This one was sitting in the drafts for a while, apologies! -
My friend and fellow Minneapolitan Adriane is embarking on a summer of consuming film and books by women, which she entitles The Quota Project. You can read about it on her blog. She's invited the rest of us to join in on her project and although I haven't necessarily dedicated my whole summer to consuming works only by women, things seem to be leaning in that direction whether by Adriane's influence or by some unconscious desire. It also helps that I moved all the movies directed by women in my DVD queue to the top.
During the past 3 weeks, 2 of which I'd been in Vietnam, I read two books and watched a documentary written by women:
1. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) by Le Ly Hayslip and Heaven and Earth, dir. by Oliver Stone. I read this book and watched Oliver Stone's movie Heaven and Earth in order to prepare for meeting Le Ly herself in Vietnam as she would accompany my tour group for part of the journey. In fact, it was because of her that we were able to participate in some activities we would not have otherwise and meet some very powerful Vietnamese women, most of whom were former Viet Cong, or whose parents had been Viet Cong. I've started to read the sequel to When Heaven and Earth...which is entitled Child of War, Woman of Peace and has a very romance novel cover, which is very unbefitting for its content. Although I only met her for a short time, Le Ly seems to be a person for whom romance is secondary - in her books she is frank about her reasons for marrying both her first and second husbands: survival. They are books worth reading for the stories they contain. The Oliver Stone movie, while BEAUTIFULLY SHOT and is worth watching merely for the cinematography, does not really tell Le Ly's story the way that the books do. It's certainly interesting to look at this movie in comparison to the books. Although it is the story of woman who at a very young age was a proud and somewhat infamous in her village, it is Tommy Lee Jones' name that comes across the screen first, although he doesn't show up until halfway through the movie. He plays a composite character of both her first and second husbands, Ed and Dennis (renamed Steve in the movie) and is framed by Stone's direction as a handsome and charming older man even though Le Ly herself wrote in her sequel that she felt that he was too old for her and was not really attracted to him. The point that Le Ly married him as a chance to get out of the country is glossed over in the movie. It seems that once Jones shows up, the woman's story as we (the reader of her books) know it onscreen feels stifled, overtaken by Jones' character. For those who have not read the book, the story might be confusing and some moments very important details have no understandable explanation for an American audience.
2. Falling Through the Earth (2006) by Danielle Trussoni - Before I met him, my partner lived in New York and one of his many part-time jobs was to sell books for authors at their readings. He told me about Danielle Trussoni after I started working on my project about Vietnam war veterans and their descendants. He said, "she's really nice." Her book is a memoir, documenting both her childhood and adulthood, focusing on her father, a Vietnam War veteran. When I started reading it, I was in Vietnam with my own father with a group called Tours of Peace, a group that is worth checking out and supporting since they subsist solely on donations. So it was poignant for me to read about Ms. Trussoni's experiences with her own father - although she ended up visiting Vietnam without him - and to compare her experiences with my own. This book was important for me because I'd been trying to understand my place in this project - writing about war when you yourself have never been in one. There's a hole in writing about war: there are war memoirs and war histories, but not many children of veterans writing about war. I think that position matters, that it's got to matter just as much as the position of the veterans themselves. Because it means something to grow up in a country that's constantly in international conflicts, even if you yourself haven't been on the field of battle. That's a bit of a digression, but my point is, I'd like to find more writing from children of veterans.
3. New Year Baby (2008) dir. Socheata Poeuv - This documentary, besides being directed by a woman, was more or less accidentally at the top of my Netflix queue. But it was a happy accident because it was the first documentary that I watched when I got back from Vietnam. In this documentary, Socheata Poeuv, who was born in a Thai refugee camp but emigrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of 3, retraces her families history and brings her parents back to Cambodia for that very purpose. As with Trussoni's book, I felt close to this work because of my recent experiences. Although the stories are very different, I feel that Poeuv was attempting a kind of reconciliation or healing between her parents and former Khmer Rouge just as the American veterans of Tours of Peace strive to do with former NVA and Viet Cong. Unlike my experience, those of Poeuv and her family in Cambodia were much more uncomfortably awkward and heartbreaking. Poeuv herself is struggling with facing the realities of modern Cambodia asking why no one demands justice. And in a sense, when I went to Vietnam with Tours of Peace, the group (who's been taken veterans to Vietnam since 1998) was past that kind of question. A lot of times I hear people use the word "justice" and hear "revenge," which is perhaps why the word rarely came up during our trip. I'm not saying that Poeuv or her family wanted revenge but I think that she was perhaps like me before visiting Vietnam: she didn't know what to expect and so had no concrete expectations. And I can't tell you how many people were really worried about my dad - they didn't say it but I think they were worried he would freak out. I can't speak for Poeuv but I can say that from what I observed there was comfort for the veterans in the trip. As a non-veteran, I can't say that I was exactly looking for personal comfort - but that visiting Vietnam made my feelings and thoughts about it more complex. And I'm grateful for that. I would be interesting to hear about what's happened since that trip for Socheata and her family.
