Lounge Wizard : Brawny Yank Singer Becomes a Star in Vietnamese Clubs

At the Caravelle, in the shadow of Disneyland, singer Rick Murphy’s head almost touches the ceiling, a problem no one else has in this smoky nightclub.

To many, the 6-foot-3, 225-pound Irish-American from San Diego might seem out of place at a club he calls the Copacabana of Southeast Asian entertainment. But to the refugees hunched at dimly lit tables, Murphy is nothing less than a hero--a man whose fluent Vietnamese lyrics have won him an international following and, along the way, generated pride and admiration among his audiences.

“Rick is a real phenomenon,” said Nam Nguyen, a mechanical engineer from Del Cerro. “To those of us who have children, he is the best of both worlds--an American who shows the younger generation what’s important about our culture, our heritage, our struggle.”

Among the 40,000 Vietnamese in San Diego, where he has lived since 1974, Murphy is a household name. A frequent performer at Vietnamese clubs throughout Southern California, the 35-year-old has, for the past seven years, appeared in cafes and restaurants around the world.

Nguyen Kim Long, the owner of the Caravelle, said that, to an intensely nationalistic people, Murphy is evocative of all that is good about being Vietnamese.

“We are so proud of him,” added Nguyen, the mechanical engineer. “To have a young man like him, who has worked so hard to learn our culture, our language, our customs . . . it is very flattering.”

Murphy, a native of Salem, Ore., grew up in Orange County, graduated from Katella High School and later received both bachelor’s and master’s degree from UC San Diego.

He began studying Vietnamese in 1982, drawn to the language and by the culture’s quiet grace and respect for traditional values--a welcome contrast with the chaos and instability in his own life at the time, he said.

The following year, he started singing in Vietnamese when a Southern Baptist minister, who is Vietnamese, asked him to prepare a song for a Christmas service.

Dressed in traditional Vietnamese garb, Murphy typically sings somewhere every weekend, making occasional appearances at one of San Diego’s three Vietnamese clubs. He travels out of the country twice a year for a total of about 2 1/2 months, and every two to three months makes weekend trips to other American cities. His fee is usually several hundred dollars per appearance, although he often sings for free at Vietnamese benefits.

Although his career is prospering--he has not yet made an album, but will soon travel to Paris to tape a video of a live performance--Murphy said he eventually would like to work as a diplomat or missionary. His country of choice is one that he has never been to--Vietnam.

He says his embrace of Vietnamese culture is not a rejection of his own background.

“I’m not turning my back on American culture,” said Murphy, who lives in the Linda Vista area, where many of the city’s Hmong and Vietnamese refugees reside. “I’m not rejecting my family, my country, my race.

“To some extent, what I’m doing is very American. It’s so individualistic. But worship of individualism is, in part, the problem I had with American culture. . . . It’s just that so much happened to me at one time in my life. You drive your car and nothing goes wrong for months, then all of a sudden, everything goes wrong. It’s like that with life. And around 1978, everything just went wrong.”

During that period, Murphy’s parents divorced, and although he was in his 20s, he and three younger sisters were devastated, he said.

At the time, he was a sociology major at UC San Diego, “studying some heavy-duty theory, all of these neo-Marxist, Freudian thinkers. They were writing a lot about the Holocaust. It was around that time that I became reborn as a Christian. Within two years of being reborn, I got involved with the Vietnamese.”

“Maybe I was looking for a new kind of family,” he said. “You know, like a traditional family in society, where authority is respected. Maybe where things were not so in question. All of this happened when I was 22, 23, and I was so idealistic. I thought I could learn anything, do anything, comprehend anything. I found out I couldn’t.”

Murphy said the evolution in his life is not as dramatic as it might appear. His father, a former editor at The Times, now works for a newspaper in Texas. But both his paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were Mormon missionaries. Murphy remembers going to his grandfather’s house in Hawaii and feeling entranced by his Asian artifacts, the genesis of a curiosity that continued into high school, where he made his first Asian friends. They were outsiders and, to some extent, so was he.

Among his Vietnamese fans, Murphy has been warmly embraced and, in the process, inspired introspection among his followers.

Suzanne Pham, a Vietnamese refugee living in Garden Grove, said Murphy is important because some Vietnamese parents, in their haste to be accepted in this country, have forgotten their roots and the dignity of who they were. The fact that he wears traditional Vietnamese clothing and sings songs many refugees have not heard for years is, she said, especially pleasing.

“Vietnamese is one of the hardest languages to learn, and he has learned it flawlessly,” Pham said. “We are truly proud to have him represent us. He reminds the younger generation of the pride and wonder of Vietnamese music.”

Ruben Rumbaut, a professor of sociology at San Diego State University, said Murphy’s mastery of Vietnamese is no idle accomplishment.

“It’s not an Indo-European language,” Rumbaut said. “It’s not like Spanish, French or German. By and large, those languages contain similarities in grammar and syntax and even vocabulary. In Vietnamese, there are several different tones, so that the same word, spelled the same way, can have many different meanings depending on the way it’s intoned.”

The warmth the Vietnamese display toward Murphy is genuine, Rumbaut said.

“They’re impressed not so much by the novelty of what he’s done but by the underlying sincerity and genuineness expressed in the mastery of the language,” Rumbaut said. “In the case of Vietnamese, that’s a double achievement. I have been advised by Vietnamese friends that it’s better to speak in English than it is to converse in Vietnamese in a rough or imperfect way. So what Rick did involved an element of risk.

“He’s gone beyond the point of speaking fluently enough and well enough that what the Vietnamese do in relation to him is reciprocate the considerable respect he’s shown toward them by learning the language.”

Rumbaut said that Murphy, who was one his students when he taught at UCSD before 1985, has become totally immersed in Vietnamese culture.

“He is one of those very rare people who get involved in research through active involvement and participation in the community he’s studying,” Rumbaut said. Murphy has “grown quite attached” to the Hmong children who live in his neighborhood, taking some to the zoo or Sea World on weekends, Rumbaut said.

Murphy dates primarily, but not exclusively, Vietnamese women, and says he would one day like to marry a Vietnamese woman. But, pointing to the wrinkles in his rugged hands, he adds, “the Vietnamese say I have an unlucky love line.”

At his home in San Diego, which he shares with three other men--two Vietnamese, one Chinese--Murphy is surrounded by Vietnamese artifacts and mementoes.

He says he values Vietnamese culture for its serenity, its grace, its respect for authority and reverence for family. With the Vietnamese, he said, he feels a sense of belonging.

When he started to learn Vietnamese, “a tonal, musical language,” he found it suited his mood and sense of discovery. But even in his wildest fantasies, Murphy never dreamed he would someday become a singer.

“I thought I’d get married pretty young and do something,” he said. “But never this .”