Saigon: The Play That Tries to Heal "a Wound," and a Director Who Wants It "True to Saigon, True to History"

"What I ask of myself is that I not forget Saigon's tears. What did people feel in this place? Only with that thread running through it could I make a story true to Saigon, true to history."

On April 23, 2018, the French play Saigon was screened in Beijing, followed by a discussion.

Director Caroline Guiela Nguyen talked about how she made the play and answered questions from the audience about details in it. Yanghua Theatre, the company that brought Saigon to China, also explained why it picked up this production.

In 2017, Caroline, then 36, took part in France's Avignon Festival for the first time. Saigon, which she wrote and directed, played in the "IN" section — the strand the festival officially invites and funds. Wang Keran, general manager of Yanghua Theatre, and Anna, the company's co-producer, saw it there.

From start to finish, Saigon has only one set: a Vietnamese restaurant.

The middle of the set is where the diners eat. On the left is a kitchen the audience can see into. On the right is the front door, and beyond it a small patch of outdoors that tells the audience whether it is night or day. Besides the door, the right side also holds a small stage strung with colored lights. In the story, people get up on it and sing in Vietnamese and in French.

Saigon is a name that exists only in the past. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's capital, once went by it.

In Saigon, the director tells the stories of people whom war forced apart across two countries, Vietnam and France. Those stories always play out inside a Vietnamese restaurant.

At first it is a restaurant that opened in Saigon in the 1950s. Then it is a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris, run by Vietnamese who were made to follow the French back to France. By the end, as the story moves on, it is the old restaurant that overseas Vietnamese still remembered in the 1990s, when they were finally allowed to go home.

It "crosses time and space," carrying stories that took place in France and in Saigon between the 1950s and the 1990s.

Caroline was born and raised in France; her mother is of Vietnamese descent, her father of Algerian descent. In 1997, when she was 16, she went back with her mother to Vietnam. In her mind, a Vietnamese restaurant is something that stands outside time and space.

She has walked into restaurants like this in Vietnam and in France. In either country, the restaurant is the one thing that never changes.

Hence the setup of Saigon. The restaurant and the people who work in it never change; time runs on, and inside it people come together or are separated.

Wang Keran and Anna watched the three-hour play at Avignon. Unlike Anna, who is French, Wang had the language in his way. But by the end both of them were in tears, and both loved it. Afterward they arranged to meet the director, hoping to bring the production to China.

The French Embassy later backed the import and paid the company's airfare. Saigon will play in Beijing and then Shanghai at the end of this June, as part of the Croisements Festival, the France-China cultural spring.

Wang Keran said staging the play in China costs so much that even a complete sell-out would still lose money. That, he said, is why there will probably be only these two runs brought in by his company.

A record of the discussion:

Q: the moderator and members of the audience

Caroline: writer and director of Saigon

Q: Let's begin by having the director, Caroline, tell us where she is from, what she has done, and where she studied. Some of you may be surprised that a production this big comes from a woman director — please introduce yourself.

Caroline: Hello everyone. First, thank you very much for coming to meet me today. I know that seeing a play as a filmed recording is a precious thing. It is not the same as a live performance, but it is precious all the same.

A quick word about myself. I came to theater late. I first studied sociology in France, and I found that I liked to stand at a distance and observe. Ethnology is a branch of sociology, and through it I came across ethnographic theater studies, then a new discipline in Paris, and I gradually worked my way into the field.

My family suited that field well: my father comes from Algiers, my mother from Vietnam. I went to Japan and to Vietnam to study directing, and later I got into the National Theatre School of Strasbourg to study directing, where I worked on classic scripts. But after that I wanted to invent a way of making theater of my own.

Q: People may be curious about the director's family background, because this story has a great deal to do with her. Tell us about it.

Caroline: When I entered the National Theatre School of Strasbourg, I found that the people we saw onstage were not representative. In life, my mother is Vietnamese and speaks Vietnamese, as do her brothers and sisters; my father is from Algiers and speaks the local language with his brothers and sisters; my cousins married foreign women, and so on.

But the lives of these people had never been shown on the stage of a major theater. I felt that both these people and their stories needed to be put onstage.

Q: I want to ask the director: when did you decide that you had to put a production like this onstage — about your mother, and about thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people driven from their homes?

Caroline: How did I come to take on a subject this large? It goes back to 1996. That year the Vietnamese government invited Vietnamese living in France to return and see their birthplace for the first time.

I was in my teens then, one of the overseas Vietnamese. My grandmother and my uncles were all talking it over: we had been gone forty years, and going back meant going to a place that was by then a foreign country to us. We discussed it for about a year, and at 16 I went back with my mother and part of her family.

Once there I had a very strange feeling. Living in France, I ate Vietnamese food every day, people spoke Vietnamese to me, and I had always taken myself for Vietnamese. In Vietnam I discovered, first, that I did not speak Vietnamese, and second, that people took me for French. I was thoroughly confused. There were also people who looked a great deal like me — I look like my mother, and my relatives look like me. But because of money, living conditions, and the language, we could pass for blood siblings and still not talk to each other.

I was caught in between: in Vietnam I was the French one, in France the Vietnamese one. Who was I, then? That was a very large question.

I told myself that one day I would come back and tell this story. It is my own story.

I don't want to use the word "identity" here, because in France "identity" is a very sensitive word. What I want to ask is what actually makes up a person's inner life. That is the question I want to work on.

Let me give a more concrete example from my own life. When my mother first reached France, she wanted to blend completely into French society. So she did not teach me Vietnamese; she wanted me to be a French child through and through, and worried that if I spoke Vietnamese I would not be accepted. My mother's French is very good — perfect, you could say. But back in Vietnam I found it was not that simple. There is one moment I bring up often: we went to buy fruit, my mother was choosing, and I saw the women selling it laugh. I asked our interpreter, "Are they laughing at us?" She said, "The way your mother talks is out of date. Vietnamese people don't speak like that anymore."

That gave me a thought: what my mother speaks may not be Vietnamese at all. It is a language that once existed.

I am someone who speaks only French, and whether even that verdict holds may not be so simple either. The voiceover you just heard in the play I wrote myself. My inspiration when writing it came from a friend who translates: when she turned Vietnamese into French for me, the French she used was full of pictures.

If someone was crying, an ordinary person would say he was sad; her translation would say he was overcome with grief. That struck me as more vivid, so I wrote my voiceover that way.

When I had it written and had someone read it aloud, my boyfriend said, "That's just how you talk normally." Only then did I see that the voiceover I had written was my own way of speaking.

Building your own character, your own identity, goes far beyond the simple matter of which language you speak. Through the marks we carry on us, we already have our given place in the world; who we are is perfectly clear, and language cannot fence it in.

Q: The director tells many people's stories in this play. How did you make it? There are so many people in it, and I'm curious about the process.

Caroline: I did a great deal of basic research in France and in Vietnam. In France, mainly in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, what we usually call the Asian quarter, where many overseas Vietnamese and Chinese live. I would sit in Vietnamese restaurants, waiting to hear their stories, listening to their voices.

I also spent long stretches in the place once called Saigon and now called Ho Chi Minh City. There are many restaurants there, and I listened to how people spoke, in what tone and what voice. My mother wants to return to her hometown, but she cannot return to Saigon: that place no longer exists. I spent a long time in France and Vietnam gathering and sorting basic material.

When I came back, I began rehearsing with the actors. At rehearsals I gave them a book. In it were DVDs, a lot of music, recordings I had made, photographs and so on — the whole background of the play, so they could get a feel for it and see what each person had felt.

The people who went with me to France and Vietnam — set design, music, lighting and the rest — were all people I had known for more than ten years. On rehearsal days I would ask the actors to look through these materials and improvise, and I filmed the rehearsals. Every night I went back through the footage, took it apart, and wrote the next morning on that basis. The material was ground out this way, not written.

Q: There is a lot to say about this play. We know it took two years to make, with many trips between France and Vietnam. Three words come to mind — form, writing, story. What do they mean to you?

Caroline: Let me start with the third, the telling of stories. There is a current in France now that holds that the story itself does not matter much; how you tell it matters more.

You see every kind of theatrical form onstage today, but I badly miss the feeling of telling a story and hearing one. The Vietnamese and Algerians I mentioned are everywhere in my life, yet you never see them onstage, which is a real shame. I wanted to pick both of those things back up and have them show in my work.

Second, the form Anna mentioned. Form and writing are not cleanly divided. In the play you see the use of light and shadow, and for me light and shadow can narrate different times and places. So is light and shadow form, or is it the writing itself? I think "light" is itself a kind of writing. Making a work, as I understand it, is not one person at a desk writing without a stop. A maker who "lets the actors act" is not the same as a classical author; it is a fuller form.

Q: I think what you said is excellent. Watching the film, we also felt how generous this play is. Every detail fits so exactly; nothing in it is spare. We felt how generously you give to your actors and to your audience. And for all its complexity and precision, it gives a feeling that is very simple and very moving. We would like to talk about what is called melodrama — roughly, a play where someone cries and we are willing to cry too, a play that finds an echo in the audience. Could you tell us what you make of the reviews Saigon has had?

Caroline: What you are describing is hard to render in Chinese — there is no matching word for "melodrama" — and it is the same in Vietnam. Read the other way round, that shows how French theater takes anything to do with feeling, puts it in a box, and calls it melodrama. That is worth pointing out.

On the matter of feeling, Vietnam and France are very different: Vietnamese people are moved to tears easily. When I take a taxi in Ho Chi Minh City, the driver likes to play bitterly sad songs, in French or in Vietnamese, and ends up crying as he listens. In France that would be thought shameful. It is not shameful at all; it is simply how they feel. At karaoke in Vietnam, many people sing sad songs with the tears streaming down — perhaps it answers a need. You do not see that in France.

At the auditions, when actors in Ho Chi Minh City improvised a short scene, every one of them cried within two minutes. You almost never see that in French casting; getting an actor to cry in front of others is very hard.

The two countries take different views of tears. When we rehearsed Saigon we put no such yoke on ourselves — we were not going for melodrama. After the play came out, people called it melodrama, but we never set out to squeeze tears from the audience. What I ask of myself is that I not forget Saigon's tears. What did people feel in this place? Only with that thread running through it could I make a story true to Saigon, true to history.

Q: One last question. Whose wound does this play heal when it is performed? Is it one particular person's, or many people's?

Caroline: Thank you for the question, Anna. No one has ever asked me that. I think it is a beautiful question, a very good one. To answer it we first have to ask where our wounds came from and what caused them; only then can we ask whose heart is actually healed.

To talk about this play is to talk about France's colonial period in Vietnam. There is no way around it. Many hearts were wounded, many bodies were hurt, many tears were shed.

The question is not only about overseas Vietnamese or about Vietnamese people. To me, even if you are neither Vietnamese nor French, even if you had no grandmother living in Saigon, even if none of these experiences touch you at all, you can still feel the wound this play speaks of. That is exactly the response it has had in France, in Vietnam and in other countries.

What matters most is not arguing over whether it is a Vietnamese wound or a French one. Our wounds are made by other people, and everyone's wounds are much alike. The wound we feel is the wound of all humanity. This play is not confined to the setting of the colonial period in Vietnam; what I am talking about, I think, is a question for all people.

Q: Why does Marie's restaurant become the place where the story gathers? Watching it, I felt Marie was not built up enough as a character. What is her relation to this group of people that lets her restaurant become the center of the whole story?

Caroline: Thank you for the question — in fact you answered it yourself while setting it up. A Vietnamese restaurant, I think, stands outside time and space, with no barrier of geography or of time. In Vietnam or in France, when you walk into a Vietnamese restaurant, there may be a picture from 1956 on the wall, though it is 2018. It gives you a sense of times and places crossing and running together.

The restaurant stands for what is permanent and unchanging; it gives a feeling of steadiness. Its owner is called Marie. In one sense she is real, in another she is not. That is the charm of theater itself.

She and her husband, this couple, are forever serving people in the restaurant; they do not change. This element, at once invented and real, reflects the women you often see in Vietnamese restaurants in Vietnam and in overseas-Vietnamese restaurants in France: always working in the back kitchen, cooking for everyone, and never seen by us. These people keep cooking, and keep telling us stories.

In the play, Marie is always waiting for her son to come home; the story carries the feeling of being stranded far from where you belong. Telling a small story like this carries more symbolic weight and gets my theme across.

My mother is the eldest of my grandmother's nine children, but my grandmother often calls her the second. I always found that odd — my mother is plainly the eldest, so why call her the second?

Three years ago, in Ho Chi Minh City, I happened to learn that this is a Vietnamese custom: whichever child you are, it is held that before you your mother had another child, forgotten, gone no one knows where. So even if you are the eldest, in a sense you were born the second.

Q: Several of the leads, Marie among them, have very sad stories. Marie holds a birthday celebration for her dead son — a joyful one, and she is dressed so beautifully. Her attitude toward grief is quite different from the other leads'. Did the director mean to show the different ways they face sorrow?

Caroline: Thank you for the question. Forty years pass between 1956 and 1996, and when Marie celebrates her son's birthday she sheds more tears than anyone. Her tears are the center of the whole play; by shedding so many, she draws everyone else's tears together. It is a very important scene.

In the last scene, Marie insists on going on living, which shows how strong this character's hold on life is. You cannot say she is not grieving; it would be impossible for her not to grieve.

All I can say is that while I was making the play, getting to know these women, I saw that grief meets with different responses. Theirs is that despite enormous sorrow they go on living, because life goes on and there is still cooking to do. Facing grief, they show different feelings, but that does not mean the grief is not there.

Everyone is different, in fact. People do not all react to a feeling the same way, and there is no such thing as a normal or an abnormal reaction.

The characters in this play have one thing in common: they are strong, full of life in the face of hardship. That includes the woman who reached France, found that her husband had deceived her, and still did not give up — she had a child and learned French. What they share is being able to keep walking through every hardship and trial life brings.

Q: As a woman director and maker, you treat every character in Saigon gently. Do you have your own angle or method for that?

Caroline: (First, I want to say that theater really cannot be conveyed by a projection. We truly cannot feel the presence of theater, including the fragility of actors performing onstage. A recording loses at least ninety percent of the theatrical feeling. I agree with you there.)

You feel my angle is different because I am a woman. But when I was making the play I never thought about how to make it as a woman. There is no such thing as a woman's angle, because that would mean half of humanity shares one point of view, which is impossible.

You say I treat my characters gently, and I am grateful for that and accept it. But a male maker can be gentle too, and a female maker can be angry and anxious. None of it is fixed.

The Indochina War is an event there is no avoiding in France; a great deal of conflict, violence and hatred sits in people's hearts. But I want people to leave the theater with no hatred in theirs.

When I made the character Louise, I never brought her husband onstage. Her husband is the one who stamped the paper that sent Marie's son to the front to risk his life; he is, in truth, a guilty man. But I chose to keep him off the stage. What I wanted to show, through the dialogue, is that people can understand one another — not have everyone walk out full of anger and hatred.

Q: In making this play, did you get everything you wanted to say across? Do you have any regrets?

Caroline: (First, thank you for sharing that and for the question. You said the name Saigon makes you think of colonial war, which I find very interesting. The city has centuries of history behind it; why should a city that rich bring war to mind? Of course, war did destroy it. In France, when you say Vietnamese restaurant, we think of pho and spring rolls; the imagination has run dry. I hope this play can wake people up. Saigon is not only war — it has deep soil under it too, and what I am telling is a human story.)

As for regrets after making it: saying I have none would sound too affected. I won't say that.

The water we drink carries all sorts of impurities, and what I mean is that impurities do not make a thing bad. For now I am quite satisfied with this play; it has been performed all over France and around the world, and that makes me happy. Given the chance, I'd like to tell more stories and put in more characters.

Q: I want to ask the director whether these Vietnamese actors are professionals. Three hours of a play this everyday — how much conviction does it take to hold it up? How does the director draw the actors out, and how do you work with them?

Caroline: The one who plays Marie is not a professional actress; she is a cook, and her movements are exact because she really cooks in life. Even a very fine actress would need a great deal of lived experience to get those movements exactly right. The woman who plays Marie also has an extraordinary gift for acting, and only that combination makes it work: three hours onstage, including the tight control she keeps at the moment she hears her son is dead.

A non-professional has to have conviction to hold up a play like this. Professionals do it for a living, and doing the job may not call for that same strength of conviction. Not that this is true across the board: the woman who plays the mother is a professional, and some young students from a theater school in Ho Chi Minh City who play the younger characters are professionals too. The voiceover, and the girl working in the kitchen alongside Marie, is my translator. I wanted to find a sense of balance, and I hope what the stage can show is the many-colored life we find in real life.

Cover image: a production still from Saigon, courtesy of Yanghua Theatre.