon, the show I had decided to watch that day with a dear friend from Saigon. Thao was from the South as I was from the North. Together we made an unlikely pair to watch this Broadway production, famed as an “epic of our time,” a reminiscent look at the legacy of the Vietnam War in a modern context.
Clap clap clap clap.
The cheering crowd filled the room with explosive jubilation. Everybody was standing up and whistling to the cast. Everybody, except for Thao and I. My body was pinned to the chair, suspended in disbelief. As the crowd cheered louder and louder, actors ascended the line to receive their due congratulations - first the support roles, then Kim (Miss Saigon), her child, her troublesome partner, and (there he is) the American GI. The room erupted in an outburst of ecstasy. A white American man basked in the glory of an unmemorable performance.
Alistair Brammer and Eva Noblezada in “”Miss Saigon” on Broadway. (Photo by Matthew Murphy)
Miss Saigon is an international musical franchise premiered in 1989. Directed by French producer Claude-Michel Schönberg and his Tunisian partner Alain Boublil, the show has gained international fame (and notoriety) since its inception. It continues to be among the longest running play on Broadway today, with posters and banners sneaking into the most intimate corners of the American public imagination – the countless subway and train stops from New England to the Californian coastline. The play fashions itself after Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. It recounts a story of an innocent Asian women abandoned by her Caucasian lover in the midst of political conflict.
Kim, the main character in Miss Saigon, hails from a village in the South of Vietnam. Due to the turn of history, she finds herself becoming a bargirl in Saigon, serving American Marines fighting in the war. On her first night on the job, a GI named Chris apparently “saves” her from the harassment of his fellow soldiers. They spend the night together, an event which is interpreted entirely differently in the two cultures in which they belong. Kim and Chris develope a companionship which, without Chris’s full understanding, culminates in a traditional Vietnamese wedding. Yet, despite the confusion at the wedding altar, Chris never clarifies his intentions with Kim, leading her to believe in his love. He promises to bring Kim back to America, yet ultimately fails to do so during the tumultuous “Fall of Saigon.” As such, Act 1 ends with the image of Kim, her son, and the “Engineer” (the owner of the bar), leaving Vietnam at the dawn of day as refugees. In the subtext of the play, the red carpet of violence has arrived with the communist take-over of South Vietnam.
Jon Jon Briones, Samuel Li Weintraub and Eva Noblezada in “Miss Saigon.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
Up to that moment, the play was truly touching. And yet, everything that was built up in Act 1 became shattered in Act 2. The second act opens with a call to address the plight of Vietnamese-American children left behind, saying that they are “ours children, too.” Chris, now living with a white wife in America, is haunted by memories of war. When he learns about the existence of his son with Kim, he decides to go to Bangkok where she lives to bring just the son back. So the former GI and his legitimate wife travel to Southeast Asia. In their discussion of this impossible affairs, the couple exchange words about how Kim “still think she is married” to Chris. They decide to bring the boy back but leave the question of Kim intentionally unresolved. “What about her?,” they ask. But no answer is in sight. In the final scene, Kim, for the sake of her son’s future, begs Chris’s new wife to bring him to America, and then kills herself. The white man’s (and white woman’s) burden is quite literally resolved by having the subjects of empire kill themselves, hence relieving the perpetrators of their own guilt.
Noticeably, in the entire play that day, not a single word of “sorry” was uttered. At no point did Chris apologize for his presence in Vietnam, for leading Kim to believe in his undying love, for failing to deliver on his promise, or for his dishonesty with his new wife. This absence of repentance went hand-in-hand with a recurring trope of the savior and his predicament. Unable to save Vietnam from communism, the white soldier came back to salvage what’s left of his identity without regards for the people he encountered during wartime. He also has little to no understanding of Vietnamese culture, the significance of rituals and the impact of his military presence in the country. And yet, at the end of the play, his character received a standing ovation. That was the real horror of the war and its representation.
I didn’t clap for Miss Saigon because I didn’t see myself represented by the play. I didn’t see the tales of my grandmother and grandfather, women and men, young and old people across the vast landscape of Vietnam represented. In all due respect, one cannot turn a blind eye to the reality of children and women left behind during wartime, nor can one deny the presence of love between American and Vietnamese people at the time despite the war. In the process of making my first feature film, I encountered the incredible story of Thomas Fox and Kim-Hoa Fox, a couple who met during the war. He was an American volunteer in a refugee camp in the South and she was a social worker. Both were working to address the trauma of war in the most impoverished villages in South Vietnam at the time. One does not see an asymmetry of power relation in their story, yet such story seldom gets to the big stage where our imagination of the war take place.
Miss Saigon promotes a narrative of Vietnamese women as objects of desire whose culture, yearning, and happiness are irrelevant. Even worse, these aspects depend primarily on the goodwill of an American society with incurable savior complex. Four decades after the war, there are still new documentaries coming out to explain how the conflict get out of American hands. The story is about how Americans could have done it better, and not about how they should never have done it at all.
So where does one look to find inspiration to address a conflict that have riddled both the big screen of play and cinema as well as the private screen of individual’s imagination? In recent years, the most exemplary works about the Vietnam conflict that come into my mind are The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a literary work of such complexity that it upends several assumptions about the war. Ocean Vuong and his poems bring readers to the realm of the phantasmal, of the lingering trauma of displacement. Marcelino Truong’s “Such a Lovely Little War” contextualizes the onset of conflict in Vietnam. Cinematically, Lam Lê’s film “Cong Binh” discusses the early roots (and many interpretations) of communism in anti-colonial activism in Vietnam and abroad. My great friend and collaborator, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is working on a cinematic collage of short stories about the war, told from several perspectives. Working alongside one another, older and younger generations of Vietnamese are discussing, questioning, and pitching for a fair chance to represent themselves and their country. It is an ongoing effort to see and be seen.
For me, what story will I tell about the war? Perhaps many, perhaps none. Conversations with many young fellow Vietnamese have led me to believe it is about time we tell the other story of how we get over this “original tale” of a war-torn nation to move forwards a futurism of our own.
But on some quiet afternoons when I listen to old recordings from Saigon in the 60s, or read my family memoirs, I think of many stories. A mother in Haiphong bids goodbye to her son as he marches southward. Confined together in a collapsed house, a communist messenger and a Southern soldier find themselves having an unlikely conversation. A young child goes on an adventure to find his lost friend, unknowing of the presence of bomb ordnance. A young wife in Can Tho waits for her husband to come home while keeping her family safe. A lost American GI in the jungle. An English-speaking politician goes on an international tour. A dying man in Quang Tri sees his life flash before his eyes as the bombs come dropping from above. There are many more stories but none of them will be about heroes, Vietnamese or American. They will be humble and honest stories about everyday people, in the act of their daily living, trying to survive while caring for the ones they love.
