During my freshman year of high school, while working on a history assignment, I came across a photograph of the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk protesting South Vietnam’s regime in 1963. The American photographer Malcolm W. Browne won 1963 World Press Photo of the Year for capturing the burning monk. Reading the caption in my textbook and looking up the photograph online, I was confused to learn that the monk was protesting the Southern Vietnamese government under Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm for discrimination against Buddhists. Wasn’t my family on the side of South Vietnam? Aren’t we Catholic? Does that mean we’re the bad guys? Otherwise, why did this monk go through such lengths to protest? When I came home to ask my dad if he knew anything about the photograph, he simply told me that the photographer wasn’t showing the other side of the story. I could not imagine what context could undermine a person’s self-immolation, or that imperfect narratives and multiple truths can exist.
American photographers continued to capture iconic images of the war that brought “authentic” suffering back to American homes and raised public outcry, contributing to the last of American troops leaving Saigon on April 30th, 1975. After the war, waves of South Vietnamese refugees escaping persecution from the new North Vietnamese government came and rebuilt their lives in the United States. Growing up in the heart of the Vietnamese community in Garden Grove, the most populous Little Saigon of the Vietnamese diaspora, I’ve internalized stories of pain, sacrifice, and pride from the very first days I attended weekend Vietnamese school at my local Catholic church. Our local streets are lined with the Republic of Vietnam flag, and there is no day where that is more visible than on Vietnamese New Year at the parade down Bolsa Avenue. At the same time, I was educated by the American public school system, a child of Vietnamese refugees just old enough to read and praise Tim O’Brien’s moving short stories about the trauma that American soldiers faced in ‘Nam, but not keen enough to wonder why all the people like me are caricatured. And I continued to encounter in history textbooks the images of my people in distress, credited to American photographers, and leaving me to only imagine the inevitable death of the Vietnamese subjects, nameless.
But as the children of Vietnamese refugees get older and reckon with the cognitive dissonance of representation and misrepresentation, there has been a wave of talking back and alternative archives – in graphic novels, in books, in film. Over the years, Viet Film Fest (VFF) has given these thoughtful films the spotlight to spark discussion – including director Naja Pham Lockwood’s On Healing Land, Birds Perch (Đất lành chim đậu) which shared the Grand Jury Trống Đồng Award for Best Short this year with Julian Doan’s Long’s Long Lost & Mini Mart.
On Healing Land, Birds Perch was also shortlisted for the 98th Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film. Also on the 15-film shortlist was We Were the Scenery, which played at VFF this year.
At the center of the 34-minute short film On Healing Land, Birds Perch is the photograph “Saigon Execution,” taken by American photographer Eddie Adams. As all similar stories go, the photograph won the World Press Photo of the Year in 1968, and Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. The harrowing image shows a Vietnamese soldier in uniform sternly pointing a revolver to the head of a Vietnamese man in civilian clothes whose expression appears terribly pained. The story seems simple: a cold-blooded war criminal is shooting an innocent civilian, war brings out the worst of humanity, and we should not repeat history’s violent mistakes. Even as newspaper captions at the time or history textbooks will explain that the man holding the gun is South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan and that he is shooting the enemy, Việt Cộng captain Nguyễn Văn Lém, who happened to be wearing civilian clothing, the emotional impact of seeing a man seconds before he is shot on the streets will bring more American public outcry against a brutal, unpopular war.
I first encountered “Saigon Execution” not in an American history textbook, and not from this short film, but in The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir by Vietnamese American illustrator Thi Bui published in 2017. Bui reflects upon her refugee family’s experience during and after the Vietnam War. In one chapter, Bui’s father recalls how the South Vietnamese soldiers – men like police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan – harshly treated their own people like criminals while trying to identify spies and protect them. When Bui asks about Nguyễn Ngọc Loan and “Saigon Execution,” her father acknowledges: “You know, the American media broadcast that all over the world and made South Việt Nam look bad – but no one talks about how that same Việt Cộng, just hours before, had murdered an entire family in their home!” Bui becomes confused if her father is defending Nguyễn Ngọc Loan when it is clear that he dislikes him, but the contradictions in her father’s stories that troubled her pan out to a wider discussion of Americans’ oversimplifications of the good guys and bad guys of the Vietnam War. Learning about “Saigon Execution” from a fellow Vietnamese American made reflecting on our history somewhat less traumatic, at least compared to my encounter with the photograph of the burning monk in a textbook.
While Bui uses “Saigon Execution” to demonstrate just one of many examples of misrepresentation and simplifications when Americans control the Vietnam War narrative, film director Naja Pham Lockwood remains focused on the photograph itself, reanimating that flashpoint with the testimonies of the subjects’ adult children. On Healing Land, Birds Perch is a bold film that digs deep, entrenching the audience in the heartbreaking emotions of intergenerational pain and north-south enmity that sear even as half a century has passed since the war’s end. The documentary interviews Huan, son of South Vietnam’s Lieutenant Colonel Tuan whose family was murdered under Captain Lém’s orders; June, daughter of General Loan; and Thong and Loan, children of Captain Lém. The film moves from the shared joys of Tết, to Tết 1968, when the Tết Offensive changed their families’ lives forever, to intense testimonies that the viewer cannot look away from.
In the short documentary, Lockwood wrests “Saigon Execution” away from the American eye and asks the Vietnamese subject to talk back. What results is a compelling, rich exercise for the audience, who receive the raw, tearful, contradictory words from the generation after the photograph’s subjects. How would we have reacted if we, like June, were in class one day and saw a photograph of our father in the history textbook, shooting another man, and hear our friends ask why he did that? What would we have done if it was our father, now dishonored and working in a restaurant in Virginia, was at risk of being deported back to Vietnam, because of what the photograph captured? On the flip side, what if our father was shot on the streets of Saigon during wartime, and we, like Thong, had a photograph of his pained expression moments before his death? And we knew who the man holding the gun was, and we had to see this violent photograph broadcasted every memorial day because our father was a martyr for the nation. What if his body was never found? And another angle – what if we, like Huan, were the sole survivor when our family was massacred by the enemy, and we had a photograph of the execution of the man who gave the orders? What if a park was built over your family’s corpses when the enemy won and rebuilt the nation, and there is no longer a grave, a site to hold your mourning rites? Lockwood’s project connects the subjects of this shared tragedy with sensitivity. Even in their contradictory stories – Loan’s daughter can never see her father as a killer just as Lém’s children will never believe that their father would give orders to massacre a family – the viewer realizes that the stories of what the Northern Vietnamese and Southern Vietnamese lost are two sides of the same coin, are part of the single story of war.
I grew up listening to the Southern Vietnamese version of the war, the ones who lost a homeland, and paid for it through inhumane years of reeducation camps, refugee camps, and the migratory journey to build a home and raise a family with little in strange foreign land. With the American public education system and non-Vietnamese friends, I encountered mainstream versions of the war. But I am farthest away from Northern Vietnamese versions of the war. I was fascinated by my own discomfort to realize that Lockwood had entered the home of Lém’s children to hear their side of the story. It almost felt invalidating to hear his children’s vehement denial that their father would ever give orders to massacre a family, upsetting me to the point of doubting whether their tearful mourning of a father who they lost as kids was genuine. Meanwhile, it felt tragic and I sympathized to hear June say that she can’t see her father as a murderer, which I acknowledge is essentially the same thing that Lém’s children felt.
While non-Vietnamese viewers will of course have their takeaways from Lockwood’s masterful storytelling about how war affects not individuals but families over generations, as a Vietnamese American I find that Lockwood strikes at matters of remembering and healing that are at the heart of the diasporic Vietnamese community. Does never forgetting the past stand in the way of healing? What does my generation, the children of refugees, lose because of our distance from the traumatic past, when we pursue a connection to modern Vietnam, because it is impossible to experience our parent’s Vietnam? But if I hold onto my elders’ pain and grudges, I’m afraid that I risk not seeing the humanity of people like Lém’s children, and the universal truth that no one truly wins in war. The film shows that the pain that Huan, June, Thong and Loan experienced decades ago are as visceral as yesterday. Fifty years may be just long enough to dampen the memory of the pain, torture, and loss, or it may not. I’m hesitant if my parents will bear to listen to the northern Vietnamese side of the story, of their losses, but I also will not judge them. June herself did not return to Vietnam, fearing that to return to the country under the new regime would be a betrayal to her father. But she understood that her children wanted to see their parents’ origins, a physical place, even if it is far from the same Vietnam. Perhaps it is simply that different generations have different needs.
On Healing Land, Birds Perch is not only an alternative archive, but a facilitator for discussion, a prompter of hard stories and unresolved feelings. I am aware that remembrance and memorialization of the war and its aftermath is imperfect. On Healing Land, Birds Perch is not a perfect or superior narrative of commemorating the war or reckoning with grief and healing. But I firmly believe in Vietnamese-centered stories that try anyway. Because what our elders need to hear from us, especially if we get their story wrong, they will ask for, and correct us. On Healing Land, Birds Perch has proven that films and film screenings are powerful, perhaps efficient communal experiences to share and prompt multi-faceted oral histories among the diaspora.
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
