Troupe Finds ‘Laughter’ in Vietnamese American Experience

Pamela Pham remembers the merciless teasing. The way her new American classmates ridiculed her for pointing to things with her middle finger, a custom back home.

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“The kids would laugh and laugh and laugh and turned that into a joke,” Pham said. “They made me a joke.”

Journey Pham (no relation) remembers a family member’s brush with death.

The way somebody tried to shoot his brother, yelling, “You don’t belong here,” Pham recalled.

Humiliating or life-threatening, the trials of assimilation have been formidable for Vietnamese refugees and immigrants. Now Pamela Pham and Journey Pham are part of a group of young Vietnamese Americans looking on the lighter side with “Laughter From the Children of War,” a theater piece they’ll present tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

“It’s a very serious topic, yet it’s presented in a very funny, extremely poignant way,” says Hung Nguyen, a member and artistic director of Club O’ Noodles, a 2-year-old drama-comedy ensemble of a dozen twentysomething performers born in Vietnam during the war.

Nguyen co-founded the L.A.-based company, which has mostly performed on college campuses, to allow Vietnamese Americans, rather than mainstream media, to define their identity. “Laughter’s” theater, song and dance is written from troupe members’ stories and reminiscences.

“Instead of having [the musical] ‘Miss Saigon’ say what it means to be Vietnamese,” Nguyen said, “or Oliver Stone say what it means to be Vietnamese, it is we who are saying what it means.”

“Laughter” follows the journey of a group of Vietnamese children, born during the war, from their homeland to the United States, Nguyen said by phone during a recent rehearsal break in Los Angeles.

Against a musical background juxtaposing traditional Vietnamese lullabies with rap and jazz, it relates “how they experienced the war as they are growing up,” he said, “what the war meant to them, how they get to America, how that experience affects their lives” and their struggles and discoveries as U.S. citizens.

One poignantly humorous scene depicts the humiliation of a once-powerful Vietnamese general who, newly arrived in the United States, cannot speak enough English to order fast food, Nguyen said. Parent-child roles are reversed when his child is forced to place the order.

Another scene lambastes stereotypical portrayals of Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans.

“We are satirizing how in all the Vietnam movies, like ‘Rambo’ or ‘Full Metal Jacket’ by Oliver Stone, there has to be a rape scene of Vietnamese women, or everybody lives in a jungle and speaks gibberish,” Nguyen said.

In musicals, as well as in movies, Vietnamese women are often portrayed as either “submissive virgins or exotic whores,” he said, and helicopters, like the life-size chopper that descends in “Miss Saigon,” are de rigueur .

“There has to be a helicopter scene with shooting at the village people, but they never really tell a story about these people, what they see or how they live their lives,” Nguyen said. “We wanted to say how ludicrous [it is] to trivialize the whole experience of these people who experienced the war.”

During a recent rehearsal, high-spirited troupe members ran about as if dodging helicopter bullets, launched into a rousing rendition of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme and voiced a grave concern after a small toy helicopter descended: “We can’t have a show about Vietnam without a real helicopter!”

In a climax, the actors vowed to cast off the confining, metaphoric cloak of “silence” borne of being branded “the other,” of not knowing English, of being “trapped between two worlds.”

Facing their imaginary audience, they repeatedly chanted their declaration, their voices growing louder and louder: “We will be heard! We will be heard!”

Pamela Pham, 21, of Santa Ana, made a similar declaration a few years ago. After coming to the United States from Saigon by boat, she became a bookworm “because of the language barrier and the cultural differences.”

In high school, she “broke loose,” joining scholastic clubs, hitting dance clubs and speaking up in class. Now she’s a UC Irvine senior majoring in criminology. She joined Club O’ Noodles in February and is one of several members without prior theatrical experience. “Laughter” has been a way for her to deal with painful memories and express herself so that others understand who she really is.

“I [don’t want to] sit here and blame other cultures for not understanding what it means to be Vietnamese American. It’s about communication now.”

Actress and community activist Nobuko Miyamoto, co-directing “Laughter” with Nguyen and acting as the troupe’s artistic adviser, is all for that.

In the 1960s, Miyamoto left a successful stage and screen career--as a teen, she danced the lead in “The Flower Drum Song” on Broadway and later appeared in the movie “West Side Story”--frustrated with stereotypical roles.

She became involved with civil-rights activities and created her own theater troupe, L.A.’s Great Leap Inc., which presents a balanced view of Asians.

She got involved with “Laughter,” she said, because she remembers what it was like, two decades ago, “not to have a voice.”

“Only in the last 20 years has there been a movement [among Asian Americans] to claim our own identity and create our own voice,” she said. “This is an extension of that.”

* Club O’ Noodles presents “Laughter From the Children of War” tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $10. (714) 854-4646.