Viet and Nam — A Search in the Scorched Earth

Photo Credit: Nicolas Graux/Strand

Watching Viet and Nam for the first time, there were two distinct memories that burst out of my California childhood. The first was the smell of nail polish and the ache of my back as I crouched over my grandmother’s feet. Messy streaks of red coating more of her skin than her nail. Words that I no longer know but still remember flowing out of her lips, telling me of the first time that she had painted her mother’s nails.

It was here in America, but not quite in California yet. My grandparents had first landed in New Orleans where there was already a community of Vietnamese people living and working on the docks. In the humid jungle of a city that has known devastation that my grandparents could identify with, New Orleans to them was best represented by the faces that looked just like their own.

The second memory that is brought up is of the way my uncle, my father, and my little cousin’s hair stands on its ends when in water. They are amongst just a few of the only men in our family whose hair hasn’t been changed by white genetics. They spike up under the slightest moisture, seemingly defying gravity and testing something to fall on it at the same time. I have always thought, watching them swim, that their hair looked like pine leaves or little mountains.

Viet and Nam is a visual proverb more than it is a narrative. For a film that so boldly claims itself with the name of our country — splits it in two — I find that it doesn’t make sense any other way. The poetry of Vietnam (and subsequently) Viet and Nam, lies within the faces of its land and people. It’s the eternal grief that presents itself in a search which tells us what it is to be Vietnamese. To make a narrative out of such an experience is to force a need for closure that is antithetical.

A widow, a war veteran, and two miners named Viet and Nam are all homesick for a place that they do not know. The veteran of the North Vietnamese Army (or the PAVN) and the widow, connected by the distant memory of a soldier that was dear to both of them, search and long for a place that the soldier gestures them towards. They long for a version of their home that can no longer be and no longer is. Viet and Nam are two coal miners who have lost their fathers and long to understand who their fathers are. Even as they dig “Trong lòng đất” (the Vietnamese title of the film meaning “In the Earth”) they are faced with nothing more than explosives, open pathways, and coal that turns the insides of their body even more mineral than the chemical warfare of the war already has.

A war veteran admits after a long search that he is the one that killed his friend, the widow’s husband. Two coal miners have sex in a sea of darkness, their backs against piles of what looks like a mixture of shiny metals and coal. One tells the other that, when he orgasms, he sees what looks to be his father — only his father has no face. A widow tells her son that his lover looks just like him — no, that he bears a striking resemblance to his lover. Families mine the earth with their pickaxes, looking for the remains of those that they have lost in a dense forest. A boy stares into a crevice in the earth, across a border, and in the eyes of his lover in hopes of finding his father and a place to call his own.

The grief in being Vietnamese presents itself as a perpetual search, Viet and Nam tells us. A search to find your own enemies, your own lovers, and your father in the same face as you. It’s not knowing whether the spikes in your uncle’s hair will crush underneath the weight of your palm or prick you. It’s immigrating to New Orleans not knowing who amongst this new world fought for who in the land you left behind and worrying about your North Vietnamese dialect. It’s watching your daughter put nail polish on you not knowing what the acid smell that is coating your fingers is, or how one substance can both provide your entire livelihood and kill you from the inside out at the same time.

It’s trying to find those that have vanished, trying to find the land that was once yours and that has now been decimated and rebuilt on the bones of chemical warfare and land mines. In the earth is a people with a history of being beat down by centuries of colonization — now standing split down the middle. Viet and Nam are not one. Instead, they are constantly looking in each other’s faces, desperate to understand why they are torn apart and who they are to each other? Is Viet’s resemblance to Nam indicative of a paternal relationship or is it that they are more one than they realize when in two separate bodies?

Viet and Nam asks us a million questions about the vanished and about our grief — and tells us that there is no answer that will give us the finality that we long for. We can finally see the face of our father, know the answer to his disappearance, and it will never give us what we are searching for.

Công cha như núi Thái Sơn, nghĩa mẹ như nước trong nguồn chảy ra.

A Vietnamese proverb. One that acts as a promise to our parents to keep the elements of them within us. “The devotion of our father stands like the mountain Thái Sơn. The patience of our mother flows like water — an endless spring.”

Our blood is in the land. The land is in our bodies. Our grief resides in the mountains — buried either just a meter underneath the land or hundreds of meters below the surface. It threatens to kill us every time we dig into it and try to blast it open. Our patience floods us. By the end of Viet and Nam, it is killing us and sweeping us away again. It’s a cautionary tale about a people whose patience runs still and stagnates until it chokes us, but what Viet and Nam finds is that there is a way to stay still like the mountains and continue to float within the flood.

Viet and Nam find the right to name their own longings. They look towards the camera, remarking how dark it is inside and that they have been here before and I can’t help but feel as though it’s a nod to the fact that — wherever this film has been screened, it has and will be screened again. Their suffering will never stop. The water is rushing in. And they accept what is trapped in the darkness with them.

This is them. Two men who have dug the earth more times than they can count, whose bodies sit on a pile of mineral as if they belong there, who can now name their inability to find their missing fathers in anything but the face and body that is just the same as their own. That is Viet/Nam.