Spinning Yarns as an Immigrant

Part of Alex Luu’s mission as a writer and performance artist is to tell stories that show something of what it means to be an Asian American man.

But talk to him awhile, and it quickly becomes clear that what most distinguishes him is his open, freewheeling way of spinning yarns about what it is to be Alex Luu.

Luu, 34, lives in Alhambra and is playing Orange County for the first time; his one-man show, “Three Lives,” opened over the weekend at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana, where it resumes Saturday and Sunday.

It tells an immigrant’s archetypal story.

There is the peril-fraught flight from oppression, as Luu’s Chinese family makes it out of Vietnam in the last, frantic airlift in 1975 when Saigon fell to Communist forces.

There is the small boy’s struggle to remain what he once was in a new land--and the literal blows he absorbed for being different from the other kids at school. There’s the eager assimilation, as a teenager, of American ways, and with that, the fear that his friends might still detect the FOB (“fresh-off-the-boat”) kid he once was.

The Irish and the Germans, the Poles and the Italians, the Jews and the Mexicans, and all the rest have been through this drill in America, and that immigrant experience has been a crucible of inspiration for artists.

Luu makes the archetype his own by focusing on how his father and grandfather helped him become his own person in America. And how, as he became this new thing, an American, his relatives became somehow incomprehensible to him. In the end of his funny, poignant and refreshingly not self-sparing piece, Luu comes to a deeper understanding and appreciation of his family’s achievements, and of some of his own failings.

There’s a lot more to tell, and the engaging Luu was more than willing in a recent phone interview from his home in Alhambra.

There is his lifelong fear of balloons: “I get very nervous and I have to leave; I avoid New Year’s Eve parties like a plague and I’m rarely at parades,” he said. --He turned that fear into a performance piece some years ago, complete with a balloon-festooned stage. It was an experience fraught with more than the usual stage fright.

There was Luu’s childhood pastime in Vietnam of raising crickets to combat each other like fighting cocks--a “kind of gruesome” game that was the subject of “Chan’s Cricket,” the first project he completed during the late 1980s as a UCLA film student.

There was “Toytown USA,” a mid-1990s performance piece about how he found the perfect birthday present for his niece--but was so hounded by racist store clerks that he was unable to buy it.

There’s the still-forming piece about what it was like to be a minority twice over: Luu’s father and grandfather fled to Vietnam when China fell to the Japanese before World War II. At the end of “Three Lives,” Luu realizes he has inherited from his father and grandfather a powerful, sustaining legacy of striving and suffering for the sake of survival and freedom.

And, oh, yes, while he was in college, Luu got himself entangled in a religious group that he came to realize was a militant cult, interested in arming itself a la the Branch Davidians. How he got into and out of that is the subject of his unproduced feature film screenplay, “Signs From Heaven and Hell.”

Luu said that telling his life’s stories has always come naturally. Although some of his Asian American friends were groomed for the “big three” careers of doctor, engineer or lawyer, he said his parents were more liberal and gave him license to explore his artistic side. That led him to film school.

For a year after graduating, Luu tried to work himself up the career ladder in Hollywood as a low-level functionary on low-budget movies.

“I wanted to write and tell my own stories, but I wasn’t getting an opportunity. I felt very frustrated.”

He got a day job in Alhambra, teaching high school students to write; that would pay the bills while he worked on his own writing and performance pieces. To his surprise, Luu found he had a flair for teaching and motivating kids.

In 1994, he quit his day job and decided to devote himself full time to his art. He joined a Los Angeles group, the Asian American Men’s Writing and Performing Workshop. Its mission was to fight news-media stereotyping of minorities by telling individual stories in a probing way. The workshop spawned an ensemble touring show, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Asian Men (*but didn’t give enough of a [expletive] to ask”).

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The emphasis, group founder Dan Kwong said, was to “push people to go deeper, encourage them to explore their stories as deeply as they could.” Luu, he said, came to the group with already well-developed writing and performing skills. He sees Luu’s work as part of a rising tide for Asian American storytelling: “There has been an exponential growth” in performance art by Asian Americans, Kwong said, and in educational programs to help Asian Americans tell their stories through writing and performance.

Kwong said he is particularly excited by Luu’s ability to teach youngsters as well as enthrall audiences. Indeed, Luu recently served as a teaching fellow in Oregon, and after a well-received performance of “Three Lives” in May at the Boston Center for the Arts, Luu will return to Boston this fall to run a three-month workshop to teach teens how to tell their own stories.

The Boston Center has had trouble reaching out to the city’s Asian communities, said Magda Spasiano, the center’s teen coordinator. Hiring Luu, she hopes, will be a way of connecting.

“He’s amazingly personable, a very giving soul, very open and approachable,” she said.

For Luu, a key reward of doing “Three Lives,” which he first performed in 1997 and has refined since, is watching people’s emotional guard drop as they connect with his story.

“It is about three men who were very close to me, but at the same time, I was afraid of that closeness,” Luu said. “Most Asian men aren’t allowed to embrace emotions. I’ve had men come to the show, Asian and non-Asian, who are just weeping. It blew me away.”

The emotional stakes in such personal storytelling have been too high for Luu’s parents and his older sister.

“They’ve never seen my stuff all these years,” he said. “I was really upset they didn’t want to come see [“Three Lives”], but I’ve made my peace with that. I say, ‘Dad, this is not really a piece where I slam you.’ It comes full circle and is about the importance of the family.”

Luu said his father dreams of the day when his son will be an honored feature filmmaker: “Whenever I see him he asks me, ‘When do we go to the Oscars?’ But they know [solo performing] is something I love doing and I’m making a living out of. They’re happy about that.”

* “Three Lives,” Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m. $15 to $20. (714) 547-4688.