Viewing Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam as an Oral Historian

Now an accomplished actor with appearances in numerous theatrical productions, Trieu Tran recounts his personal journey fleeing from Vietnam to growing up in the U.S. in a critically-acclaimed play, Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam. Written by Tran himself in collaboration with the director, Robert Egan, Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam is a powerful story about survival, redemption and ultimately, an act of bravery. Scholar, activist, and diaCRITIC Thuy Vo Dang shares her experience watching this one-man show and why it’s one that you don’t want to miss.

Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes! Read more details.

Trieu Tran in "Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam" at ACT - A Contemporary Theatre
“Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam” by Trieu Tran.

Trieu Tran’s ninety minutes on stage was like a time warp for me, conjuring ghosts of the past I’ve almost imagined gone. “Ninety minutes, no intermission,” we were told before the performance began. The set was wood and bamboo, decorated simply with somber photographs arranged neatly in columns behind an ancestral altar. At stage center there was a huge bowl of water serving as prop and focal point. Dynamic images floated across the panel of screens flanking both sides of the stage, carrying us across space and time from the jungles of Vietnam to the overwhelming whiteness of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and the urban streets of Boston.

Uncle-Ho-stage
The center of the stage

diacritics-donate_header_box_640x120

For me Uncle Ho to Uncle Sam was a reckoning with the ghosts of a troubled refugee past. The range of experiences Tran embodied onstage, from the devastating loss of the homeland and imprisonment of his father to the boat passage from Vietnam complete with savage pirates, is the stuff of drama indeed. After spending the last two years interviewing and processing over a hundred interviews of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants for the Vietnamese American Oral History Project at UC Irvine, I can say that these tales did not ring novel to my ears. Yet, there was something so powerful about seeing these stories through Trieu Tran’s narration, gestures, and expressions. And then there was the conjuring of spirits and ancestors, domestic abuse, gang violence and poverty. Every terrible thing that could happen did happen to this poor refugee boy. The play was unrelenting, catapulting the boy Trieu and his family from one tragedy to the next. We were warned this would be so when he introduced his birth as the beginning of the demise of South Vietnam. What haunted me about this one-man act was a constant sense of loss and longing, and not belonging. In his portrayal of the contradictions of refugee/immigrant/Vietnamese masculinity, he made me remember all the boys I knew in my family and community who faced such challenges—having to “be a man” at the tender age of 6 or 7, having to stand tall and walk tough even as war and its aftermaths tear your family apart.

Uncle-Ho2
Author Thuy Vo Dang (left) with Christina Woo (right), UC Irvine librarian for the Southeast Asian Archive.

Such intensity can be a burden to the audience. One critic says of his show, “the audience needs a chance to breathe in, to absorb such events. There could be more space here for that, for weaving in the telling Shakespeare motif, and for Tran’s broader perspective on what President Nixon called “peace with honor” — rather than backloading it into to a rhetorical epilogue.” I agree that the ending was somewhat weak and rhetorical, but I thought that the discomfort and the suffocation the audience should feel throughout was what the play was after. Because refugee stories do not give one room to breathe as they unfold. When one’s past is rife with such loss, longing, and un-belonging, there is no room to breathe or absorb for the one who has to survive. In the show I saw at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City on September 27, I thought the way he tried weaving in Shakespeare via Richard III seemed somewhat forced, as if Tran were nodding at the theater critics and saying, “see, I know my Western canonical stuff.” I’d rather he focus more on the humanity of his father or the quiet resilience of his mother—I wanted more of them in the show. That’s the oral historian in me who doesn’t see what the theater critic might see.

I emailed Trieu and asked him how audiences have responded to him and if he has ever experienced a predominantly Asian American audience. He told me, “I would love to see more Vietnamese filling those seats. Though I am using my personal life, it is an immigrant story, a refugee story, and that story is of the Vietnamese community.”

There’s still time to catch the last three performances on October 2, 5 and 6 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California.

 

 

_

Thuy Vo Dang earned her doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. She is working on a book examining Vietnamese American anticommunism. Her writing has been published in Amerasia JournalLe Vietnam au Feminin/Vietnam: Women’s Realities, and Nha Magazine.

_______________________________________________________________

Do you enjoy reading diaCRITICS? Then please consider subscribing! See the options to the right, via feedburner, email, and networked blogs.

Please take the time to rate this post (above) and share it (below). Ratings for top posts are listed on the sidebar. Sharing (on email, Facebook, etc.) helps spread the word about diaCRITICS. And join the conversation and leave a comment! What did you think of Thuy Vo Dang’s review? Do you share the same thoughts and reactions to this play? If you have yet to see it, did this review convince you to watch this show?

________________________________________________________________

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here