Vietnamese Praise Reality in Stone’s ‘Heaven’

Syndicated columnist and Voice of America newscaster Truc B. Bui loathed the idea of the autobiography “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places” being adapted into a movie.

After all, the book’s Vietnamese heroine was not only a rice farmer’s illiterate daughter who was raped by Viet Cong soldiers, she was also a prostitute who ended up being whisked away from the hellish war by an American businessman.

“Heaven and Earth,” the Oliver Stone-directed movie, would say nothing more than his other Vietnam War genre movies did, Bui thought. The movie, to open nationwide on Christmas, would only confirm some people’s twisted stereotype of Asian women, he told himself. Nothing more.

But then, as he has written in his column “Letter From Washington,” to be printed Sunday in Little Saigon’s Nguoi Viet newspaper, Bui was in for a pleasant surprise.

“The movie was fair; it was honest; it was balanced,” Bui, 49, said after attending a screening two weeks ago. More importantly, he added, “it did not show (the Vietnamese people) as being the enemy” of Americans.

And if for no other reason, some Vietnamese Americans in Orange County said they are looking forward to the movie because Stone promised from the start that it would be seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese, for whom the Vietnam War is but part of a legacy of endless wars.

“It’s too soon to predict how the Vietnamese community will react to the movie, because it hasn’t come out yet,” said Hung X. Vu, vice president of the Westminster-based Vietnamese American Movie and Television Assn. “But it’s gratifying to see that Oliver Stone, who has filmed so much about the Vietnam War, is now looking at a completely new angle.”

In “Platoon,” Stone took viewers back to the bloody battlefield of Southeast Asia, where American soldiers torched a village and were massacred by Viet Cong fighters. In “Born on the Fourth of July,” the controversial director focused on a combat-paralyzed Marine who becomes active in the anti-war movement back in the United States.

In those two critically acclaimed films, viewers “don’t see the point of view of the Vietnamese,” their loss and immeasurable suffering, said Hoang X. Nguyen, an editor of Nguoi Viet . “But in this movie, we have a voice for the first time. Oliver Stone allowed us to tell a small part of our story.”

Stone also took no prisoners--nor sides--in his latest installment of the Vietnam War, this time chronicling how it shaped the life of a peasant woman, Le Ly Hayslip.

The violence in “Heaven and Earth” was perpetrated by the Viet Cong soldiers who raped the young girl, the South Vietnamese who tortured and imprisoned her because they believed she was a Viet Cong spy, and the American husband who physically abused her. Even the Western freedom to which she fled for protection ended up shunning her through bigotry fed by the people’s hatred for the war in its waning years.

At the Thu Do Cinema in Garden Grove, which caters to mostly Vietnamese American audiences with movies from Asia or mainstream movies with Asian themes, countless people have called or come in to inquire if “Heaven and Earth” would play there, manager Steven Tran said.

“We happily told them, yes, on Christmas Day,” Tran said.

“I think this movie will have a very big emotional impact on the community,” he said. “It shows (Vietnam) at its most basic level, in the most vivid way, just the way many of us remember it.”

“For many people, I think they will watch the movie and in some scenes, say, ‘Hey, I’ve seen that before. . . . I’ve seen that place,’ ” said Tran, who saw the movie at a trade screening earlier this month. “You’ll feel pain; you’ll feel relieved because it will bring you face to face with the past.”