Cineaste v20, n3 (Summer, 1993):45 (2 pages).
Distributed by Indochina Film Arts Foundation, 665 Chestnut Street (2nd floor), San Francisco, CA 94133; Fax 415-441-1783; email: http://www.indochinaculture.org/
Now that Oliver Stone's finely tuned epics 'about' Asian women-- Heaven and Earth and The Joy Luck Club--have hit the screens, the sharp and thoroughly engrossing From Hollywood to Hanoi sneaks in a more personal voice. It opens like an ominous fairy tale, with cartoonlike, redneck bad guys standing on a dock, one of them fingering a cigar. A young Southeast Asian woman pulls a gun on them. "You're under arrest!," she exclaims. "For smoking?," they snap back, and try to escape, dodging our heroine's swift kick. She pursues them by motorcycle, wrestling them on the hood of a truck, fearlessly battling until she's thrown with a scream of "NO!" into the water. "My career was going nowhere," intones Tiana in voice-over, and as the B-movie clip ends, the pursuit of Asian- American identity is on.
Director-writer-producer Tiana's Hollywood acting career interestingly punctuates her feature directorial debut, carving out a unique niche among documentaries as well as documentarians searching for their roots. With a surprisingly self-mocking tone at the onset, although sidestepping obvious political stands, From Hollywood to Hanoi is nonetheless an overt treatise on national and ethnic identity and one of the few feature length personal-identity-as-politics films to appear on commercial screens recently. Born Thi Thanh Nga, Tiana's previous filmography is under telling aliases: after debuting in Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite (1975), she became Tiana Alexandra to appear in such fare as the World War II miniseries Pearl and an Aaron Spelling Christmas special, and as Tiana Banana she made three music videos for Warner France, including Lust in de Jungle and Free As I Want 2B.
Using what must be some of her most embarrassing film clips, Tiana acknowledges and plays off of her previous 'identities' right off the bat. A journey in both a geographical and psychological sense, From Hollywood to Hanoi manages a tour through the many realities of the filmmaker's life as she presents them, a media-savvy rumination for those who have never been to today's Vietnam as well as for those who do not live with the many dualities Asian Americans face in the U.S. Interviewing three clearly 'Amerasian' teens standing in front of a school, Tiana asks, "Do you consider yourself American or Vietnamese?" As if acknowledging the media take on what it means to be from a time and two places marked by the same war, bomb explosions are intercut while they respond. Their difficulty yet eagerness in answering her parallels the filmmaker's own complex approach to identity throughout the course of the film.
A breezy but poignant overview of Tiana's privileged childhood in a South Vietnamese government family leads into their continual effort in the U.S. to be the "perfect Americans." But it is her later decision to return to Vietnam that defines the film. There, amid emotional meetings with relatives and visiting places she excitedly remembers or has only heard about, the camera bears witness to Tiana's reunion with a proudly Vietnamese Vietnam, the oasis of her quest to find what it can mean to be Vietnamese.
Billed as the first American film about Vietnam actually shot in that country, the footage is, indeed, quite remarkable. Tiana interviews a Texas-trained doctor at a Saigon Agent Orange ward, the camera lingering on research lab jars of grossly malformed babies in the film's most straightforward critique of American imperialism. She gossips with cousins on her hotel bed while they raid her cosmetics case, and endures when they dig up "one of my worst movies from the local bootleg video place." Her north Vietnamese coverage belies rather biased ethnography, using commentary from passing interview encounters as constant reminders of her otherness in this apparently more bleak land forbidden to her childhood years. Ardent to the point of ecstatic Ho Chi Minh supporters dot the landscape of Tiana's northern journey, but her interaction with the brass remains in the realm of the poetic, literally. It was Tiana's poem, "Dear America, Dear Vietnam," which so impressed Vietnamese officials that she gained the difficult permission to return. Reciting poetry to compliment her, Senior Politburo Advisor Le Duc Tho refers to Tiana as "niece" and explains that he declined the Nobel Peace Prize awarded him (and Henry Kissinger) after the war because it was given to both sides, both the "aggressors" and the "people who fought for peace."
Both sides, both homes to Tiana remain elusive by the end at a glitzy suburban Christmas on her return to her family's home in northern California. Her father, who was the head of the South Vietnamese Ministry of Press and to whom the film is dedicated, remains staunchly against her visit to their homeland. He refuses his daughter's souvenir gift of a helmet, although agreeing to hold it for the camera. He himself "will not return until the country changes direction." Characterizing herself as the rebellious daughter, Tiana and her film's primary emotional concerns are charted through just such returns--to Ho Chi Minh City (which Tiana remarks is still called Saigon by everyone), to the forbidden Hanoi, to her family in San Jose's Little Saigon, and, presumably with this film, back indeed to Hollywood. Where to find home, here or there?, is an underlying though never definitively answered question. In Saigon, Tiana finds in the many abandoned Amerasian children and the young Viet and Duc, Siamese twins born victims of Agent Orange, analogies to her split self-- is she Vietnamese, or is she American? In encounters along her route in northern Vietnam, where people remark on Tiana's appearance versus accent, the question becomes how is she Vietnamese, how is she American.
From Hollywood to Hanoi, despite its amazing seamlessness from location to location, amplifies the idea that, like many immigrants, Asian-Americans returning home after an era, or a generation or two, may face a blinding wall to what they seek. As with The Joy Luck Club, implied and almost celebrated is a mythologizing wall between the seeker and the 'homeland' that is never addressed. Though not pointedly addressed here either, Tiana's wall is obviously built of media images of violence and the kind of equally violent caricatures she has been asked to portray by the first city of her film's title. An ongoing victim of 'serious' tomes comprised of white liberal guilt and nostalgia during its existence as an American obsession, Vietnam emerges in Tiana's film as a home, and one still considered a home to many Asian-Americans who are survivors of the war, immigration, and the everchanging difficulties of acculturation and assimilation.
Tiana's interwoven strands form a surprisingly easy, though seemingly unholy, alliance. From her former niche as Hollywood martial arts tough cookie, fast on her draw and her "hi-ya's," to interviewing survivors of the My Lai massacre, is a big jump. Her authorial approach is friendly and familiar, narrating with a conversational gusto pleasant even to those more accustomed to a TV talk show host than a PBS ethnographer. Although both Tiana's father and uncle held prominent positions in the South Vietnamese administration--her uncle was Defense Minister--she belies her own less than political steamroller approach by referring to them informally as "the head cheese" and her "feisty" uncle. The recounting of her years before the making of the film are engagingly humble, with lively tales of her childhood in Vietnam when she was coaxed into finishing her dinner by threats of Ho Chi Minh tearing her up, and later naively agreeing with her classmates in America that all the "gooks" were bad.
Visually Tiana often reads more as interviewer than participant, reliant as one may be on how war and Third World documentarians usually conduct themselves onscreen. When the filmmaker appears in a bright red jeans ensemble while interviewing in North Vietnam, she reveals herself to be as much a child of Hollywood as she is of anywhere else. "I felt like an outsider," says Tiana in voice-over. "I didn't look the same as the North Vietnamese^. I didn't talk the same." Even in her familial South Vietnam, among people she once knew or communicates more kinship with, Tiana remains a visitor and moderator, her manner and relation to the people her camera encounters disturbingly ambiguous. But what are war, Vietnam, or biographical documentaries supposed to be like, anyway? And how does a first-person documentarian fit herself into these narrow genres most often defined by white male liberal guilt and nostalgia?
From Hollywood to Hanoi introduces a promising new filmmaker with powerful subject matter. With a sequel ready to be cut, and Oliver Stone himself on the board of her Southeast Asian/European/American cultural arts board, Tiana's new career should be something to watch.
Tiana Thi Thanh Nga was born in Saigon and lived there until 1966, when she moved with her family to America and became a U.S. citizen. She studied acting and directing and worked with Asian-American filmmakers such as Wayne Wang and Emiko Omari. As an actress, she has appeared in a variety of feature films and TV series. She began work on From Hollywood to Hanoi as "a search for roots and identity" in 1988, when she first returned to Vietnam. She subsequently made more than twelve trips to her homeland, filming over seventy hours of footage with a Vietnamese crew she and her cameramen trained, and spent a year and a half editing the film in New York. Tiana has stated her desire with the film to tell the story of the millions of Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) who feel, because of pressures from within the Vietnamese community in America, that they can never return to Communist Vietnam. "In Vietnam," Tiana explains, "I met many American veterans who believe, as I do, that true healing cannot take place until all parties acknowledge the lingering issues and the need for reconciliation. There is a lot of unfinished business in Vietnam we must begin to address." Cineaste spoke to Tiana shortly after the opening of her film at The Film Forum in New York City.
Cineaste: What motivated you to make From Hollywood to Hanoi?
Tiana Thi Thanh Nga: Ever since I was five years old, growing up in America, I've had this recurring dream in which there were five Vietnamese women. When I was taking acting classes, my acting coach encouraged me to look into my dreams for my sources, so I began doing these Vietnamese women. Lily Tomlin, who was in my class, said I was funny and ought to do a one-woman show. I started to write a comedy called DMZ, U.S.A., sort of a Vietnamese version of a Wayne Wang film. While working on it, I realized I didn't know very much about my own culture. How could I do a spoof when I didn't even know what it meant to be Vietnamese? It really frustrated me.
Cineaste: You were already established in Hollywood by this time?
Tiana: I wasn't a huge star but I had a home in L.A., two cars, an agent from Creative Artists Agency. I knew people. I could pick up the phone and call Ted Ashley, the CEO of Warner Bros. I had done music videos. I didn't lack material things, but I was becoming disenchanted. There was a whole part of my identity which I didn't know anything about. Corny as it sounds, I began asking myself the fundamental question: Who am I?
Cineaste: At this point you returned to Vietnam?
Tiana: Yes, my first trip was with Vietnam veterans. I didn't really know what to expect. I guess I believed all the American propaganda about Vietnam.
Cineaste: You didn't go with the idea of making a film?
Tiana: Not at the beginning, but from the first day we landed in Hanoi, I knew there would be more trips. We were in Vin, the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh. We were stranded with a flat tire, and people came out to help us. One woman was very helpful. I told her I would be back some day and asked what she would like me to bring her. She replied, "Materials to build a bridge." I thought, "Oh my God, I'm not U.S. Steel." Then she broke out into this sonnet and said, "A bridge we may cross together and share a new language." That really moved me. When I got back to the States, I sold everything I had and formed Friendship Bridge Productions. My friends thought I was totally crazy.
Cineaste: It does have a fairy tale quality.
Tiana: Yeah, one about a girl who was torn from her roots because of a war nobody understood. However, that girl happens to come from Vietnam, so her story has very particular political overtones. At the core, it's a story about searching for home, and looking for daddy's approval. And, in a funny way, I found it. I found all those old men in the Politburo who run the Communist Party and who had fought the French and won. To them, I was the daughter returning home. They accepted me with open arms. That was amazing. The whole country accepted me. To them I was just a Vietnamese living abroad.
Cineaste: You weren't really thinking in explicit political terms.
Tiana: Well, it became apparent rather quickly that my film was going to be political. My father had been the Press Secretary of South Vietnam. When he realized that the South was going to lose, he brought us all to America. On my second trip to Vietnam I found family members that I had been told had been killed by the Communists. I was appalled at the lack of communication between the U.S. and Vietnam. I realized that we Americans have been sold a bill of goods that was nowhere near the reality. Hollywood has really done us a great disservice by stuffing Rambo down our throats. Americans think of Vietnam as a war, not a country of seventy million people who are friendly towards the West and who welcome American visitors. I thought I had to do a miniseries to get it all in, something like Postwar Vietnam: The Lost Years. That first trip touched off a five and a half year odyssey. My first cuts were four to five hours long. I had scenes about MIAs, about POWs, about this, about that, everything.
Cineaste: How did the miniseries idea change into this very personal and quirky feature that has the charm of a home movie?
Tiana: When I showed the early cuts, everyone said I was trying to do too much. They wanted to know my story. Why was I doing this or that? Where was I from? How had I grown up in America? In other words, they wanted my personal story. And they were right. The minute I honed in on that, the film clicked. I realized the film would be much more engaging when I told the story I knew best, my life. I only had to find a way to juxtapose the two sides of my identity. I had to explore the fact that I was Vietnamese, but I was also this American kid who lived in Hollywood.
Cineaste: The montage style of editing expresses that dichotomy formally. It is one of the reasons the film is so funny. Would you explain how you and Roger Shulte, your editor, cut the film?
Tiana: You mean the messiness? laughs^. It was that way from the beginning because of the way I shot the film. I shot from sheer curiosity. I kept chasing issue after issue. It keeps screaming at me. I'm consumed by what didn't get into the first film. For instance, I interviewed a sixteen-year-old Vietnamese girl who was raped repeatedly at sea by Thai pirates. She shaved her head because she was ashamed and believed it was all her fault. We didn't know where to put it into this movie. It's another story. My sequel is going to be even more schizophrenic, even more exciting, and maybe even less structured. Real nonfiction stories don't come in neat packages. I've got seventy-five hours of film, which would be fine if I was doing that miniseries.
Cineaste: Do you think your film has made some impact on America?
Tiana: No, I don't think I'm impacting America at all!
Cineaste: If five thousand people saw the film, would you feel some satisfaction in knowing you had reached at least that number?
Tiana: I know for a fact that over twenty thousand people have seen the film so far. I was at every showing until the film opened at the Film Forum in New York and I've added up all the audiences for those first ten months. I've talked to people as they came out of screenings. I know that at least six of them have gone to Vietnam. Two have opened an orphanage and four are doing volunteer work. I'm in touch with them. I know that even if the film were never shown again, the stone has been thrown into the lake and the ripple effect is reverberating. On the other hand, I would love to have twenty million see my work, because--and I know I'm repeating myself--this is a film about a country and a culture we here in America know very little about.
Cineaste: How would you summarize your experience with this film?
Tiana: We live in a visual world. If you have something to say, film is a great medium, especially nonfiction film that can illuminate people as it entertains them. That's how I see myself. If I can illuminate people about Vietnam while I entertain them, then I will be very, very pleased. My advice to other would-be independent filmmakers is that the most important thing, and maybe this goes for life in general, is to find something you are passionate about, something that has really gotten under your skin. Otherwise, you won't do it. It's too hard. There are too many forces that will make you want to quit every day.
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