How Vietnamese New Wave Empowered a Displaced Generation

When the filmmaker Elizabeth Ai was pregnant, she found herself scouring through old family albums, looking for something from her own childhood which she could share with her daughter in a couple of years. That’s when she chanced upon photographs of her uncles and aunts in Orange County, listening to New Wave in the ‘80s and ‘90s – something she stopped hearing when she was barely a teenager.

Elizabeth’s family immigrated to the US after the Fall of Saigon in 1975. As a second-generation Vietnamese immigrant, she grew up with her mother barely present in her life, in her rush to earn money, which was an absence she felt dearly. “The majority of folks (who immigrated) have a similar experience – this disconnect from their parents,” she said, “I feel it’s now that we have this privilege to be able to talk to one another beyond the survival of displacement. I don’t want to speak for every Vietnamese person because some people are very fortunate, like everyone in my family got to stay. For a lot of people, it was losing communication with members of their families. There’s a deep unhappiness when you’re like, I can’t even live in the place I belong.”

Amidst this pain, was a deep-seated love for New Wave music, that had the ‘80s on its toes. Elizabeth got to hear it when she was in a car with her aunt and uncle, as her grandfather didn’t approve of that music at home. “It was like an escape to get in the car,” she said, “From the trauma, the chaos, the fighting.” Vietnamese New Wave started when performers like Lynda Trang Đài started doing covers of New Wave music, often in Vietnamese. “It spread like wildfire,” she said, recalling suddenly there were so many artists in the genre and production companies like Asia Entertainment and May Productions popping up, “There were thirty-five record labels on one street in the Little Saigon area in Southern California. It was a huge enterprise at some point – they called it Vietnamese Hollywood.”

In her film ‘New Wave’ (2024), Ai delves into this music phenomenon which struck a chord with Vietnamese teenagers, as they attempted to cope with the political and personal situation at home, talking to performers like Lynda and Thai Tai, her aunt and finally, her mother. There’s a lot that didn’t fit into the film, or the book, she gushed and hopefully there’ll be an exhibition one day with all the crowdsourced images. “We never see pictures of ourselves like this,” she said, “We’ve seen so many famous White stars, but when it comes to our community, it’s very rare to see something like that.”

Upasana Das: You made the film to leave behind something for your daughter to remember and understand your experience. Has she seen the film?

Elizabeth Ai: She’s almost six – she got to see it many times actually, because I would be working on the film and sometimes, she would just sit on my lap. It’s something she’s still processing, and I think as she gets older maybe she’ll understand. But for now, she’s like, oh, are you still working on my film (laughs)? It is really special for me, because that’s a big part of what I didn’t have growing up.

UD: It’s nice she feels that sort of ownership. When did you discover New Wave music?

EA: I was five in 1985 when that music came out. My uncles and aunties originally listened to Modern Talking, CC Catch, Bad Boys Blue, but they also listened to Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Duran Duran – like the UK New Wave, that more folks in the US were listening to, but as Lynda broke into the scene, they celebrated that. They were the teenagers, and I really admired them and looked up to them – they were my babysitters. So, I liked Madonna, I liked Michael Jackson.

UD: What made you feel connected to this kind of music?

EA: It’s the music of my childhood that really connects me to my uncles and aunties and that first youth generation. Even when they weren’t around and their tapes were there and their boomboxes, it almost felt like it was something that connected me to them. It felt cool – the adults don’t really like it, but the teenagers like it, so I felt like I was in their world. To come back to it as a mother now, these memories are bittersweet, because even though my parents weren’t around, I had these other caretakers, I had this music, and we had these fun moments.

UD: Was your mom into New Wave at any point of time? 

EA: I know my mom listened to the music, I asked her about it – and she liked it – but my mom was eating, breathing, sleeping work. Every moment of her day was about how to take care of everybody in the family. So, she wasn’t out in the nightclubs having fun or spending time on the weekends just listening to music – maybe when she was in the car. I think the parents eventually liked it. I don’t know if my grandparents liked it. It just became so ubiquitous that you would hear it everywhere you go – it’s always on the radio, you come home and it’s on a commercial. At some point you would go from why are you kids listening to this, to complete submission!

UD: When did the Vietnamese New Wave scene start becoming popular?

EA: The Vietnamese community already liked New Wave. There were little pockets in California where people were liking this music, and the youth were going to places to listen to it. When she [Lynda] broke out on that 1987 VHS tape on the ‘Paris by Night’ variety show, it just spread everywhere – everybody felt very represented. When we talk in the diaspora about being seen or representation or visibility, Lynda was it. Everybody wanted that hair, they wanted the clothes, they wanted to be singing the songs and there she was doing it. Nowhere in Western media was this available.

UD: Were you watching ‘Paris by Night’ then? 

EA: My grandparents were and my uncles and aunties were but probably I wasn’t. As I got a little older, I could see it a lot more because ‘Paris by Night’ in that era wasn’t as prevalent, but probably in the later ‘80s – like ’89, ’90. You could go to any Vietnamese supermarket or Vietnamese, convenience store or Vietnamese enclaves, and they would be renting out the VHS tapes. It was a variety show that you could only buy on a VHS and that’s why I don’t remember it at the moment it happened. As it got more popular, public access television would have a channel, or some hours where Vietnamese people would be on, talking about the latest trend or things that are happening in the community, and they would talk about Lynda. So, when I was home on the weekends, my family would be playing these public access channels, or if they had rented the VHS tape.

UD: Why did performers like Lynda do covers? 

EA: There’re so many people that we celebrate that do covers – a lot of great American singers like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and even Michael Jackson. It’s so hard to invest to do your own thing, you know, and as somebody who’s getting to this country, maybe the first thing you’re doing isn’t inventing or making original music. The first thing you’re gonna do is, let’s make the thing that we know how to make right away.

UD: You mentioned they also made Eurodisco their own. There’s also this question of assimilation into this new country. How does the boundary between making it their own and assimilation play about?

EA: I don’t know if they were trying to assimilate. They were rejected from the American mainstream, and they were also rejected by their parents. So, they’re like, I’m going to school learning one thing, while these people are treating me a certain way, looking at me a certain way – with the stigma of the Vietnam War as a part of who they are. They’re like, well, I’m here because of this war that happened that America was involved with. It was more we’re carving out our space and it was like a reclamation. They couldn’t please either culture, so they built this other third culture, where it was this hybridized identity. It was a very symbolic thing singing in Vietnamese and in English but using the music of unpopular European synthesized music because Modern Talking wasn’t playing on American radio, and neither was Bad Boys Blue, so it was a radical act to be like this is what we’re popularizing in our diaspora community. 

UD: Also, the American Army would carry music with them to Vietnam. Did your parents listen to non-Vietnamese music while in Vietnam?

EA: There’s a very popular genre of music called bolero that they listened to. There was also American GIs listening to rock and roll, and all kinds of music from America, like jazz. With French colonization, there was definitely a lot of French music. Even before that, there was a thousand years of Chinese rule in Vietnam, a brief period of Japanese Occupation. There’s a very famous Indian Vietnamese singer and she came about in the late 60s or early 70s in Vietnam – her name is Julie Quang, and she was in a rock band, and she preceded the era before New Wave. So, they had a very different sound, but very much inspired the future generation.

UD: Is Vietnamese New Wave primarily composed of a lot of women singers rather than men?

EA: In my research I would say it was majority women. They would front the bands as singers, and the bands would be guys. They would play the synthesized drums and guitars and keyboards. Most of the album covers were women – I guess they were like, “Oh, let’s put sexy women on top!” Solo performers like Lynda would take pictures with Thai Tai and Trizzy – there are a lot of group photos because they really saw themselves building this kind of community of artists and they did a lot of these fashion editorial photoshoots together, and then the album covers would sometimes just be a variety of people, but they all sang their own songs.

UD: Lynda didn’t get to make her own music – how were mainstream American record companies treating this genre – did any other Vietnamese New Wave singers try to make their own album?

EA: There was one woman who was successful for a brief period of time. She actually did cross over – Shere Thuthuy. I think she had an aneurysm shortly after her crossover into fame and making original music. There weren’t many. She was one who I really admired that was able to get so far with her career, but it stopped short because of her condition. There wasn’t very much diversity back then in movies and television and same with record companies. 

UD: A generation of people didn’t accept Lynda because of her provocativeness. You feature a lot of interviews where people are asking her why is she dressed like this.

EA: Being a woman back then, wearing very little clothing and dancing the way that she did – even Madonna wasn’t just immediately loved. There were lots of people who didn’t want to see her on TV, didn’t want to hear her music because people who were very conservative and Christian said, how dare she show her body this way and sing about sex and love. So, if a White woman was getting pushback from mainstream America, what do you think it was like for somebody who just got to America from a conservative society like Vietnam, to emulate somebody like Madonna in the mainstream? There are even worse questions that didn’t make it into the film, from the archives.

UD: Also, the kind of clothes they wore were very typical of the ‘80s – this sort of big hair or huge shoulder pads. Did they also have like an independent style of their own? 

EA: I feel like it’s very much a DIY culture. So, it was very much a style of their own. They were inspired by obviously the big hair and the flashy clothes from the era, but they had to make their own dresses – they would rip their clothes and decorate them in their own ways – you see it in the photos. Everything was very accessorised with jewellery and piling on stacks of bracelets and necklaces. They made everything their own. Even the music – even though the diaspora stars covered the music, they would do their own interpretations of the music and sing in Vietnamese and totally change the lyrics in Vietnamese. So, what they would sing would be completely different.  

UD: What was the process behind collecting these photographs?

EA: It spanned from going through my own personal archives in 2018 and putting aside pictures of my aunties and uncles and the ones that they shared with me of their friends in the community. The pandemic happened in 2020, and we had just started filming. We launched the Instagram in 2020 – we had spent four years asking for photographs from our social media community, and people would send incredible photos but then they wouldn’t sign the release document to give us permission, or there’s like a glare on the photo. Then they would just disappear. It made us realize how much of an effort preservation work is.

UD: Did you ask them about some of the stories behind the photographs?

EA: It was impossible to ask everyone about every single photo that was sent in. Somebody in my own family talked about that one photograph, which I thought was a government photograph in Hong Kong, but my family was like, “No, they survived a ride that almost sank and were like let’s take a picture – we all lived (laughs)!” I was so emotional that moment when I was being told on camera for the first time. I hope that everybody has an opportunity before it’s too late to ask their parents or elders, caretakers about them before those stories do disappear. That’s the hope from the film.

UD: There were a lot of emotional struggles in the making of the film. When you were growing up in Orange County, did many children not have that conversation with their parents about where they were coming from?

EA: I didn’t know very much about Vietnam growing up. I didn’t have those conversations – I did ask. Sometimes there were questions I was just forbidden to ask. They just try not to revisit these very tragic memories. I did hear murmurs about such and such tragedy, but I never did hear, “Oh, our family did this in this part of town.” I couldn’t ask about the war. I just recently learnt that my mom didn’t finish high school, and I learned that my mom and her siblings spent many nights in bomb shelters – literally a hole in the ground, because there were bombs flying overhead because they were in the middle of Vietnam. I don’t know what I would have thought had I learnt this as a kid. It would have helped me deepen my understanding, and empathy for what we were all going through.

UD: The party scene became a means of escape for many people, but the club scene became dark at times – someone shot himself as Ian mentions in the film. What role does mental health play in that scene? 

EA: It was a community that had been displaced, and there were so many kids that either had parents or didn’t have parents or were struggling. There are some people that did well for themselves and left Vietnam with a lot of money and were able to provide and then there’s the other end of the spectrum with the kids who left alone on a boat, came to America – didn’t have parents, didn’t have guidance, didn’t have ways to survive. It was young people – we party together, we hang out together, we listen to the same music together and I think that the adjacent kids in gangs were probably hanging out as a part of that party scene. When you don’t have direction or guidance in your life because of these circumstances of being displaced from a war, it’s bound to happen that there are acts of desperation in communities.

UD: You mentioned in the film you were arrested.

EA: I was detained by the police. I was a wannabe gangster, and it really was just making bad decisions in my life. Should I have been out as a 14-year-old kid at that time at twelve, one in the morning, at the beach? I was hanging out with gang members and rival gangs showed up and that’s how I ended up being detained because there was some fight. For me, that was a cycle repeating. Not that my uncles and aunties were hanging out with gangsters – they were hanging out late at night, listening to music, and I didn’t have guidance or someone to ask me how I’m feeling. I had a very difficult adolescent period, and it was a repetition of them not feeling connected to their own families. My grandfather didn’t respect my auntie listening to that music, didn’t respect her choices of what she wore, how she looked.

UD: There’s a cycle going on of parents distancing themselves from their children – even Lynda, while performing, misses her son’s graduation.

EA: It’s definitely a cycle and that’s why making this film was so important to me.  I didn’t originally plan to be a part of the film. I thought it’s enough to just want to make a portrait about people who got to this country and were building an entertainment industry and making music. And after interviewing so many people who talked about the family dysfunction, I realised I needed to address the dysfunction in my own family. There’ve been people who said, “I started to have these conversations with my family and seeing your film confirms that I need to keep going.”

UD: You see this rise of New Wave music again with people re-discovering it, like Bubble T parties. What is this phenomenon?

EA: Now that the film is out, I’m connecting with people in their teens and 20s and early 30s. They are like, “This is the music of my parents or older uncles and aunties.” There are people who have stumbled upon Italo disco and Eurodisco music – maybe not necessarily Lynda or the Vietnamese diaspora, but there are nights here in Los Angeles where people are having Italo disco night, so it’s really interesting to see how people are coming upon this music today. I’m really proud to be Vietnamese now. When I was growing up, I was so confused – not feeling like I belonged in school, not feeling like I belonged at home either. I knew that Bubble T had parties, and they had old pictures of Lynda on their party flyers, and I thought that it was just so cool that they are proud to be queer, to be Vietnamese and they’re really reclaiming who they are.



Feature image courtesy Elizabeth Ai