SCREEN | Recollections of a Vietnamese Rebellion – 'New Wave' Culture

"I was chasing a story about a bunch of Vietnamese-American rebels."

Photo credit | Yudi Echevarria/Angel City Press

Chinese-Vietnamese-American director Elizabeth Ai explores the immigrant experience through music in her fun but meaningful documentary, New Wave. All about the influence of the titular genre of music and its effects on the pop culture of the Vietnamese diaspora emerging from 1980s Southern California, the film takes an interesting approach to dissecting the unspoken collective intergenerational trauma of these children of refugees after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

While the Vietnamese subgenre of "new wave" dance music, initially mislabelled from its Eurodisco origins and unrelated to the actual UK genre of post-punk music of the same name, seems decidedly light and fluffy on the surface (most famously Paris by Night singer Lynda Trang Đài's sexy pop covers), Ai penetrates the deeper sense of pain from fleeing one's homeland and struggling to make it in a brand new foreign country. This music was an act of rebellion against the pressures of financial responsibilities and often other intense feelings about fractured families.

Ai conjures familiar images of big hair, synthesized sounds, and a defiant youth subculture that had more style to it than any substance on first thought. Beneath this, she uses her upbringing being raised by surrogate parents and extended family to soundtrack a life of absences and empty spaces needing fulfillment.

The Post Gen

New Wave tells stories of a lost generation obsessed with the vanity and aesthetics of the 1980s. This obsession masked issues regarding young women being thrust into the reluctant sole breadwinners across many refugee families at the expense of themselves and their own children. She further delves into these accounts in her companion book of essays, New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora—there's a book signing at Nooroongji Books on February 3rd.

There's a stylish sheen to both Ai's film and the glossy material it's trying to explain. Fortunately, New Wave as a personal documentary goes past the artificiality of 1980s new wave music and fashion. Her encapsulation of the Vietnamese refugee experience and the traumatic ordeal of generational displacement after the Vietnam War as told through their children layers another moving history of a people on the run. More than anything, it's a piece of memorabilia of one generation's reinterpreted memories being passed down to another.

New Wave screens at the Rio Theatre with Ai in attendance for an in-person Q&A by Anh and Chi co-founder Amélie Thuy Nguyễn on February 4th. There's also an accompanying special nine-course family-style Vancouver World Chef Exchange dinner collaboration with Chef Thai Dang from Chicago's HaiSous Vietnamese Kitchen planned on February 5th.


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