Alienism in Ostin Fam’s Bình
by Ella Nguyen
This essay is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative III, a collaborative mentorship incubator between the 25th Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA.
All my life, it feels like I am constantly on the verge of leaving, abandoning a ship that has not yet docked. The delicate sense of belonging from my immigrant childhood often resurfaces in my adult life in an abstract yet unwieldy tension. Much of these formative years did not merely see me struggle with making myself heard and seen but also witnessing my loved ones’ existences disparaged. I realized early on through watching my parents. They battled a language barrier, misunderstood microaggressions as cultural norms, and breathed the racialization of themselves into the alien essence of living far away from home. Their search for security ended when they became the spaceship vessel my sisters and I must steer. No matter how much English I could speak, I could not make my parents visible to Canadian society. No matter how Western-presenting I am, I cannot make my parents feel held here.
Image description: On the right, a picture of my parents in a small Vietnamese grocery shop in Ottawa the summer they visited me from Fredericton. It was their first time in almost 2 years since they were able to buy authentic ingredients and rare imports that are all too common in Vietnam. The store smelled like an old closet and pickled daikon. My parents were delighted by these little things.
On the left is a partial image of 4 downtown Burnaby apartment buildings engulfed in fog. It had been well over 2 years since I last saw my parents in person. I sometimes walk aimlessly inside this city’s belly, watching countless people hurry past each other. No one is particularly interested in slowing down to look up when the sky is this barren, and the skyscrapers cease to be real. A bottom text taken from Bình reads, “Have we returned home after all?”
Yet unlike my parents, home has never been as definite to me. There are periods of time when I wish I only knew one place, my birthplace, as the one I would eventually rest my bones in. Believing that I should have either been born in and stayed put in Vietnam or born in Canada without having to move, I blamed my parents for deciding to make us immigrate when I already knew what the thirst to be realized as a full and socially integrated person felt like. I was growing my roots into Vietnamese soils, then plucked right out of the budding flower bed our ancestors planted their souls into. Although, my conceptualization of home will never be complete, every time I resettle somewhere new, I know my home is transient, an everlasting reconstruction of belongingness, its intricacies neither wholly grasped by the selves I have been and will be. In the present, I savour my past to establish meaning; nostalgia and diaspora hang onto the skylines of my uncertain homes. Missioned to recognize beauty and goodness in foreign places, I transfer memories of sublime solace over to every new stage of life, and the intrinsic features of home begin to emerge.
Everything in Transition, Home in the Mystique
In the same breath, Bình draws a narrative of displacement across oceans influenced by director Fam’s own alienating experience in returning to his native home after six years of living in the United States. Existence in limbo is overwhelmingly lonely and otherworldly. The film expresses this knowledge in busy, dusty images of densely stacked steel poles, skeletons of scaffoldings, scattered concrete blocks against a stunning backdrop of tree-shrouded mountains. Strikingly, a sight of indistinguishable creation and ruins.
Bình inhabits the form of an adventure story where the titular character, a young alien boy, wanders a hidden corner of the Earth quietly observing three local drifters trying to navigate isolation, poverty, and loss. His journey unfolds into a mystical, ambivalent exploration of home incubated in the artificial and natural structures on Earth. Through a dissociated communication with his spaceship, filling landscape shots with a metallic hum, Bình reports that Earth is vastly different from their planet. Yet certain features are undeniably close to home. Things like trees, dirt, and clouds are rough impressions of the alien realm. But having only seen the unfinished pagoda and its fugitive frequenters, he expresses that the fundamental aspects of a home which also are assembled on his planet, are instead “built [here] to keep the gods” (0:48).
Fam illustrates a cultivated intuition in blending the observing eye of documentary-making and the experimental sensibilities of art-house influence. His choice to make Bình a black and white film brings forth its dreamscape qualities; highlights glow with a magical pinkish hue, and sharp shadows accentuate the contours of the breathtaking location.
The conception of Bình originated from Fam’s year-long collaboration with cinematographer Hoàng Thành Đồng, gathering construction footage of the Bái Đính pagoda in Ninh Bình. This mainly rural province is fortified by large grotto caves and inlaid bloodlines of rice paddies and emerald-green river channels. Known and valued for these sacred natural and cultural attractions, Ninh Bình’s undeniable role in Vietnam’s expanding wealth was one of Fam’s inspirations to write Bình. The film’s fictional content reflects Fam’s reaction to his homeland’s changing identity due to its recent economic boom, cultivation of international attention, and amassing more prolific investments than ever before.
Ghost of a Nation
Buddhism, for all its association with Chinese domination and anti-violence principles, is bound in the Vietnamese context by conflicting historical ties to the nationalist movement from the Cold War. Its core ideal of spiritual emancipation, however, profoundly resonates with and helps restore ease to many Vietnamese Buddhists, whose lives continue to be impacted by the brutal aftermath of war. As recent capitalist projects begin in Vietnam, one of the noticeable products of this transformative process is religious tourism. In his director’s statement, Fam comments that “[…] it’s uneasy when you and your country don’t recognize each other. People resort to different support systems including money and religion”. The building of Bái Đính pagoda can be critiqued in that it is not the conventional, humble spiritual space that “[…] we Vietnamese used to worship, cherish and confide”, Fam says.
The large and wide-spread assembly of the temple, a jarring presence amidst wondrous mountain valleys and untread paths, underlines the disparity between local dwellers and global entities that are beginning to materialize. Bình’s first human encounter is with a reverent worshipper who hopes to reconnect with his deceased wife through a pilgrimage to visit an uncanny medium at the pagoda, the same woman who appears in Bình’s obscure dream sequences. This is indicative of her supernatural powers (a sham or not) suggesting a closeness to aliens. When paralleled to Bình’s alien nature, her arc symbolizes the unstable and alienating quality of life that living in a rural area of a country that is rapidly urbanizing and changing to adapt to globalization can emphasize.
For her service, the medium simply requests her desperate patron bring a live chicken and some fruit. Later we find out that that it is the only things she and her partner, a worker on the construction site, have been able to feed themselves with. The couple’s bitter and anxious attitudes about their conditions outline a cold and estranged relationship with their homeland’s growing prosperities. The picture of their vagrant life on the site of the country’s largest temple construction enquires into the ethics of the commercialization and commodification of local religion and land.
One could argue that the construction’s call for many labourers actually does more good for poor and uneducated young people in rural Vietnam by keeping them employed and alive. In that sense, this provides both the medium and the construction worker a place to make a profit off of as well as to call home. However, when construction is complete, they will be ostracized from the premises and have to begin their search for another temporary settlement again. Sometimes, the hunger to feel safety and belonging turns us down cruel paths.
Through Fam’s vision of alienism, I find myself looking to the days I felt most at home. I was surprised to find that at times, I felt closest to my Vietnamese identity when I was farthest from its dominance. In other words, home is entirely ambivalent; the fabrication of its continuance unravels under challenging socio-economic and diasporic circumstances similarly.
Living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, a place with a population of less than 60,000 people and about 100 Vietnamese individuals for half of my childhood, there was little contact with Vietnamese culture outside of my family. I had virtually no Vietnamese friends my age. My parents’ household was the only structure that held together the most precious aspects of being Vietnamese for me. Every Tết (Vietnamese Lunar New Year), we would still wish our parents good health and happiness in exchange for lì xì (lucky money). My mother learned how to make muối tôm from scratch for us to eat with fruit, collecting recipes for simple Vietnamese kitchen staples that no one sold transformed into a sacred routine. These things may sound trivial but in the overwhelmingly non-Vietnamese landscape of things outside of our house back then, my parents’ continued effort to feed us knowledge of our cultural selves means that I get to reflect on the distinctiveness of being Vietnamese in a place that challenged it with great depth and fondness.
In Ottawa where I headed immediately after high school, I found a small group of Vietnamese friends whom I later moved in with. Being around them every day changed my world whether they knew it or not. I remember finally feeling comfortable enough around them to utter cusses in Vietnamese. In a year, I felt like I had lived through all my childhood with these women. We shared many similar early adulthood struggles that are so specific to a Vietnamese immigrant life I couldn’t even make sense of it until I met them. These are the little underlying things that got me closer and closer to feeling unified with the younger version of myself who never got to grow up in her home country.
Yet, after resettling in Vancouver where the Vietnamese population is 3 times larger than in Ottawa, I struggled to keep a tight connection with the people I encountered. Here, everyone is so used to seeing others like them. One day at school, I overheard a couple excitedly chatting in Vietnamese and deep down, I wanted to go over and join them, but I knew that people don’t do that here. At a Vietnamese restaurant in Vancouver, you could order and speak in Vietnamese the whole time and the owner wouldn’t come out to introduce themselves and ask about how you ended up in Canada. Everyone here is trying to make it on their own and weaving a diasporic network of Vietnamese contacts simply feels unfeasible because it both already generally exists out there somewhere and not really at all.
Image description: On the left, a black and white image of a Christmas party at the apartment I shared with three other Vietnamese girls while I lived in Ottawa. This was one of the most transformative years of my life, as it is the first time I got to be so close to Vietnamese women near my age. Not only did I acquire a better Vietnamese vocabulary, but I also felt that being Vietnamese was worth celebrating in big gatherings. It was okay to laugh and joke and speak Vietnamese and be loud both in private and in public.
On the right, a blurry skyline of East Vancouver, entailing distant snow-veiled mountain tops and a close traffic scene. This part of town is known for its diverse Asian businesses and distinct Vancouver Special architecture. Nonetheless, I am often overcome by the lonesome quality of living here. Asian seniors are usually seen strolling around by themselves or waiting for the next Rapid Bus to get home. Produce markets, where the lively commotion emits from, are only open until the early evening. At night, the entire community is sealed by a silent, post-apocalyptic air.
Scattered in Ambivalence
Sometimes, I fantasize about the home that would make me feel closest to being a child again. I think about my first home as a kind of starting point where I can picture my father’s purple orchids hanging on metal bars on our rooftop, hear the neighbourhood dogs barking in unison at midnight, smell the fume from burning spirit money, and know that it is 5 pm when the scrap buyer’s booming chant AI MUA VE CHAI bounces off walls in the alleys. By retaining information about an older world where everything was first absorbed by my immediate senses, I enable myself to gather tangible meanings of home. This sense of belonging is intrinsic to identity-building. I recognize my identification with Vietnamese communities everywhere I go as a dissociated, non-verbal, yet glowingly robust connection. Bình’s alien capabilities, even when limited by the environmental incompatibility, still thrive in displacement as he seemingly accesses murky and metaphoric visions of Earth’s reality. Bình portrays identity on a metaphysical level, even when met with the puzzling conditions of alienism/ diaspora, one’s sense of belonging and homesickness persist through time and space.
Bình’s name comes from Fam’s own family. After being advised by a fortune-teller, Fam’s mother renamed his brother Bình to grant him prophetic protection from misfortunes. The word inherently carries the meanings safety, serenity, and peace. The film, however, ends on an ambivalent even melancholic note as colour gradually pulses back into the last frame. A clear happy ending, a nagging yearning for home, remains somewhere beyond the cinematic perimeter as Bình watches a heavy truck pull away onto the dirt road. The unnamed construction worker perches in the back, eyes lingering on the small, lonesome figure of a young boy.
Though my diasporic experience is not the same as Fam’s or any other Vietnamese person’s who has moved abroad, there is a shared intricateness written into our stories. At the center of it all lies our knowing empathy for one another. For me, returning to my first home might never be the ultimate reality. I can only defy the mercurial flow of life by nurturing every passing moment belonging is felt. This abundant vision of home is scattered between the uncertainties of existence. It persists in rare pockets of time and space where you can sit down to share a meal with people who understand exactly why your grandparents moved to Saigon in 1973 and why you miss going back so deeply.
I know I will come back to Vietnam one day and find myself grasping at the remaining strands of my own past to restore the sweet taste of belonging I used to know. At that point, I will probably find that my positionality in Canada is a lot closer to home; and that is fine. I have accepted that my parents will likely never move to the same city as me to retire. Even though they have taught me the first iteration of home, this is my life-long journey to continue building the ever-growing metaphorical house my whole being longs for. At last, there is peace in the ambivalent stretch of path between home and nowhere.
Ella Nguyen (she/they) is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and Philosophy student at UBC. Her poems ‘Peaches (I Learned to Love)’ and ‘The War You Return From’ are published in Flaming Balloon’s first youth poetry anthology. A lover of video essays and arguing in spaces she isn’t supposed to (the Internet), she hopes to create her own platform to educate, make meaning, and heal. She deeply enjoys competitive cooking shows and unintentional ASMR videos. Her upcoming essay ‘The Power to Be Seen’ will appear in the 2021–2022 issue of the UBC Journal of Philosophical Enquiries.
IG: @depuss.y
