The photos are, frankly, grotesque. There’s an uncanny valley quality to them: You can tell that this man, based on the lighting and costuming, is performing. And from how thin and dark his eyes are, he must be Asian. But the skin of his eyelids is stiff and artificial. Even if you didn’t know that this man is actually a white British actor clad in latex prosthetics, you would be able to tell that something’s off.
The actor is Jonathan Pryce, who played the Engineer in the original production of the musical Miss Saigon on the West End, winning a Tony for the same role a few years later. He is also at the center of criticism about the show. In an interview, he describes the “special makeup” he wears for the character. Pryce and the talk show host both pull their eyes sideways as they talk. A young Lea Salonga sits next to them, hands folded in her lap, smiling with her teeth.
Miss Saigon is a romantic tragedy based on the Italian opera Madame Butterfly. It was written and composed by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the same artists behind Les Miserables. The story follows Kim, a Vietnamese bar girl, and Chris, an American G.I. They fall in love and get married just before Chris evacuates Sài Gòn with the U.S. military. Years later, Chris travels to Vietnam with his new, white wife to learn Kim has not only waited for his return, but has also given birth to his child. At the end of the show (spoiler!), Kim devises a plan to force Chris and his wife to take the child to America with them to give him a better life. (Like seriously, major, big papa spoiler.) She shoots herself and dies in Chris’s arms.
Miss Saigon has been criticized for racism since it came out in the 1980s. It’s also one of my favorite musicals of all time.
In the final years of the Vietnam War, my grandma, like Kim, was in love with a white American G.I. Together, they had my mom. My biological grandfather, like Chris, left Sài Gòn and started a new family in America. “He love your mom very much,” my grandma texted me, “but he were married man.” In 1975, days before the fall of Sài Gòn, my mom and some members of her family fled to America. My grandfather spent the rest of his life with his second family; none of us ever saw him again.
I understand, objectively, why I should find the musical offensive—both on a broad and personal level. The writers do exactly what Viet Thanh Nguyen criticizes Western media for: They focus on sensational moments of violence. Such sensationalization is the reason why vivid photographs, such as that of Kim Phúc running naked through the streets after a napalm attack or Thích Quảng Đức burning alive in an act of self-immolation, are so prevalent in Western memory. They are images Americans can use to talk about their own experience and memory of the war. They have also replaced the more realistic, although quiet, struggle for Vietnamese survival every day. Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “Each of us reaches this moment when we realize that the rest of the world no longer cares, if it ever did, about our memories.”
So when the musical tells us nothing about Kim’s past, beyond the fact that she is orphaned and homeless because of the war, the audience does not question it. When Kim asks Chris, “Do you want one more tale of a Vietnam girl?” it’s clear we, just like Chris, are supposed to say no. Her questions are rhetorical. And when she elaborates, only for a short while (“Do you want to be told how my village was burned? … How my parents were bodies whose faces were gone?”), her memories are incredibly vague and incredibly gruesome. The musical seeks to align itself with the long line of atrocities we already know about. As a result, Kim’s entire personal history is replaced by a very traumatic, very American understanding of the war.
The musical also frames its Vietnamese characters, especially mixed-race children, condescendingly. In their essay on feminist refugee epistemology, scholars Yến Lê Espiritu and Lan Duong challenge that Western narratives, rather than engage the Vietnamese war experience, flatten their Vietnamese characters. Miss Saigon does exactly that. The second act opens with “Bui Doi,” a song about the children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers—children who, the song tells us, were “conceived in hell / and born in strife.”
The song turns mixed-race children, including Kim and Chris’s son, into helpless objects in need of American assistance. “Someone has to pay / for their chance at life,” the chorus sings. Black-and-white photos of real children are projected on a scrim at the back of the stage. If they could see the production, Espiritu and Duong would probably say the musical evokes the war to elicit pity, and that pity serves as a substitute for an analysis of the geopolitics and empire that led to such atrocity.
I know this—that the show does a disservice to the civilians who actually lived through the war, that its portrayal of Vietnamese people is fundamentally racist. But when I think of those black-and-white projections, I can only think of my mom. I think about the way she told me so many mixed-race children were abandoned by their families after the war because they were proof of association with the enemy. I remember asking her if her mother would have left her on the streets, and the best answer she could offer was: “I hope not.”
I’ve watched the musical a few times now, a grainy bootleg recording (a.k.a. “slime tutorial”) of the 2017 Broadway revival. More than once, I’ve watched it with my sister and my mom. I remember the scene where Chris leaves Kim behind at the end of the war. As the prop helicopter flies away, the Asian actors fall to their knees and scream. “All those people know they’re going to be killed,” my mom told us, as if we were watching a documentary and not a fictional performance.
Because fiction is the closest we have to our lived experience. There are so few stories about the war that centers Vietnamese people at all, and even fewer that mention mixed-race children. The only time I’ve ever seen half-Vietnamese children of the war mentioned in Vietnamese diasporic literature was in Ocean Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments”: “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. / Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me. / Yikes.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. But I also don’t think three lines of poetry, however good they may be, is enough to represent the mixed-race experience of the war. I keep looking for more pieces of art that make me and my family feel seen, and I keep turning up with nothing.
The musical may be rooted in racism, but it’s still important to me. There’s a reason why my sister, who grew up doing theater, says Kim would have been her dream role. There’s a reason my parents saw the show live when it went on tour. It’s because Miss Saigon is, as far as I can tell, one of the only depictions of mixed Vietnamese life that exists at all. It’s the only piece of art that comes close to telling the story of my mom’s parents. Who am I to take that from her? From myself?
In the long run, I know the remedy is to make space for even more diasporic art. But for now, Miss Saigon is the best I have. So I’ll keep watching the musical, and I’ll know it’s a white man’s fantasy, this Asian girl killing herself over her American lover, and I’ll cry over that fantasy anyway.
