In December I spent six days in NYC as part of a fellowship I was awarded for the duration of a year. The pièce de résistance was being a part of a staged reading for The Sống Collective. As part of the work I was tasked with reading several plays that center on the Vietnamese narrative. It was an experience I’ve never had before. I have been doing theater (seriously) for about seven years and had never had a moment of recognition in which I felt my story lifted through a script without having to extrapolate. For a short period of time I did not have to boil a story down to its basic human elements to relate. It was healing and it was inspiring.
I didn’t have this issue with recognizing identity until about a year ago after I went to see Miss Saigon with my brother and a close friend. I had heard all the stories from both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese friends about what a doozy I was in for. I try to attend all performances blind so as not to taint my experience before seeing it for myself so I saved all the research until after. Boy was I unprepared. I can honestly say that seeing Miss Saigon was the first time I have ever felt truly uncomfortable sitting in a theater. While the theatrics and the music were up to par, the story made me so uncomfortable I questioned whether or not I should stay for the second half when intermission came around. I was in disbelief of how the story of my people was being portrayed for all these onlookers and in the same moment I understood why so many people love this show. The hero narrative is easy to adopt and to like but when you’re on the opposite side of that narrative it becomes demeaning and at some points maddening.
The moment that was my “breaking point” was the opening of Act II. As if the story of an Asian damsel in utter distress being saved by an American soldier wasn’t enough to make me vomit in my mouth, this show had the audacity to open up a whole act with a song about the orphans that were left behind during the war. I could not take it. Everything in my body screamed out for me to get up and go. After all, my entire origin story was based on this notion. My mother was a child of the Vietnam war. She does not know her birth father who is believed to be an American soldier. This “Bui Doi” song could have very well been a song about my mom and it made me sick. The lyrics, the staging, the projections, the audience reactions around me, all of it made my skin crawl and I didn’t know what to do with those emotions. This was all so new to me and I thought wow how privileged am I that I made it this long before feeling like this. I can only imagine the stories of so many others that have been bastardized, belittled, mocked, and disrespected in the canon that is euro-centric theater. This marked the beginning of what will be both a personal and professional journey to finding myself on the stage again or rather for the first time.
The stars managed to align when I was not only awarded a fellowship for the year but was able to connect with a theater collective in NYC whom I had been following since its inception. The Sống Collective was my oasis in a desert I didn’t even know I had gotten lost in. It was started by three Vietnamese-American theatre artists in NYC: Carolina Do, Jonathan Castanien, and David Huynh. David Huynh was my way in. I had met David only a year earlier after attending a “niche” panel discussion on Asian representation on and off the stage at BroadwayCon 2019. It was through his Instagram that I found The Sống Collective. After a shot-in-the-dark email, I was met with an enthusiastic yes! I was open to anything which helped to make the engagement organic to its fullest extent. I was taken aback when I was invited to help with their final event for the year, a staged reading. I got the opportunity to read several works by Asian playwrights writing about the Asian, namely Vietnamese, experience. It was surreal and oh so fulfilling. I hadn’t had the time nor the energy to read anything for quite a while. I found that fire again and blew through those scripts. I read any moment I could. I read during breaks at work, at meals, even out loud to my boyfriend as we fell asleep on our longer exhausting days. At the end of it I fell in love with one script in particular, This Is Not A True Story by Preston Choi. I submitted my light analysis of each piece and let the team decide. As luck would have it they agreed on the piece as well and we began making plans to produce a reading.
When the day of the reading came I got dressed in my traditional ao dai (with a little spin to make it a little more NYC chic ya know) and zoomed off to meet the team at the venue. We entered a completely white space (go figure) from the floor to the ceiling, even the chairs were white. The juxtaposition of all of these artists of color entering such a stark white space was almost comical. It provided the perfect backdrop both physically and metaphorically. We were expected to sell out and I was excited to see who would be coming out on this dreary winter night in the city. Despite the turn of the weather, we managed to get a butt into every seat in the house and I excitedly took my boyfriend’s hand as the reading began. Before I delve into the utter magic that happened that night, it’s important to take a short step back to several nights before. Being the little eager beaver that I was (and still very much am) I asked to sit in on a rehearsal. I wanted to make sure to soak up every bit of this experience. The team gave me the go ahead and on Saturday night I was welcomed into a rehearsal room at Ma-Yi Theater Company’s studio. You can bet my brain went immediately to the dreams of 9 year old Maria taking on the world of acting one rehearsal room in NYC at a time. Once I gathered my bearings I began to understand the power in that room on that particular night. As a 25 year old artist of color, artist of Asian descent, I had an opportunity to sit amongst other Asian American artists in a rehearsal room of an Asian American theater company, rehearsing a story about reclaiming Asian American stories written by an Asian American. The realization nearly knocked the wind out of me. How many other young artists or even experienced artists can say they have had a moment like this? This was the call, the assurance that my current path was the right one. There was a reason why I was in that room too.
And so this takes us back to why I found myself in another powerful space just a few days later. Where were we? Ah yes, the show is about to begin. For the next hour or so I let myself get lost in the story. I did not analyze. I did not question. I simply let myself feel, the same way I let myself feel in any production I go see, the same way I let myself simply feel when I went to see Miss Saigon. And this time I felt healed in some way. There were jokes that did not need to be explained. There were feelings that were shared instantly in that room. There were stories that were conjured up from all of our childhoods. It felt more like a family reunion than it did a staged reading of a play. In this line of work I am reminded time and time again that stories are important. They are the anthologies of a person, of a people, of a culture, of the unspoken. This experience with The Sống Collective became a new chapter in my story.
Since December I have toiled for months trying to write this piece. As I’m writing this now the only reason that it is getting done is because the world around us is paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s an important point in all of our lives. We’re sharing an experience that may be familiar to some, new to many, and scary to most. This moment in time is a chapter in our collective story as a human race. The future is uncertain as it always has been but more precarious for many of us who have yet to discover what this means for our lives and our work going forward. For someone like me, this chapter is an opportunity to reflect. Having finally written down the words I have been feeling for quite some time now, I can feel a new chapter beginning yet again. Carolina, Jonathan, David and I have continued contact well past our December engagement. I’m looking forward to meeting back up with them sometime later this year (if and when this pandemic lets up) to check in on their progress and offer any help that I can. The success of The Sống Collective feels like a gift I’ve been preparing for my people since witnessing the travesty that is Miss Saigon. I hope this reflection serves as a reminder to others that you are the owner of your story and that of your people. There is power in simply telling that story. I hope to continue to tell our story for as long as I have a stage, real or imagined. This is for you Mom and Dad. This is the story I choose to tell.
