FEBRUARY 16, 2007
JUStlOUt 21
"My work is not about entertaining.
It's about the experience I want to share
with the audience....
It's more of an interpersonal communication.
Minh Tran
By 1979, the government was proposing to
lower the draft age to 13, so Tran’s parents
decided to send their sons out of the country.
Tran didn’t know about the decision until
he was awakened at 4 a.m. one morning. His
mother was burning his baby pictures. He and
his brothers were handed three envelopes full of
the money that his mother had been saving, so
they could bribe their way through to refugee
camps in Thailand.
They left with no luggage. The all-important
contact information for their sponsors was
written in their underwear in permanent ink, in
anticipation of the boys losing everything but
that last layer.
The brothers were on the road for three
months. They bounced from town to town,
waiting to meet their guides, or informers, at
bus stations and train terminals, sleeping in the
streets with no more shelter than a rented mos
quito net. They worked on their tans so they
could pass as laborers, instead of standing out as
city people.
Tran barely understood what was happening.
“I wasn’t a street-smart person," he reflects
today.
Eventually, the brothers reached a refugee
camp in Thailand, about six hours from
Bangkok. There, in an encampment not much
larger than a football field, with only a small
tarp for shelter, they waited for word from their
sponsors. Approximately 74,000 people were
living in the camp.
Tran spent eight months in the camp before he got on a boat bound for the United States. The
55-foot-long fishing boat had nearly 65 refugees crammed below deck with the fish.
Tran still recalls how nauseated he was by the smell of diesel emanating from the boat’s engines.
He was seasick from the moment he set foot on the boat till he deboarded several days later.
Those days were spent with no food, no water, no chance to leave the hold—except when the
boat was taken by pirates.
The first pirates to stop the fishmg boat were relatively nonviolent. They took the refugees on
board their own vessel and fed them. Then they stripped and searched everyone, kxtking for gold or
U.S. currency. The Levi’s jacket that Tran’s brother was wearing was one of the first items to be con
fiscated. Tran secretly swallowed his ring to keep it from being stolen.
The second group of pirates, who found less to take from the refugees, were “not very happy,” Tran
recounts.
The third time the boat was boarded, there was nothing at all left to steal. So the pirates started
raping the passengers.
Until that point in his life, Tran had never seen a naked human body. Surrounded by other help
less refugees, with no end to the journey in sight, Tran considered slipping off the boat into the (Kean,
D avid W. O wens
at -
Tran arrived in Portland on Sept. 18, 1980,
with two pieces of paper and the clothes on his
back. He didn’t speak a word of English.
When telling the story of his life, Tran skims
over his high school years, mentioning little
except that he spent the time struggling to come
to terms with his harrowing journey to the
States.
During college, however, Tran found both of
the loves of his life: He gravitated to dance stud
ies at Portland State University, and he met his
husband, Gary Nelson.
Tere Mathern, a respected local choreogra
pher and co-director of Conduit Dance, was one
of Tran’s first modern dance teachers. The two
are still friends and colleagues today.
When Tran first became her student,
Mathern recalls that he already had the poise of
a performer, perhaps because of his early training
in Vietnamese opera, and he quickly picked up
the techniques she taught. “It was apparent that
there was something special about him,” she
says.
Tran was invited to join The Company We
Keep, PSU’s professional dance company. Within the company, he danced in works choreographed
by Mathem.
The two also shared the stage as dancers, finding that they had a natural affinity for each other’s
style and rhythm. Through the years they would explore and build on that symbiosis, as their rela
tionship evolved from student-teacher to colleague-colleague.
In 1989 Tran graduated frotp PSU with a bachelor’s degree in business administration/informa-
tion systems and quantitative analysis and with a certificate of dance. He spent the next several years
working with a variety of dance artists, including Northwest dancemakers such as Mary Oslund, Gregg
Bielemeier, Bonnie Merrill and Mathern.
The Oregonian archives reveal what dance writer Barry Johnson thought about Tran’s dancing: He
repeatedly referred to Tran as “graceful” and “precise.”
Of Tran’s 1991 performance in Sue Brantley’s work, Johnson wrote: “Tran displayed the supple
ness and confidence that have made him the favorite of l<Kal choreographers. Tran can make almost
anything kxik gtxxj because he has such command of such a broad range of movement.”
Tran also flirted with a career in New York City, studying with choreographer Stephen Petronio.
Continued on Page 22
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