An Interesting Essay About Miss Saigon

I'm glad Diep Tran wrote this and I'm glad someone posted this who wasn't me.

THEY SELL HO CHI MINH SHIRTS AT THE THEATER? Lord have mercy. Great blog post. I agree with it. Good luck getting the Miss Saigon apologists on the board admit to any cultural insensitivity in the show, however.

sparepart973 said: "I like Saigon, though I recognize the sexism, misogyny and orientalism in this show. But I wish the same critique could be made of Aladdin, which is equally horrible and problematic in its on way.



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I'm sure some people have very real and valid critiques of the stereotypes in Aladdin, but I think what cuts so close to home for Tran and other Vietnamese people (and lots of Asians of other national origins too) is that Miss Saigon deals with a real time and real events. It's not meant to be a fairy tale. A lot of people will look at Miss Saigon and think it represents some kind of intrinsically authentic Vietnamese experience, when it's really a fantasy created by white European men that plays into just about every Orientalist trope.

Updated On: 4/15/17 at 10:52 AM

BUMP just to amplify this essay.

That article is of someone who does not understand the show and theatre in general.

It is also of someone who does not fully understand war and that there are always 2 sides to it.

His main problems with the show "that it does not tell a story about a Vietnamese father who worked as a teacher and later became a soldier" and that Miss Saigon is supposedly all about "white-savior fantasia", actually both have nothing to do with this show.

This is either someone who does not like to be confronted with certain parts of reality from the past, and definitely does not understand theatre, this show or story telling in general.

Of course "it does not cover every person's story" is never a valid argument. And in any case, Kim is the heroine of this show.

There is no denying that bad things happened and that women were treated badly and there were horrible situations created by this war. That is what this show is about. One can feel uncomfortable with being confronted by it, or one can say they rather would like to have seen stories of different people, but deal with it, this show is about these people.

To top it all off he mentions "yellow face casting" 5 times in this article. Which says a lot about his intentions. Because that argument is not valid anymore since 1992. To be taken seriously, one needs to come up with different arguments than "yellow face casting", "white saviour" and "rather see stories about different people".


"what have they learned, really? That Vietnamese women are victims, and Americans are well-meaning buffoons."

Actually, what I have learned after watching the show is that Vietnamese women are fighters and very strong and beautiful characters (at least in this show) and the Americans are confused victims and don't know how to handle the situation, which sometimes makes them look like "well meaning-buffoons" which is hardly flattering, but the scenes show that each and everyone is much more than that. A person with different sides. This show looks much further than that beginning point that the writer of this article loves to focus on.

This person should visit another show, like wicked, or any other show where each character is wholesome or exactly like his parents and does the right thing all the time.

Updated On: 4/17/17 at 06:18 AM

I liked that article very much; Miss Saigon, like all the mega-hits from recent decades (Les Miz, Phantom, Mamma Mia, etc.) is an idiotic and shallow piece of lowbrow nonsense, masquerading as deep art. But these shows give the crowds exactly what they want - easy, sentimental, non-challenging blandertainment. Remember: the masses don't come to Broadway for smart or deep. (But recent sales suggest they may not be coming to Broadway for Miss Saigon, either, at least not this time around.)

Excerpted from the article... "Whatever their various merits, these films essentially reduce the Vietnam War to a narrative about whether or not America should have been involved, and they make the Vietnamese background players, bystanders in our own country’s history. It’s complicated because there are three sides to this story: the South Vietnamese side, the North Vietnamese side, and the American side. But one thing is not complicated: Westerners have been at the center of this narrative for too long."

I had some issues with Vietgone that I won't get into here but something that I found very striking was how the play avoided doing this and in fact made you realize how much all of those other stories are obscuring the Vietnamese perspective by focusing on American involvement. I thought it really became explicit in the final scene at the end when he was interviewing his father. Miss Saigon has always made me uncomfortable from a racial perspective but I didn't really get how my American identity was blinding me.

Other than that, yeah, I'm basically with them though I'm still debating whether I want to sit through the show to see if Eva and Jon Jon live up to the rave reviews they've been getting. Thanks for linking to this, it was a good read.

Dancingthrulife2 said: "It's really funny when people pans a show without citing any textual evidence to support their easily assilabe arguments. I'm not referring to this essay, for it does have some sincereity to some observations and thoughts. However, is Miss Saigon really a story about Saigon girls? Is Fiddle on the Roof a story about the fiddler playing on the shaky roof? I would agree with many criticisms of Miss Saigon had it been the original production. But people talking about the new production drawing ideas from impressions they had of the original production are not only unfair but also irrespective of the art form. Different productions tell different stories, despite the same or similar material. That's why you need a whole creative team to conceive and produce a revival. The goal of the production is not to show you what Vietnam looked like back in 1970s but rather the trauma war has wrought everyone involved. So in a sense, yes, this is not the real Miss Saigon's story, but it's something much larger than that. I'm also tired of the "white savior trope" criticism. You can say The King and I falls into this category, and I wouldn't disagree. However, this is only in the first 30 minutes of the show, unless that's all you saw and then stormed out of the theater. How can anyone capable of understanding the English language fail to notice that NO ONE IS SAVED, fail to notice that KIM's transformation from "when I make love it won't be me. And if they hurt me I'll just close my eyes" to "They think they'll decide your life. No it will be me" is not due to being saved by the white guy but more like being damaged by him and what he stands for? Can't people understand the sarcasm in The American Dream and how it makes fun of the pathetic materialism embedded in the popular conception of the United States? And for those saying there's no good Asian male character, please please tell me is there any good white male or female character? Or is there any "good" character at all? Everyone is a victim and that's why this show is so powerful. You will and should be disappointed if the story you are expected is an Asian-specific story, but you'll be surprisingly satisfied if you are more open to the representation of damages done by war and US imperialism that's unfortunately and ever not limited to Vietnam alone today.

For those of you wondering, I'm not white. I'm an Asian myself.



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This post deserves a big bravo. It's basically all there is to say.

Updated On: 4/17/17 at 09:29 AM