Helping herself

Kieu director Vu T. Thu Ha recasts a Vietnamese epic as a day in the life of a Tenderloin massage parlor worker

By Kimberly Chun

› kimberly@sfbg.com

It's an immigrant song sung the world over — that Proustian moment of acute synesthesia when you suddenly smell, wafting through the air, the river you walked beside on your way to school, or the mango tree that shed its fruit outside your bedroom window, and suddenly you're transported halfway round the world.

Director Vu T. Thu Ha knows how that tune goes. Every time she gets a whiff of durian fruit or certain leaves, she's transported back to her native Vietnam, which she hasn't seen since she was 10, when her parents put her on a small, leaky fishing boat and loosed her on the world.

"Every now and then you just walk through the streets. Sometimes you smell something, and you're, like, home. You want to just stand there and, 'Wait, where did it go?' Even for just one brief second," the apple-cheeked, barefaced filmmaker says, smiling somewhat wistfully, sitting beneath the shade trees lining Dolores Street outside Maxwell Coffee House.

Vu, 31, understands the emotional power of such evocative moments. Her first lyrical feature, Kieu, likewise traverses the borders between dreamtime and real time, homeland Saigon and present-day San Francisco, memories of humid breezes and green papaya and the reality of a Tenderloin massage parlor worker. Adapted from the nearly 200-year-old classic Vietnamese epic poem Truyen Kieu (The Tale of Kieu), by Nguyen Du, with careful, empathetic grace and creamy, lush cinematography (by Carla M. Roley), Kieu covers a day in the life of the title character (Kathy Uyen) as she gets a letter from home, shops for produce, prays at her altar, and trudges to work, haunted by thoughts of her past, her family, and the poem itself.

While working as a videographer several years ago on a St. James Infirmary sex education video for massage parlor workers, the director came upon the tale of Thuy Kieu, a magdalen figure who's sold into sexual servitude in order to save her father and brother and who's a "sort of national heroine in Vietnam in that she's celebrated for her spiritual purity and her acceptance of fate."

"I definitely didn't agree with the idea of making a safe sex video for sex workers!" Vu says now. "It seemed a little bit ... condescending. In my experience visiting the massage parlors, the women often compare themselves to Kieu, and that was how I learned of the poem, with them reciting it. It was natural. Why not allow them to tell us their stories?"

In 2003, Vu received a Creative Work Fund collaborative grant from the Haas Family Foundation and teamed up with Locus Arts and the Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center to develop a script loosely based on Kieu. The film's composite character was developed by a writing team of Asian and Pacific Islander women: Japanese Hawaiian writer Lisa Asagi, poet and teacher Maiana Minahal, writer and filmmaker Debbie Ng, activist and storyteller Leilani Ly-Huong Nguyen, and Oakland Unified School District consultant Jacqueline Thu-Huong Vu (who has worked with teenage Asian sex workers in Oakland). Researching the lives of massage parlor employees, the women hung out, sang karaoke, and ate with their subjects; toiled on portions of the script for a year; and then came together to edit — and eat home-cooked meals — in the director's Sycamore Street apartment. Vu and Leilani Ly-Huong Nguyen eventually rewrote the screenplay in Vietnamese and then translated it back to English after it was shot in 2004 and early 2005.

Immersing herself in her countrywomen's lives and then shooting Kieu's boat scenes in Vietville, on Palawan in the Philippines, Vu was reminded of her own passage out of Vietnam: At the time, she thought she was simply going to visit an uncle. "There we were in the middle of the ocean," she says now. "It's like, 'Thanks, parents!'" The boat broke down, the water supply ran dry, and the small craft drifted for three days and four nights — as the children sucked on sugar and lemon balls made by their mother to slake their thirst.

Placed with Vietnamese foster parents who are Assembly of God preachers in Charlotte, NC, Vu spent most of her childhood working in the garment industry, and at 20, she became a union organizer. A protest against Macy's brought her to San Francisco, where she organized for Local 250, the health care workers union, and then signed on at Rainbow Grocery nine years ago. Photography classes at City College led to a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. There she made a narrative short with legendary filmmaker George Kuchar, Shut Up, White Boy, learning to shoot on 16mm as she went — much as she tutored herself in video, alongside a mostly female API crew of Locus Arts filmmaking students, for Kieu.

Her next step: assembling DVDs of her feature to hand out to massage parlor workers. "How could you not be political when you're making art?" she ponders. "It's so cliché to say it, but how can you not, especially in an industry that's so dominated by men?" *

KIEU

Sun/19, 5 p.m.

Kabuki

March 26, 4:30 p.m.

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