I just watched most of
Oh, Saigon on TV. To say that it shifted my brain is a massive understatement. It's the story of one family, split on the last day of the Vietnam War: April 30th, 1975. Incidentally, my birthday-- which I hadn't known. They were on the last helicopter out, but they left their fifteen-year-old Van daughter behind, lost in the chaos.
The narrator and focus is Doan, Van's half-sister. She and the rest of her family now live in Kentucky. Doan starts to explore her family's history, and makes a trip back to Viet Nam to meet the relatives she doesn't remember, and the country she doesn't recognise. Five years later, she finally convinces her father to return-- for the first time in 30 years. Van and her five-year-old son come, as well. The resulting trip shows a shattered family trying to connect, and a daughter trying to understand. Perhaps for the first time, Van confronts her mother on being left behind--after the war, she was one of the infamous Vietnamese Boat People, was shipwrecked, kidnapped by Thai pirates, and barely escaped alive. When she finally came to the States, she couldn't fit in with the family, and found herself estranged again. Doan's father, a former South Vietnamese major, sees for the first time in 60 years the brother who held the Communist Party line, and considered his younger brother a traitor. Doan's mother describes her husband as someone who has never been able to fit in in America. He has no friends, he doesn't go out.
The social comparisons to current wars are inescapable. This is not a story about politics, this is a story of what one family lived through, and how it's affected every aspect of their lives for decades after the conflict itself has ended. There's no flashy, violent footage. There's no big-budget soundtrack. It's a quiet film, with almost the look of home movies. But its effect is devastating: this, it says, it what happens to families who live through a war. This is how they survive-- or don't.
I'm still trying to process it all. It's completely incomprehensible to me that this happens hundreds of thousands of times in every single country torn by war. It's happening right now. It will continue to happen. These are the casualties of war we so often gloss over, with some variation of, "Well, they lived, that's all that matters." But that's only half the truth. It's never the same for these families. The war is never over. And in a way, nobody ever truly wins.
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