The Green Dragon : Film traces 1st wave of U.S. Vietnamese
Vietnamese writer Qui Duc Nguyen will speak tonight following the screening of Timothy Bui's "The Green Dragon." (7 p.m. screening, playing at Wallace Art House at Restaurant Row).
Nguyen is author of "Where the Ashes Are, The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family," (Addison-Wesley, 1994),
co-editor of "Vietnam, A Traveler's Literary Companion" (Whereabouts Press, 1995), and "Once Upon A
Dream, The Vietnamese-American Experience" (Andrews and McMell, 1995).
The film "The Green Dragon" tells about the first wave of Vietnamese refugees who came to America in 1975.
Camps were set up across the southwestern deserts to house more than 100,000 Vietnamese immigrants before
and immediately after the fall of Saigon.
A child, played by Trung Nguyen, searches daily for his mother at sprawling Camp Pendleton, Calif., encountering
characters that embody ambition, hope, tragedy, false expectation and lost identity.
An American volunteer cook named Addie (Forest Whitaker) befriends the child, Minh. Without verbally
understanding each other, they have an unusual bond through drawings, Batman comics and music, and the
common loss of a mother.
In another of the stories that merge, Minh's uncle Tai, played by Don Duong, is asked by Sgt. Jim Lance (Patrick
Swayze) to be a camp manager. The war has ended, yet each has an internal battle in need of peace. Lance's
brother died in the war and left behind a letter describing the only woman he ever loved, a Vietnamese nurse who
cared for him when he was wounded.
Lance's journey of understanding, through both the letter and the woman, help assuage a guilt that has plagued him
for years. Tai also is at war with his own guilt and, with Lance's help, finds the strength to look forward without
forgetting the past.
Author Nguyen, a friend of director Bui, came to America in 1975 and in 1979 began setting up radio programs
for the Vietnamese communities in California and Texas. He's also worked in international television in New York
and with a multi-lingual Internet company in Los Angeles.
For several years, he was a regular commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and was
awarded A Citation for Excellence by the Overseas Press Club of America in 1989 for his NPR documentary on
Vietnam. He has traveled extensively in Asia and Europe.
Nguyen currently hosts "Pacific Time," KQED public radio's national program focusing on Asia and its
connections to the United States. The program is heard in Honolulu Friday evenings at 7:30 on KIPO 89.3 FM.
The Honolulu Star Bulletin - July 05, 2002.
Filmmakers return to roots of conflict
In the new film ``Green Dragon,'' a refugee who has just been flown
halfway around the world -- from South Vietnam to the Camp Pendleton
Marine base north of San Diego -- takes stock of the news that his country
has fallen to the North Vietnamese and says sadly, ``Our past has been
taken away.''
``Green Dragon,'' which opens Friday, helps give some of the past back,
not only to the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who fled in terror
after the war was lost in 1975, but also to the country that welcomed them.
The film was directed Timothy Linh Bui (pronounced buoy), produced by
his brother Tony, and the brothers -- who grew up in Sunnyvale and San
Jose -- wrote the screenplay together as a valentine to their adopted
country.
When Tim Bui was 5 and Tony was 2 (and their first names were still Linh
and Vu), their family fled Saigon, less than two weeks before it fell. Their
father, who served in the South Vietnamese air force, would have been
arrested and tried if they had stayed, so they left their home and most of
their belongings for a future in America that most of them couldn't even
imagine.
In that way, the story told in ``Green Dragon'' is their own, even if they
can't remember a lot of it. ``I remember waiting on a runway to board a
U.S. cargo plane to fly out,'' Tim says, ``but I didn't know it was because
of a war.''
Refugees were scattered among hastily erected encampments at U.S.
military bases and then moved to homes of their own when sponsors could
be found to help smooth their transition. ``When they're in these camps,
they're standing on a bridge with one foot in Vietnam and one foot in
America,'' Tim says. ``When they heard that Saigon fell, what happened in
the past didn't matter. All they could do was look ahead.''
In one way, however, the past and present remained tied together by
families that had been torn apart. The Buis' mother, Susie, left her
brothers and sisters and their parents in Vietnam. Her story was typical,
and it is told in the film through the eyes of a young boy named Minh Pham
(Trung Nguyen) who is searching for his mother.
``That was the most common story,'' says Tim, 32. ``Every single day my
mom would go to the Red Cross in hopes of finding news they had made it
out alive. I think every refugee during that time was looking for someone.''
Their mother eventually learned that her family was alive, but she didn't
see them again until the 1980s.
The Buis had landed first at Fort Chaffey in Arkansas, where the brothers
got their introduction to American movies. ``Every night, to keep the
Vietnamese entertained, they would show American films on the outdoor
screen,'' Tim recalls. ``They'd play a lot of cartoons and B-films.'' All of it
was in English, of course, the first step in their forced assimilation.
Many of the Vietnamese refugees were afraid they simply would be
dumped on the streets of America and so, as ``Green Dragon'' shows,
some were not eager to leave the camps. The Buis were sponsored by a
church group in Chico. ``When we got off the plane, the press was there
to greet us because we were the first Vietnamese ever in that area,'' Tim
says. ``They helped set us up and got my dad a job.''
The boys attended elementary and junior high school in Sunnyvale but
they had no Vietnamese friends there. They speak Vietnamese now only
because their parents spoke it at home and they were forced to speak the
language when they were in the house. ``There was no community at all,''
Tim recalls. ``I don't remember another Vietnamese kid growing up in
Sunnyvale.''
Movie interest
But their interest in movies had been sparked, and when their parents built
their video store into a chain of five stores called U.S. Home Video, the Bui
brothers were in business too.
``We'd wake up and find like 5,000 films stored in the garage,''
remembers Tony, 29. ``I don't remember exactly when the moment
occurred that I switched from being a film viewer to thinking that I could
actually do it, but somewhere along the line I started to feel moved by
watching films.''
As their attachment to American popular culture grew, their connection to
Southeast Asia vanished. ``Growing up here in the '80s, I never thought I
would be able to go back to Vietnam,'' says Tony. The brothers had seen
Francis Ford Coppola's ``Apocalypse Now'' and Oliver Stone's films about
the Vietnam War and had taken to heart the images of Vietnamese people
running through the jungle with guns, selling themselves to soldiers in
Saigon bars. ``They were films made from one perspective, and growing
up we thought that was the only one,'' says Tim. ``Then as we got older
we began to question what we saw. When we returned to Vietnam, we
realized there was this other perspective.''
Tony had finally decided to go back during breaks from film school at
Loyola Marymount, and by the time he attended the Sundance Filmmakers
and Screenwriters Lab in 1996, one of his goals was to shoot a movie
entirely in Vietnam. ``Three Seasons,'' a luminous film based on his
experiences in Ho Chi Minh City, won both the top audience and jury
awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. With that film, Tony became
the first American director to secure a completion bond on a production
shot entirely on location in Vietnam (most of the war movies were shot in
Thailand and the Philippines).
`Sacrifice everything'
``I could never have made `Three Seasons' if it was my third or fourth
film,'' Tony says. ``But when it's your first film, you're young enough, you
don't care, you sacrifice everything. We were trying to establish our
identity and figure out who we are.''
``For both of us,'' says Tim, ``the next natural step before we went on to
tell any other stories was to tell a story about our family, the journey of
the first wave of refugees.''
They have finished writing three scripts, none of which has anything
directly to do with Vietnam. They have moved on, and by doing so have
become part of the success story of the resettlement camps.
``I think the success of the program can be seen in the success of
Vietnamese who went through it,'' Tim says, ``and who now own
businesses and have careers and got on with their lives and became
American.''
By Bruce Newman - The Mercury News - June 30, 2002.
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