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VIETNAMESE
REFUGEES FIND HOPE OUT OF TURMOIL IN THE UNITED STATES IN
GREEN DRAGON
 Refugees
generally leave a country in turmoil without a clear idea
of what comes next other than a prolongation of their lives.
In Green Dragon, the experience of some 134,000
Vietnamese refugees is condensed into short cuts of a few
characters with myriad adjustment problems faced at the principal
location of temporary housing, Camp Pendleton, where the film
was actually shot. As the opening credits roll, we see film
footage of the chaos of South Vietnam's last days, then the
means of transportation to America, arrival and processing
of Vietnamese refugees, and the temporary quarters, largely
Quonset huts and tents that were prepared for the refugees
in two days. Throughout the film, radio broadcasts provide
news updates until the People's Army of Vietnam triumphantly
marches unopposed into Saigon on April 30, 1975. Released
in Los Angeles one day after the twenty-seventh anniversary
of that event, the film's tagline is "A story from a
war that had been forgotten." The two principal characters
are Marine Sergeant Jim Lance (played by Patrick Swayze) and
refugee Tai Tran (played by Don Duong), whom Lance appoints
as camp manager because one day he demonstrates a command
of English in asking how he could be of help, clearly manifesting
survivor's guilt. Lance's assignment is to accommodate the
refugees until they have sponsors. (Indeed, the camp opened
in April 1975 and closed in October that year.) Lance asks
Tai to try to keep order in the camp by attending to the needs
of the refugees and by preventing disorder, but of course
the task is more than anyone can handle, since more than 10,000
refugees are cramped into a single location. For some refugees,
problems that they had in Vietnam are compounded, such as
a husband who has two wives. Wife #1 displays intense emotional
outbursts, believing that she has lost her "womanhood,"
though wife #2 in due course slaps her husband when she learns
that he will abandon her, neither apparently realizing that
no American would ever agree to sponsor a man and his two
wives. A few refugees inevitably insist on returning home,
so they have to be segregated from the general population,
though one man wants to drag his family along despite their
wishes to the contrary. Many refugees are sad that close relatives
have been left behind. Tai's niece and nephew keep looking
for their mother, but in time his nephew, adorable five-year-old
Minh (played by Trung Hieu Nguyen), becomes amazed by the
art work of African American Addie (played by Forest Whitaker),
a camp volunteer cook. The bonding, based on body language
and common appreciation for the comic character Mighty Mouse,
appears perhaps as a paradigm for why Americans and Vietnamese
have taken such a liking for each other in contemporary America.
At the center of Addie's secret mural, on which he encourages
Minh to use a paintbrush and possibly launch a career, is
a green dragon, which supplies the film's title.
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Political discussions among the refugees tend to be accusatory,
contentious, and futile; those most disappointed with the
plight of their country identify Americans as having betrayed
the people of Vietnam, yet Sergeant Lance tries to reassure
them to the contrary while holding back his obvious guilt
that events turned out so badly for the United States. Yet
no guilt is more deep than a Vietnamese general, who ultimately
commits suicide rather than face an ignominious future. Indeed,
most refugees are afraid of their future life in America.
One enterprising young man, Duc (played by Billinjer Tran),
has no problem organizing business right in the camp, as he
doubtless did in Saigon, and he exchanges gold possessed by
refugees for various items brought into the camp by Addie,
who later dies. When Duc is sponsored by someone in Kansas,
he leaves with a smile on his face, determined to build a
Little Saigon of shops and homes (which is due course transformed
the nearby town of Westminster). But unknown sponsors do not
excite everyone. One night, a woman who had received word
that she had been sponsored, refuses to leave her friends
and the photos of her two sons, so she is forcibly removed
by military police while screaming. The obvious brutality
frightens refugees so much that Tai feels no alternative but
to resign, having felt disgraced in his role and humiliated
that he was not consulted beforehand. Though sympathetic to
Vietnamese but ignorant of their cultural sensitivities, Lance
does not realize that betrayal (of country, of family, and
by the Americans) is the strongest emotion dominating the
camp, whose residents are now in fear that they will be treated
as harshly by Americans as by the MPs. But Lance then brings
peace to the camp in a surprise ending: He takes Tai outside
the camp to see how Americans live. When Tai returns, he reports
that the roads of full of Cadillacs, the houses are beautiful
and spacious, and the stores are big and filled with goodies,
some of which he brings back in a paper sack. Nominated for
last year's Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival,
Green Dragon was written and directed by Timothy
Linh Bui, with a short segment directed by his brother Tony
Bui (who directed Three
Seasons). Timothy arrived as a refugee at Fort
Chaffey, Arkansas, at about the same age as Minh in the film,
and the character provides an opportunity for some autobiographical
reflections. In addition to the fictional stories about refugees,
which were constructed from the experiences that Timothy's
mother relayed to him about real persons, the film provides
music, dance, subtitled Vietnamese dialog, and an opportunity
to view Vietnamese customs regarding many aspects of everyday
living. The pace is so rapid that there is little time to
reflect during the film on the overall message. What dawns
on a filmviewer later is that the 1.5 million Vietnamese now
in the United States are a proud, energetic, enterprising,
sensitive, smiling people who have brought more good to America
than America ever brought to Vietnam. For the film's role
in bringing to light the pathos of the Vietnamese refugee
experience, the Political Film Society has nominated Green
Dragon for an award as best film exposé of
2002. MH
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