A new documentary chronicles how Vietnamese refugees built identities and lives in Southern California in the 1980s, after the 1975 fall of Saigon, partly with the help of new wave music from Ian Nguyễn, Lynda Trang Đài, Lilian (born Nguyen Dieu Hoa), and others. The New Wave film and its companion book are from Elizabeth Ai, who says this was all a big gift to herself. That’s because she was forced to face her own family history.
“My great-grandparents fled from China, then my parents and my grandparents fled from Vietnam. So I think there was so much trauma that it was like … everything that we have right now in this country is a huge privilege. So we're not going to look back. We're not going to talk about that trauma. Don't bring it up. Don't ask about it,” she explains.
Her family came to the U.S. with nothing and had to build from scratch. Ai was raised by her grandparents and teenaged aunts and uncles — while her mom worked full-time.
“My mom's never around,” she recalls. “My parents had split up, so she was just the person who was the breadwinner for the family. My dad was out of the picture. And my mom was … opening up nail salons, and I would see her once a week, which at some point became once a month, and then I'd see her a few times a year when there were holidays or special events.”
Ai also shares that her mom fell into a gambling addiction, which kept her away from home.
“You grow up with your mom as a hero. You're like, ‘Wow, she's the breadwinner.’ I'm 5, 6, 7. … And then when you become a teenager, you're like, ‘She's the villain.’ She becomes something else to you. You're like, ‘You're not around, you're not my mom.’”
She adds, “I was raised by these teenagers, and one thing led to another. It wasn't like this huge decision not to see my mom for years, which turned into decades. It's like a reflex, whatever synapses are firing in your head, you're just like, ‘We don't call that person because they're never around.’”
Ai acknowledges that other women in the Vietnamese community had similar stories. She calls it a burden they silently carried. “I just really wanted to focus on these scars that we still carry and aren't discussed very much in stories and movies and films that we see.”
While Ai’s mom and older Vietnamese refugees were working, a younger group, including her teenaged aunts and uncles, were rebelling through music.
“New wave happened to be punk, post-punk, then all the synthesized music. And for me, I'm saying this is a sub-genre of that synthesized music — Eurodisco. And Eurodisco is the music that the Vietnamese community glommed onto.”
An especially popular artist was Lynda Trang Đài, the so-called Vietnamese Madonna who mainly did cover songs.
“It was probably 1983, 1982 even … she already started singing in churches … sneaking out from her parents and saying, ‘Oh, I'm going to church,’ and then she ended up at nightclubs singing these songs. … She burst out and just said, ‘You know what, this Madonna person here is on MTV. She's doing it. I'm gonna be doing it.’ … The moment she saw Madonna, she was captivated. She started to bounce around on stage with ripped clothes and even sparkly bikinis and short shorts, and her hair was like cotton candy on her head. And she was just doing something else,” Ai explains.
Growing up, Ai heard Trang Đài’s songs everywhere she went, including in Vietnamese supermarkets.
“I definitely shunned the music when the 90s came along, only because I wanted to be my own person and assimilate too in my own ways. And I cringed when I was like, ‘Oh, Vietnamese Madonna,’ to only come back to it now as … a mom and be really proud of it,” she admits. “I didn't realize that it was such a big part of me.”
It was challenging for Trang Đài to work on original music, and the diaspora community was willing to pay for covers, Ai explains.
Ai says it took years to develop enough rapport and trust with Trang Đài, so the artist could finally talk about her struggles.
“She just told me … every day, people can be smiling, but you don't know what they're feeling inside. … And that's how I ended up in the narrative myself. … What was I dismissing the entire time when I was just trying to look for the history … behind what it's like to be a performer or to rebuild after fleeing from the war? But to get to what we're really dismissing is: What's inside? … Do we realize what we've sacrificed in the displacement?”
In the film, Ai reconciles with her mom, but she admits that the grief is still here.
“You go through decades of not talking to somebody, and then you realize, oh, man, yeah, they had it even harder than you. And I'm trying to reconcile those two parts, like, my feelings are valid, but hers too, how much weight she carried.”
She emphasizes her gratitude for this project, which took six years to make. “What I've been dismissing is something that I need to deal with in my own life, and then that shifted the entire thesis. And that's the film that you saw — it's about the intergenerational dialogue between the first and the second generation.”
It may seem ironic that Vietnamese new wave — which is fun and fluffy — provokes intense and deep self-exploration for Ai. However, she explains that it all fits together.
“It's like makeup or armor or whatever it is that we use to hide behind. And I think that's why it makes total sense. Because you're like, ‘Do I want to hear the songs of the Vietnam War movies?’ … All the songs that we know from that 60s and 70s era. And they were like, ‘No, we're not listening to analog.’ This does sound like the future, and we're gonna get past that past. So I think it makes absolute sense that it is fluffy. It is not tragic, it is not rehashing old things. It is not the tradition of their parents either. Because who were they when they got here? They were gonna have to make this third culture, right? And it wasn't necessarily American. It wasn't, either, Vietnamese.”