[Patty-Lynne Herlevi is a Seattle-based film journalist and screenwriter. She has penned film-related articles and reviews for Moviemaker and Nitrate Online. She is presently working on a book on contemporary film directors entitled Frame Canada.For more information about Patty-Lynne see http://home.earthlink.net/~pattylynne. ]
Synopsis: Chac is a film documentary of one woman’s journey through her past. Many years after the deaths of her Vietnamese mother and American (step) father, director KCT journeys back to the Mekong Delta where for the first time she meets her biological father, and learns of painful truths that changed the course of her life. This is a story of love, betrayal and redemption.
Patty-Lynne Herlevi: Coming from an Asian background did you find that your mother was stoic and didn’t reveal much to you? Is this why you said in the film that you didn’t know your mother well?
Kim-Chi Tyler: I remember growing up and the things she taught me: always go to school and make sure that you have a good job. She was very concerned about me having boyfriends too early, that men would flock to me. She wanted me to be independent because she didn’t have any money. I mean I don’t remember who taught me how to tie shoes, or how to use chopsticks, only that it wasn’t her. I can’t remember much that was physical, but the mental, like education had a lasting affect.
PLH: That reminds me of the film Joy Luck Club.
KCT: Yeah, that’s very Asian.
PLH: You and I are around the same age so we would have grown up during the same era and I remember all the anti-Vietnam war sentiments of that time. As a child, did you experience any of that?
KCT: No, when we came to the United States we went to Portland and were very isolated. We were with my (step) father’s family for three months and then we moved to Hawaii, which was also very open, but I didn’t experience or see any tension. I suspect my brother did because he’s older and he remembers more. I was just a kid and I only wanted to go to school and play with other kids. I definitely felt a little tension when I moved to Florida and went to grade school. I was in fourth grade and I really saw myself being very different, and the kids would tease me for being a ‘chink’ and would call me names like ‘gook’ or something. I didn’t understand that because it definitely didn’t happen in Hawaii, but Florida is a more Caucasian dominated society.
PLH: When people found out you were from Vietnam did they automatically start talking about the war and the soldiers they knew who died there?
KCT: For sure. I mean that was their only connection. And that’s why I made this film because I don’t want people to continue to see the Vietnamese people only in conjunction with the war. I want them to see them like a family, like every other family in every other culture.
PLH: When you were growing up, did you experience loss of relatives?
KCT: I grew up with my mother who was very protective. We had a house in Saigon and I remember my grandmother visiting me a lot. There was talk of loss of aunts and uncles because my cousins would come and live with us. But I didn’t understand why and my mother would say, well, you know, his parents or her parents died so I’m going to take care of them. But it wasn’t until recently did I realize that my grandmother’s family lost most of its members in the war because they sided with the North.
PLH: Which side was Communist and which side did the US fight with?
KCT: In the North, Ho Chi Minh started the revolution which spread South and eventually overtook my village and at one point the people didn’t know which side the others were on. But the North Vietnamese were mostly Communist, but there were Communist in the South, too. It wasn’t a black and white thing, at all. The cause appealed to the South as well. For example, my mother’s family mostly fought for the North, while two uncles from my father’s family for the South. One uncle who is still alive lost his leg and the other one was shot in the head, but they both survived, which is incredible.
PLH: How old were you when you went to Saigon?
KCT: I don’t remember. I think that I was around two or three, but my brother remembers.
PLH: How was your brother affected by his return to Vietnam, about reuniting with your Bio-Dad?
KCT: Well, he actually grew up with him. But now they are struggling. My brother is where I was four years ago before I began the film. He’s trying to figure out what happened because he heard one side of the story and I heard my mother’s. She said he (my bio-Dad) was horrible. So the two of us got together and compared stories.
PLH: When you returned to Vietnam for the first time after 25 years did you have any residual childhood memories? Did the smells set off your emotions?
KCT: Smell, definitely, as well as the visual images of food being sold on the street really moved me. I know I was once here, and that somehow I belonged here, that it was my homeland. When my brother went back for the first time, he kneeled on the ground and kissed it because he was so moved about being back in his own country.
PLH: As an assimilated American did you feel like an outsider in the country of your birth?
KCT: I suspect I’m one of the few who doesn’t feel like an outsider. When I go back to Vietnam I am a Vietnamese girl. I do what ever I am suppose to do and I don’t feel uncomfortable. I love it. I love the fact that I have to show respect to the elderly. I love the fact that I can just be Vietnamese and flirt with Vietnamese men and act all feminine and little girlish. I have so much fun there.
PLH: Does your American cultural perspective ever cause problems while you’re there?
KCT: It’s frustrating sometimes, but I don’t mind explaining that I was raised differently, and naturally I am going to see things differently. But I try really hard to understand them.
PLH: The segment with your grandmother is incredibly comical, when she tells you, a grown woman, to remember to brush your teeth, to eat more because you’re too thin?
KCT: I have the best time telling my family how Americans just love skinny people. They don’t understand it and I laugh every time I tell them. Americans glorify thin, but over there, the fatter you are, the better.
PLH: It says in your press kit that immigrating to the US was a traumatic experience, and that your family never talked about it while you were growing up?
KCT: We came over on a cargo plane and were all sitting on the floor; I remember people were panicking. My brother remembers much more. He says we sat in a Philippine base camp for hours and that I was so hungry I kept saying I wanted one of those packages of noodles that you just add water. He said I kept crying and it was really annoying. We then we went to live in Guam, but my mother wasn’t very healthy so we stood in line a long time for food at the camp. We had to live in a makeshift camp for three months until my father was able to get us out. And that’s when we went to Portland.
PLH: It was your wonderful stepfather who raised you and helped your family assimilate into the culture.
KCT: I was very lucky to have him and when he died my world crumbled because he was the fabric of my world, he ‘was’ my family.
PLH: What was your mother’s role in all of this?
KCT: She worked in the hospital. But we all took jobs when we lived in Hawaii. I delivered newspapers at 4 o’clock in the morning before I went to school, and so did my brother. We all had to work. My mother was scrubbing toilets. We were on food stamps because my father left the country (Vietnam) in a hurry and couldn’t take out any of his money. He was planning to retire in Vietnam. But thanks to the hardship we learned how to take care of each other and that’s why I’m a very practical person. Even though I am a filmmaker, I will always have to have a job. I can’t be creative without a job.
PLH: You enjoyed a special relationship with your stepfather?
KCT: He never treated me like an adopted daughter. He was always saying, “my daughter, my daughter.” He was amazing.
PLH: The sweep of your documentary covers your inner and outer journeys and your transformation. How do you see yourself before you visited Vietnam and shot your film, and after the film?
KCT: Who was I before I went? I was this spoiled little girl who was very hot-tempered and very insecure because I wanted to be American more than I do now. Now I am comfortable with the fact that I am Vietnamese and also American. I love the fact that I can go back to Vietnam twice a year and just submerge myself into my family. I also celebrate the fact that when I come back here I am this working American girl who can do whatever she wants.
PLH: Do you ever feel that you’re living between worlds?
KCT: No, I’m not. I’m living in both worlds and I love it. I understand people a lot more than I did before and I am more patient. I love the fact that I am much closer to my brother.
PLH: How did your brother react when you told him that you were returning to Vietnam to search for your biological father?
KCT: He was against it, but he eventually relented. He asked us not to discuss our mother on camera. After he saw the film he realized how hard our life was, and we began to talk about it. It’s still difficult for him, but now he’s able to express his emotions and disappointments, which is very healthy.
PLH: As a generalization could one propose that Asians have problems expressing their emotions? But even as I ask this question, I couldn’t imagine putting my family on camera. This takes courage, on your part as a filmmaker and their part, especially your biological father, for expressing their emotions so publically.
KCT: The worst thing was zooming in when my father broke down and cried. I was clinical when I was filming him, but not now. It’s a very painful moment.
PLH: And what do you feel when you see it now?
KCT: I feel sorry for him; I see him a weak man. At first I thought he was doing it for sympathy, but now I see that my questions were very difficult.
PLH: Did he ever admit to treating your mother badly?
KCT: No, he will never admit it. In our culture you suffer quietly. It’s more honorable to suffer quietly. He is a more quiet than when I last found him. He is scared of his children, but that wasn’t my intention. He’s not as flamboyant as I would like him to be. There are good and bad things about everything. I like the fact that he thinks about what he’s says to me, about what he’s done in the past. My brother is having problems with his marriage and my father would say to me, “I don’t want your brother to ever divorce his wife because look at what happened to me. I married three times and I can’t even afford to bring up my kids.” Now he admits to his own mistakes, that he has too many children.
PLH: Have any of your Vietnamese relatives seen your film?
KCT: My half brother has. I’m am looking to raise more money to completely translate it into Vietnamese so they not only get to hear their side of the story, but also what I was thinking. (Kim-Chi narrated the film). That would only be fair. My father has definitely been humbled by life.
PLH: After having interviewed and filmed people very close to you, do you think you could bring the same compassion to someone else’s personal story?
KCT: I don’t know if this experience would make me more compassionate.
PLH: Would you be able to ask the same types of questions?
KCT: I was relentless, you know. I really grilled them, except for the part about my life in Saigon and their marriage. There was one scene when he was chopping wood and I was very manipulative. OK, get him uncomfortable.
PLH: That was a difficult seen to watch. This elderly man struggling to chop branches.
KCT: But I love that scene, because it reveals him as just an ordinary man who made mistakes in life. And there’s his daughter who keeps probing him for answers. Yeah, I love that scene. It made him so normal.
PLH: What would you like to say in closing?
KCT: I did this film to celebrate motherhood. My mother, sacrificed so much that I cringe at the fact that my family isn’t at all enthusiastic that I’m exposing their story to the world. But they must know it’s not to damn them but to celebrate my mother, to honor her for what’s she has done and what she had to go through to bring two children up.
PLH: Is there anything about your family that you wish you hadn’t found out?
KCT: No. I regret that my father is not as lively now as when I filmed him. He has become very quiet and humble. He makes me tea every morning and just sits there and looks at me. He’s now very grateful to me and I don’t always like that.
More than 2 million Vietnamese and 57,685 American soldiers were killed during the Vietnam War. On May 16, 1975, 140,000 Vietnamese refugees escaped Vietnam and entered the US.
THE END