Bolero for Film and Memory

intense anniversary and the good fortune of getting your filmmaker friends to re-create your favorite childhood memory

Hello from D.C.—

April 30th is the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and I’m very grateful to get to participate in a couple events that will touch directly upon this very heavy, tender nerve with fellow Vietnamese artists. Tomorrow night I’ll be at the Smithsonian with my friend and collaborator Tuan Andrew Nguyen.

It is free for anyone in town and will also be streaming live:

https://americanart.si.edu/events/artists-conversation-tuan-andrew-nguyen-and-thao-nguyen-island-april-23-2025

We will be discussing Tuan’s film The Island that is exhibiting at the Smithsonian, our individual bodies of work, and also Amongst the Disquiet, the film we made with producer Marion Hill in New Orleans.

I’ve never fully explained the film in this newsletter because it is a bit hard to explain- but it is essentially a music film interwoven with scripted narrative scenes based on diasporic Vietnamese community in New Orleans, culminating in a love letter from our generation to our elders. It was up in the New Orleans Museum of Art and is headed to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

I wrote songs for the film score and from the start I knew I needed to try writing my tribute to/ rendition of a Vietnamese bolero. As a child I witnessed these songs transport all the adults I knew. I regarded them as carrying magic; somehow as soon as they came on they added color and dimension to all the people around me. The grown ups would hear them and pair off to dance and you would feel the air shift, all energies and elements coalescing in the understanding that these bodies were not just made for labor and running for your life. And my god the love and romance and emotion of these songs, reminding everyone their hearts were not just for enduring loss. Well, every Vietnamese song and poem my mom loves is sad as hell so maybe they are, but loss of love, not loss of country and family.

These moments of song and dance ( I am realizing right now) were my first encounter with the power of music as balm and escape and deliverance.

A draft passage from my book of essays, to try and further explain how these songs hit me:

Vietnamese bolero can break you with your own longing. It can chime and stir your insides until the vibrations dislodge the nectar and the morass and it all pours out of you, conferring, melding with the singer’s voice, circling right in front of your throat and then cresting in a wave of lava that laps back and incinerates you. The best vocalists do this. They manipulate the inherent intonations of the Vietnamese language, themselves already musical, and guide words and syllables in and out of melody, and tremolo, tremble a long note, crystalize it at the perfect second, crack and bend its pitch, so that it feels like all the world and all of history is pleading. They can make you want to stop living right then, just to have a moment to consider your life. They can make you proud of how gracefully your people metabolize pain.

an example:

As we were getting ready to shoot the film, I wondered if there was any way we could incorporate a composite memory of my favorite moments from childhood. My parents loved to go dancing with their friends, and I loved to be brought along, happily ignored, just wandering around watching everyone in joyful reprieve.

I sent my Tuan and Marion another passage from the book:

The dance halls. I’ll call them dance halls because they were so much more than a temporary sheet-vinyl dance floor in the Harvest Moon Restaurant or someone’s cleared
basement. However I can remember the dancing, I will. Sweet memories are not about
accuracy, they are about safe harbor. You keep them well maintained and embellished as
needed so you can steal away from time to time.
I remember being eye level with waists and torsos. Thin leather belts, fabric swishing.
Curves. Panty-hosed legs and low heels. Hips. Graceful, manicured fingers resting lightly onstrong, scrubbed hands. Strobe lights from Party City and disco ball refractions swinging through the room, catching sequins from dresses bought at Macy’s or Nordstrom’s or Filene’s Basement. Smiling, cackling, levity. Forlorn yet soaring notes, bright, resonant snares.

Stateless men and women with varying degrees of fight still left in them, whom I knew
personally, were free and joyful, out from under memory and worry for the evening.

And lo and behold the shoot schedule was such that we were embedding within this South Vietnemese military veterans’ celebration that was already taking place, where there would be a dj and dancing, and the crew installed a disco ball, bless them forever and ever, and then I saw my memories happening again right in front of me. When does a person ever get this? I cried for the gift of it.

And we also did the twist, if you are hanging out with Vietnamese elders you are alwasy going to end up doing the twist.

and below as a thank you to paid subscribers I’ve included a rough mix of the bolero I wrote for the film. First time writing and singing entirely in Vietnamese.

x

t