Andrew Lam remembers walking along the shore of Vũng Tàu, a small coastal city near Saigon.
As the North Vietnamese army was making its way to the capital five decades ago, 11-year-old Lam stood on the beach alone, feeling his feet sink into the sand amidst the roaring of wind and waves.
That memory remains amid the chaos of fleeing with his family just two days before the city’s fall, crowded on cargo plane with his mother and sister. They landed in the Philippines, then Guam and finally, America.
“At some point you just accepted that Vietnam is a one-way street,” Lam said. “It was a place where you didn’t return, but a place where people fled from.”
Countless Việt Kiều would never see their homeland again, leaving behind lives and families in their flight from communism and fears of retaliation after the South Vietnamese government fell.
For others, it wouldn’t be until relations between the United States and Vietnam normalized that they would begin to grow a relationship again with their homeland.
It wasn’t until Lam was in his 30s and an author and journalist that he would see Vietnam again, part of a generation of diasporans who have returned to their homeland to explore their roots — and for some, help them find their creative voices and success.
Andrew Lam left Vietnam as an 11 year old refugee and returned as an author and journalist. His latest book is “Stories From the Edge of the Sea,” about the Vietnamese immigrant experience in California. (Courtesy of Andrew Lam)From Vietnam to America
Lam spent his first weeks in America at Camp Pendleton in San Diego – from April to October of 1975, the Marine base offered shelter to tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. From there, Lam’s once-privileged family relocated to an apartment in San Francisco at the end of Mission Street, where they moved in with his brother and aunt.
Lam’s first days in the city would remain cemented in his memory; he describes much of his writing as “love letters to San Francisco.”
“When I left Vietnam, the tallest building in Saigon was four stories,” he said. “When my aunt drove us around at night, it seemed to me that with all the lights inside the buildings, they looked like fairytale castles made of glass.”
He graduated UC Berkeley in 1986 with plans to become a doctor — the career his parents wished for him. But while studying for the MCAT, Lam found himself grieving a “broken romance” with someone he considered to be the love of his life. He enrolled in creative writing courses, hoping to find comfort.
“When one loses someone whom he loves very much, with whom he shares a private life, a private language, a private world, a routine — he loses an entire country. He becomes, in fact, an exile,” he wrote one day.
“When I read that passage, I started weeping. And then I realized that I had a broken heart before, but I didn’t know it,” Lam said. “I couldn’t process the enormity of losing a country as a child and so, in a way, I never addressed the trauma of war.”
In 1989, Lam abandoned his plans for medical school to study writing at San Francisco State University.
These days, Lam splits his time between San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City. “Stories From the Edge of the Sea,” his latest book for which he is currently touring, centers on the Vietnamese immigrant experience in California — a subject he has devoted his career to exploring.
After deciding to become a writer in the late ’80s, Lam wrote for Pacific News Service, a news organization based in the Bay Area at the time. It was on assignment that he returned to Vietnam in the early 1990s. It would take many more years and many more visits before he could entertain the idea of making Vietnam his home.
“You fled, you didn’t return,” he said. “But then that idea got complicated when I became a journalist.”
In 2018, amidst shifts in the journalism industry and American politics, Lam stopped working as a full-time journalist, rented out his apartment in San Francisco and resolved to partition his time between the U.S. and Vietnam.
Lam said he is constantly grappling with the reality of Vietnam’s ever-evolving identity — the changing of language, advancements in infrastructure and a culture quickly becoming Westernized.
For Lam, there are two Vietnams: “The Vietnam of my childhood memory and the Vietnam I have to write about.”
Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen is using parts of ammunition left over from the Vietnam war in his latest artwork. The work will be shown at Frieze New York art fair in May. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG) Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, working in his mom’s garage in Irvine, is using parts of ammunition left over from the Vietnam war in his latest artwork. The work will be shown at Frieze New York art fair in May. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG) Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen is using parts of ammunition left over from the Vietnam war in his latest artwork. The work will be shown at Frieze New York art fair in May. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG) Show Caption1 of 3Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen is using parts of ammunition left over from the Vietnam war in his latest artwork. The work will be shown at Frieze New York art fair in May. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG) Expand“Dimensionalizing” Vietnam
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, a multi-medium artist, left Saigon, his birthplace, with his family by boat in 1979 at the age of 3; he first lived in Texas, then Long Beach and later joined the Vietnamese diasporic community in Irvine, where he shared a two-bedroom apartment with 10 others.
Nguyen, 49, has been at his mother’s home in Irvine the last few months. After a childhood raised in the United States, he’s now based in Ho Chi Minh City, but has been borrowing her garage to work on a sculpture.
Equipped with a paintbrush and a careful hand, he painted small circular disks one recent day with an acidic formula. One by one, with just a few strokes of the concoction, the bronze metallic disks became spotted with a vibrant turquoise.
Interested in the intersection between memory and political resistance, Nguyen collected thousands of artillery shells from Quảng Trị, a province on the north central coast of Vietnam, one of the most heavily bombed areas in modern warfare and “littered” with wartime artifacts, he said.
The shells were flattened, shaped into discs and Nguyen was in the process of etching them with the acid and hanging them onto a towering circular canvas mounted onto the dining-room wall.
Much of Nguyen’s art involves turning war scraps into “healing materials.” For a recent exhibition, “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon,” he repurposed unexploded ordnance and war relics found in Quảng Trị, tuning them to the healing frequency of 432Hz.
“The concept of generational memory and trauma is very real,” Nguyen said. “It’s where my exploration begins.”
Like Lam, Nguyen thought he’d become a doctor. Instead, he cemented his passion for art as a pre-med student at UC Irvine in the late 1990s.
“I met some amazing people that inspired me and set into motion my understanding of the world,” he said. Amongst his idols was Daniel J. Martinez — an artist whose works explore topics of race and sociopolitical boundaries within American society across mediums.
After graduating the California Institute of the Arts, Nguyen moved back to Ho Chi Minh City in 2005 to study under his grandmother, a poet, with the hopes of untangling and understanding his family history — something he said he couldn’t faithfully do in Orange County.
Growing up near Westminster’s Little Saigon, Nguyen said he was disappointed by the Vietnamese community and the Vietnam War being “boiled down to motifs.” He wanted to learn more about current-day Vietnam.
Devoting much of his time to moving-image works and sculpture, Nguyen is driven by a commitment to communities impacted by colonialism, war and displacement, he said. He’s trying to “dimensionalize things that have been simplified.”
Jenni Le has been involved in the production of several Vietnamese films, here she is seen on a set in Vietnam. (Courtesy of Jenni Le)A two-way street
Jenni Le jokingly calls herself the “unofficial mayor of Saigon.” From collaborating with Vietnamese American filmmaker Charlie Nguyen on the 2007 martial arts action movie “The Rebel” to working as the language consultant for the HBO series “The Sympathizer” — adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel — Le is deeply embedded in the Vietnamese film community.
But the producer and assistant director was born in Houston five years after the fall of Saigon.
She cultivated her connections while living in Vietnam for 13 years, until 2022, when love spirited back her to the U.S. where she now lives in San Diego with her husband and daughter.
Growing up, Le said she didn’t know much about her parents’ lives in Vietnam.
“They just didn’t talk about it. We spoke Vietnamese, but there was no connection to the homeland.”
Upon moving to California in her teens and immersing herself in Asian clubs and theater groups, she began “learning about being Vietnamese,” she said.
Two decades ago, her behind-the-scenes work in the Vietnamese entertainment industry led her to Vietnam for the first time. On the plane, she remembers being struck by the Vietnamese voice instructing passengers to “fasten their seatbelts” and seeing pamphlets written entirely in her native tongue.
“It was an emotional moment for me,” she said. “I remember just feeling really at home, even though I was 24 when I first came to Vietnam.”
Her only friend in Vietnam at the time, and the one to host her first visit to Ho Chi Minh City, was Nguyen.
Ham Tran, center, works with Long Nguyen, left, who plays a prisoner in the film, “Journey From the Fall” in this 2006 file photo. Tran co-wrote, directed, edited and co-produced the film about the end of the Vietnam War, communist re-education camps and the difficult path thousands of Vietnamese took when they left their native land. (Courtesy of Ham Tran)Among her many friends, Ham Tran is one of Le’s oldest and closest; for years, the pair have collaborated on projects in Vietnam. Their most recent, “Maika,” which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, was an informal send-off for Le, as she returned to the States.
Studying at UCLA, Le and Tran met while touring college campuses with the Vietnamese acting comedy troupe, Club O’ Noodles.
“Wherever I went, I was always one of the only Vietnamese people. But to join Club O’Noodles, where everyone was Vietnamese, spoke Vietnamese and talked about their identity, helped me form who I am now,” Le said. “As an artist, it helped me understand that there was a power in our stories.”
A director, editor and screenwriter, Tran is probably best known for his 2003 thesis short film, “The Anniversary,” a story of two brothers who reunite during the Vietnam War, and most recently, “Devil’s Diner,” the first Vietnamese drama series to premiere globally on Netflix.
Tran, now 51, was 8 years old when he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s through the Orderly Departure Program. His family first spent time with relatives in Reseda before moving to Santa Ana to be closer to the Vietnamese community in Orange County.
He spent six years, from 1997 to 2003, earning his MFA in film directing at UCLA Film School. Though he studied in the heart of Hollywood, Tran found his success upon returning to Vietnam, where Vietnamese studios trusted him with editing and directing their projects.
On the opposite side of the globe, Tran now spends most mornings in a coffee shop, down the street from his home in Ho Chi Minh City, writing and editing with friends and coworkers. After traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Vietnam for work, Tran decided to make the city his permanent home in 2022.
“It’s good here, in Vietnam,” he said. “The work just came, and it was nonstop. I’ve been very fortunate to be making the films I want to make.”
Tony Bui attends the “Three Seasons” Special Screening during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at Egyptian Theatre on Jan. 25, 2024 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)Director Tony Bui also found success in the stories of the country his family fled just a week before the fall of Saigon.
He is best known for his 1999 film “Three Seasons,” which weaves together the lives of four Ho Chi Minh City — what Saigon was renamed following the north’s takeover — residents as they face Westernization and poverty. When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival that year, it won the Audience Award, Excellence in Cinematography Award and the Grand Jury Prize.
Bui remembers always having a deep-rooted passion for cinema. Raised in Sunnyvale, he helped out at his parents’ video store. Of the thousands of films he was exposed to, Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” had a particularly lasting effect, he said.
“It was the first film I sat through the end credits for,” Bui recalled. “The fact that I was able to see Asian characters in main roles, with complexity and flaws, affected me in a deep way. It was rare to see an Asian lead.”
The lack of representation, Bui said, frustrated him as an aspiring filmmaker; he noticed that when Vietnamese characters were included in films, they were limited to minor roles or portrayed as “caricatures.”
So when it came to “Three Seasons,” Bui said he wanted his first film to be entirely in Vietnamese, filmed on Vietnamese soil and to star “three-dimensional” Vietnamese characters.
Though Bui is currently based in New York, teaching film at Columbia University, he continues to visit Vietnam. On behalf of the university, Bui held public talks over the summer in Asia, including Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, centered on regional storytelling.
And this year, Bui curated a program of Vietnam War films for the Criterion Channel to honor the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. The film choices — a mix of American and Vietnamese — are about telling a “more nuanced and complex perspective, for and by Vietnamese people,” he said.
Making art in a communist country
Surrounded by fellow artists, these individuals found their creative voices and much of their success in their home country. But they also faced challenges making art in Vietnam, where freedom of expression, including in media, is tightly monitored and defined by the presiding Communist Party.
When it comes to Vietnamese filmmaking, authorities retain the ability to oversee scripts and shooting locations, although Le said regulations have loosened over time.
But some topics, such as critique of the government, triumphant dirty cops and zombies are off limits, she said.
“You kind of write things with censorship in mind,” she explained. “There’s certain things you don’t touch, but there’s things you can push a little bit.”
“Clash,” an action thriller Le co-produced in 2009, is one example of the filmmakers “getting creative,” around censorship — in this case, about the degree of violence – and really lobbying the mấy bác (officials) in Hanoi to get the film made.
Le, Tran and Bui all said it is not uncommon to have a government official be present during productions. The official, paid daily by the production, ensures the filmmaking adheres to censorship policies and pre-approved liberties.
A government official accompanied Bui for nearly the entirety of his making of “Three Seasons,” the first American film to be made in Vietnam. Tran, however, said these days, officials are often sparser with their appearances.
In 2004, however, government censorship landed him in hot water when a film he was making resulted in an eight-year ban from Vietnam.
Amidst political unrest and anti-communist protests in Westminster’s Little Saigon, Tran had written and directed “Journey From the Fall,” a film about the Vietnamese immigrant experience and re-education camps following the Vietnam War.
The film was considered defamatory and politically provocative by the communist government, culminating in its banning in Vietnam. And Tran, barred from his home country, pivoted to editing films and features for fellow Vietnamese filmmakers.
After eight years, he’d edited enough films to earn the Vietnamese government’s reconsideration, he said.
“The Vietnamese studios went up to the North and talked to the cultural police on my behalf,” he said. “That’s how I was given another chance to direct in Vietnam.”
Tran talked about the ban with a surprising calm, chalking it up to a “misunderstanding.”
“I got into trouble because they thought I was a political filmmaker trying to critique communism. But no, all my films are about family, the fragmentation of families by war — any war,” he said. “I think that all of my films ultimately reflect growing pains. It’s all from the point of view of a little kid. I was still trying to understand the process of leaving Vietnam.”
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