EDITION
HOUSING SPECIAL
April 27, 2016
Mississippi
Alberta
North Portland
Page 11
Vancouver
East County
Beaverton
photo by J enny g raham , o regon s hakespeare f estival .
Quang (James Ryen) and Nhan (Will Dao) argue over what to do as Saigon falls in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of ‘Vietgone.’
Between Vietnam and America
Artists outside
dominant culture
ind their voices
Why do I know so little about the per-
spective of Vietnamese refugees to the
U.S.? Why have I never seen a sex com-
edy involving two compelling Vietnamese
immigrants? Why do I expect Vietnamese
characters living in the U.S. to speak in
broken English?
These are among the questions that rose
for me as I experienced the Oregon Shake-
speare Festival’s production of “Vietgone,”
which opened this month and plays until
late October. Based on the experiences
of playwright Qui Nyugen’s parents, who
o Pinionated
J udge
by J udge
d arleen o rtega
immigrated to the U.S. as refugees in the
mid-1970s, the play moves back and forth
in time between Vietnam and their early
years in the U.S., including their meeting
in a refugee camp and the steamy affair
that began their relationship. Though Nyu-
gen’s parents told him most of his life that
they had fallen in love at irst sight in that
refugee camp in Arkansas, they admitted to
him more recently that the truth is a bit
more coarse than that -- though also a tale
of how they saved each other in a time
when both were traumatized and longing
for home.
Most of the few immigrant stories that
make it into American popular culture in-
volve people who were desperate to move
here to make a better life for themselves; I
suspect that, at some level, the experience
of immigrants who came reluctantly and
pine for home deies American expecta-
tions. Nyugen’s father, Quang, was a pilot
with the South Vietnamese army, and his
mother, Tong, worked in the U.S. embassy
in Saigon. They both escaped to the U.S. to
avoid certain death when the South Viet-
namese capitol was invaded; Quang left
behind a wife and two kids who he had no
way of retrieving, and Tong left behind a
beloved brother.
The play’s humor and raunchiness never
obscures that these two 30-year-olds didn’t
want to be in the U.S. They were in an-
guish about the state of things at home, and
folks in the U.S. saw in them only their
Vietnamese enemy. The two refugees have
left behind lives they cared about, and have
traded respectability for places at the bot-
tom of the social ladder.
As presented here, Nyugen’s parents
defy stereotypes. Quang (James Ryen) is
tall and muscular and virile; Tong (Jeena
Yi) is self-assured and irreverent. They
utter their dialogue in perfect American
C ontinued on p age 17