HBO’s “Sympathizer” shows that Hollywood has come a long way
I haven’t felt this jealous in a long time, even though I’m watching a know-it-all director torture yet another Hollywood movie about the Vietnam War. You know, the kind where stereotypical peasants in straw conical hats are yelled at and shot at, and the corny fear- and drug-filled American soldiers who blow up everything. At least this movie doesn’t have an overused bitch archetype peddling the “I’ve been in love with you for a long time” line.
What I’m actually watching is Episode 4 of the HBO miniseries “The Sympathizer,” based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. According to the book, the show about a half-French, half-Vietnamese spy is a biting commentary on American Vietnam War literature and films. As also applies to the book, the miniseries doesn’t spare us from the Vietnamese either. There is a lot of hypocritical guilt on both sides.
Why am I jealous?
“The Sympathizer” stars Robert Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh, but the majority of the cast is Vietnamese who speak actual Vietnamese lines that appear subtitled in English — throughout the show’s seven episodes, with the finale airing Sunday. This is a long way from what the Hollywood box office numbers dictated when I was in a Vietnam War movie.
“The Great Vietnam War Novel Was Not Written by an American”
Three decades ago, I had 15-minute lines in Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth, and even a scene with Tommy Lee Jones. At the time, American audiences had no appetite for subtitled films. When we Vietnamese actors talked to other Vietnamese characters, we spoke American English instead of Vietnamese. However, when we talked to American characters, we had to speak in pidgin English.
For me, who came here with my family at age 8 as the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and who grew up in Phoenix before becoming a Los Angeles Times reporter, it was, to say the least, awkward.
It’s a different story for The Sympathizer team.
“We had an entire team responsible for translating the dialogue and subtitling,” Susan Downey, who along with her husband also serve as executive producers of the HBO show, said in an email. “Don McKellar, the producers and our post department will work with this team to ensure that the true meaning or feeling behind the Vietnamese script is the same as – or as close as we can get to – the meaning and feeling of the English translation, even if the translation is not always word for word.”
“I think The Sympathizer is a good movie, but I hope the community doesn’t forget the work we’ve done,” Oliver emailed me.
How can we forget what Oliver Stone did for our society? When I first read the script for Heaven and Earth, I cried. In the 1990s, when Asians in general, let alone Vietnamese Americans, did not see themselves represented on television or the big screen, Oliver amplified the story of a village girl who should have remained invisible to history.
“You’re my Kim”:How I Got a Movie in Hollywood and Gained a Family from ‘Heaven and Earth’.
Oliver based his 1993 film on Le Ly Hayslip’s memoir, which recounts her childhood in central Vietnam. Because her village was caught between communist North Vietnam and Washington-backed South Vietnam, she became a teenage Viet Cong fighter, then grew up to become a businesswoman survivor, and finally a widow and philanthropist in California.
Coincidentally, Li Li, Li’s older sister since we met while filming “Heaven and Earth,” introduced me to Viet Thanh Nguyen via email in 2017 after The New York Times published his column, “The Great Vietnam War.” The novel was not written by an American.”
In his column, the USC associate professor wrote of Lu Li: “I read her book when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in the early 1990s. It moved me deeply, not only because it was a compelling memoir, but also because it was one of the few books in English by a woman writer. Vietnamese (co-written, in her case, with Jay Wurts).”
Nguyen’s column was published a year after he won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Sympathizer, attracting Hollywood attention.
A USC professor turns Hollywood producer
Last month, after the premiere of the HBO miniseries, I wrote about “Sympathizer” co-star Keu Sinh, the Vietnamese film star of my childhood even in America. I wanted a quote from Nguyen — who is also one of the show’s executive producers — so I emailed him. And he did not disappoint, writing: “Que Sinh is a legend of Vietnamese cinema and popular culture.”
And this month, I finally met Nguyen in person in Washington, D.C., at a small dinner party before a Smithsonian Q&A session about adapting his book for the screen. The professor-turned-producer greeted me, smiled, and said it was good to respect Kieu Chinh, whom he called a “fraud.”
I knew right away that he meant it as a compliment, and we were amazed that at the age of 86, Kieu Shinh is still working hard in an industry as unforgiving as Hollywood. The movie legend still loves her craft.
Beyond “M*A*S*H” and “Joy Luck Club”:From “Homeless in the Clouds” to working with Robert Downey Jr., Kieu Chinh keeps moving forward
My husband and I were fortunate to have met Nguyen in a small group. That night at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art, the room was packed with people with lots of questions. The Q&A was presented in partnership with the Vietnamese Society and moderated by Sylvia Chung, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and author of Oriental Obscenity: Violence and Racial Imaginaries in the Vietnam Era.
The event attracted diplomats, film buffs, and young Vietnamese Americans working on their writing and film projects.
One question stood out to me, from an older Vietnamese man who asked me in English: “You used to live in Hollywood as the US Ministry of Information and now you ‘sympathize’ with Hollywood. How many Vietnamese do you think it has?”
Even though the questioner sat at the front and most of the audience couldn’t see him, you could hear the twinkle in his voice. We in the audience actually laughed and then applauded his question.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, charming and calm throughout the night, replied: “I realize that I live in a multi-layered contradiction. I was going to do a small role (for The Sympathizer) and I told Park (co-director) Chan Wook, ‘Look, I want to blow myself up in filming because I deserve it as a sold-out person.’ Hollywood.
“You put it in a much nicer way,” Nguyen told the older Vietnamese researcher. “But I think I have to give Hollywood some credit. Hollywood has changed. It’s not the same Hollywood that was mocked in the novel and TV series in the 1970s.”
“At every turn, I expected the worst and at every turn, Hollywood surprised me. And I think it’s because we assembled the right team of collaborators. I gave the book to my collaborators at HBO and A24 and I thought it was worth the risk,” Nguyen said.
“The novel is a lever to move certain things in the world and it’s been successful and it’s sold a lot of copies and then we have a TV series. And hopefully the TV series will be a lever, with all its faults, to hopefully ‘budge’ the world a little more so that the next Vietnamese and Asian American productions that will come out of Hollywood have more More stories and more opportunities for actors and service providers.”
It was Nguyen’s turn to tease the audience: “The point is, as Claude, the CIA agent, said in the first episode – it’s wet in here; you have to dig into it. That’s what it’s like to work in Hollywood.”
Thuan Lou Elston, opinion editor at USA TODAY, is the author of “Rendezvous at the Altar: From Vietnam to Virginia.”
