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Vietgone Information

How Mom and Dad Met, With Ninjas in the New York Times by Diep Tran

“Vietgone” may seem to be a drastic departure. The playwright calls it a “romantic comedy” about how his parents met at a refugee camp in Arkansas in 1975, having immigrated right after the Vietnam War. It’s a story that Mr. Nguyen grew up hearing and knows well, but it has also been filtered through his pop-culture-filled and irreverent sensibility.

“When my parents told me stories about Vietnam, they told me the real stories, what actually happened,” he explained. “But what I imagined was kung fu movies. Because the only things I ever saw [growing up] that had a lot of Asian people in it, were kung fu movies.”

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 In “Vietgone,” he wanted to tell a story he had never seen growing up, a story about people like his parents, South Vietnamese who fought for their country.

Movies like “Rambo” and “Platoon,” and even the musical “Miss Saigon,” provided a narrow view that turned the Vietnamese into supporting characters in their own stories, Mr. Nguyen said.

“It always made me go: ‘Oh no, you’re the other! You’re either the other we’re killing or the other we’re saving!’” he added. “‘You’re never going to be the lead character.’”

Not in “Vietgone.” In a world where leading roles for Asian-American men and women are still rare and Asian-American characters are sometimes whitewashed, it was important for Mr. Nguyen to create “strong Asian-American characters,” he said. “They’re cool, and they’re sexy, and they’re not exotic. They can be feminist, strong women, and they can be sexy men.”

Qui Nguyen Keeps It in the Family With ‘Vietgone’ in American Theatre Magazine by May Adrales

May Adrales: Can you talk about why you wanted to tell this story and why it came out at this particular time in your life?
Qui Nguyen: I’ve always wanted to tell my family’s stories. However, my first attempt at doing so was absolutely horrendous. Seriously, it was complete dog shit. It was a play called Trial by Water, which I wrote in grad school. I had never written a play before, so I had no voice as a writer; all I could do was imitate scribes that I liked. At that time, the writer that influenced me the most was David Henry Hwang. I imitated him the best I could, wrote the play, and surprisingly it was produced Off-Broadway a few years after I graduated. When my family finally got to see it, I looked over at my mom proudly and asked, “So what’d you think?” She responded bluntly, “It doesn’t sound like you.” I was shocked. “What do you mean it doesn’t sound like me? You’ve never read anything I’ve ever written.” I thought she was referring to my voice as a writer. What she meant was, literally, it didn’t sound like her son. She told me, “You’re mischievous and you’re funny and you like to goof around, and this play doesn’t show any of that.” My response to her was a very mature, “Screw you, Mom. If you really want to see me be all those things, I’ll write those things, and I’ll show you how much you won’t like it.”

Previous Press

Two Playwrights Talk Vietgone—Peter Sagal and Qui Nguyen

‘Vietgone,’ a Refugee Tale With Laughs and Rap from the New York Times

"Mr. Nguyen nails, rather smartly, the dissonance of immigration, which runs both ways — the Americans and the Vietnamese in the play are almost always misunderstanding one another — as well as the hegemony of the majority over the minority, as both are represented in the dominant culture."

'Vietgone': A Sex Comedy About Mom, Dad And Refugee Camps from NPR

"Anybody coming from a tumultuous situation like the Holocaust, Vietnam or Syria — they often don't want to talk about it," Nguyen said. "So the first thing I did was get my dad drunk a whole lot, and that kinda freed up the chops a little bit. But what really got them talking ... is that Asian parents really hate the idea of their kids being dumb. So I pretended to be dumb and say things like, 'Oh the Vietnam War was a war between Vietnam and France, right?' And they're like, 'No, that's wrong! Why you so stupid?'

Kinda getting them atrociously mad was the thing that got them to open up to me.”

Trailers for Vietgone

At OSF
At Manhattan Theatre Club
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