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The Journey of Vaan Nguyen

by Sabine Huynh, Jerusalem Post, July 21, 2005

In a new documentary, director Duki Dror explores the fate of Vietnamese refugees in Israel.

Following the Vietnam war most members of the Vietnamese Diaspora were scattered in Europe and the United States. In 1977, however, Israel – led by Prime Minister Menachem Begin – became one of the first nations to grant political asylum to Vietnamese refugees, dubbed the boat people because they had fled Vietnam on boats through the South China Sea.

In The Journey of Vaan, Dror – whose father fled from Baghdad to Israel in the nineteen fifties – explores the conflicts felt by second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in Israel through the story of one family.

Dror has produced many excellent documentaries devoted mainly to migration and intercultural relations, and more particularly to the cultural heritage of Israeli Jews from Arab countries. Why did he suddenly turn his attention to the Vietnamese people in Israel?

“What started out as a mere coincidence became a personal story," Dror said in an interview at the hotel he stayed at in Jerusalem, following the screening of his film. "I identified with Vaan – the second of five sisters – through a shared vulnerability, which is common to children of second generation immigrants”, he explained.

The young girls were all born in Israel, are very well integrated and speak fluent Hebrew. When one of them leaves home to go to the army, only the eternal but oh - so - Israeli Yihye beseder (“things will be fine” in Hebrew) eventually soothes their father’s fears.

The Journey of Vaan Nguyen opens with extracts from an archive film showing the arrival of a group of Vietnamese refugees at the Ben Gurion airport. One of them, Hoiami Nguyen, arrived in Jaffa in 1979 “Because Begin wanted it,” as Vaan, his second daughter, explains. On Sundays, Hoiami hosts his Vietnamese friends in his small apartment and together they sing songs tinged with nostalgia: “My heart returns to the village while the river shines at dawn…” They are all longing to return to their country, but each one of them has a different reason. Vaan’s mother wishes she could be at her aging mother’s side ; she refers to her as “Savta”, “grandmother” in Hebrew. Vaan is curious to know if she would be less discriminated against in Vietnam. As for Hoiami, he would like to make peace with the past.

Twenty five years after his arrival in Israel, Hoiami finally returns to Vietnam in an attempt to get back the land that belonged to his family before the Vietnam war. Vaan goes with him. At first, father and daughter seem to have embarked on the same journey. But the gap between their personal motives quickly widens. Vaan hopes to finally win the high social status that was denied her because Israeli society made her grow up in what she calls “the Jaffa slums.” She imagines herself as a wealthy land owner and urges her father to assert his rights. However, he contents himself with honoring those that stole his property with a beautiful, evasive smile. Having left his country twenty five years earlier with nothing but the shirt he was wearing, he has come back to his homeland armed with nothing but that smile.

“In fact," Dror clarifies, "Hoiami wishes to resume the narrative of his life where he had left it. That is problematic for his daughter because she has to build her own story within the limits of her father’s. After the first two days of shooting the film in Vietnam, it became suddenly clear that Hoiami was the hero of the journey, especially because of the way he bravely faced those that chased him out of his village. We understood that it was no longer only about Vaan’s journey but also about her father’s.”

Father and daughter share the same liking for writing. He composes long letters written by hand in which he narrates what he went through. His voice leads us through the archive images that Dror superimposed on the images he shot.

“Are they all dead? Am I the only one that survived?” Hoiami asks upon his arrival in Hanoi.

In documentary images filled with fury and death, we see Vietnamese people run through the streets, soldiers packed into trucks, dissidents in “re-education” camps, and then the headlong escape aboard crammed boats. Dror explains that those images were chosen because of their harshness. They unwind in black and white, implacable. As for the images shot by Dror in Vietnam, they are bathed in deep green and reveal the desire to cover the past with a salutary balm. Hoiami’s omnipresent smile hovers over the entire movie. Yet the tragic meaning of that smile can be read in the green foliage: according to Dror, “this deep green has several tones, which echo the various tones of the different layers of trauma.” The luxuriant vegetation, he implies, has fed itself on the Vietnamese people’s sufferings.

Vaan tirelessly types her thoughts into her computer. In the darkness of her bedroom, only the computer screen lights up her beautiful face. The young girl connects daily to Isra-Blog, an Isareli website whose motto is “Ha chaim ze kan” (“life is here” in Hebrew). Indeed, an important part of her life dwells in cyberspace, where she can write freely on her own page. Her Hebrew is energetic, innovative, and literary. She doesn’t mince words, and her style leaves no room for what she calls “Vietnamese folklore.” Nor does Duki Dror’s movie, which is neither sentimental nor picturesque. Rather, its strength resides in its sobriety.

Does the director think that similarities could be drawn between Vietnam and Israel?

“Yes, that’s possible, because with The Journey of Vaan we have a story that evolves around the return to the land, the connection to the land," Dror says. "In Israel, you have both Jews and Israelis. Jews are concerned with notions of property, land, and belonging. As for Israelis, be they Jewish or not, they are people like Vaan and her sisters, for whom those issues of belonging to a land and of land-owning seem less significant.”

The story told by Dror is important and moving because it deals with a universal topic: migration, thanks to which people meet and ties are formed. The Journey of Vaan also tackles the helplessness of second-generation children who are sentenced to wander, unable to find a home base. Their parents have a story and roots. Their own children will find theirs too. But the second-generation children, issued from that transition generation, find it difficult to identify with one location. They can choose between adopting their parents’ traditional cultural values, but remaining out of sync with the society that surrounds them, or they can adopt the values of the “new” society, thus risking to turn their parents against them. In The Journey of Vaan, Duki Dror presents the Vietnamese children of Israel with a valuable gift: the possibility to identify with Vaan, a beautiful Israeli of Vietnamese origins.

The Journey of Vaan (Israel 2005) was directed by Duki Dror, produced and distributed by Zygote Films Ltd. (running time: 90 minutes).
The first screening took place on July 14th, 2005, at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, within the context of the 22nd Jerusalem Film Festival.
The next screening of the film will take place on Friday, July 22nd, 2005, at 4 PM, at
the Cinematheque of Tel Aviv.

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