DIASPORIC DISORIENTALISM
AUSTRALIAN VIETNAMESE YOUTH MEDIA

by Scott Brook and Lian Low - Spinach7, Winter/Spring 2003

All things Vietnamese seem to be in vogue — from Epicure write-ups on Footscray pho kitchens to The Quiet American, that recent Hollywood ‘history’ flick with gender politics reminiscent of the cover of Master Mind.

Undercutting the chic are Australian Vietnamese Youth Media (AVYM); a Melbourne western-suburbs-based theatre company working with Vietnamese and Australian communities to develop experimental theatre at the fringes of both cultural spaces. AVYM productions focus the broader topics of identity, culture and belonging through more specific issues such as unemployment, sexuality and depression. The challenge is to continually negotiate, chameleon-style, the misperceptions, blind spots and double-exposures of cross-cultural exchange.
Dominic Hong Duc Golding and Ty Andre talk here about all things AVYM.

Dominic: ‘We tend to fall into the trap of always looking overseas for Asian-ness, when in fact through AVYM we’re stating that we’re here. We can find Asia and Asian-ness and Vietnamese-ness in Australia. You don’t have to go to Vietnam. You don’t have to go to Hong Kong. Our culture is just as rich here as it is over there. And we use our own mythology to portray the diaspora.’

Dominic and Ty are currently co-writing a play on living with disabilities. Dominic, the project facilitator and AVYM company manager, is running theatre workshops with about 10 disabled people and their families. The current working-title Disabled_Dot com will probably change. Having a hearing impairment and mild cerebral palsy, Dominic’s original vision was for a ‘cyborg’ show about the body and technology, but this has been deferred in favour of working with the more everyday stories that are emerging from the participants.

Ty, a published author and cameraman whose credits include Alby Mangels’ World Safari I and II, is scripting an autobiographical account of his experiences living in a wheelchair with post-polio syndrome. He talks about everyday encounters with discrimination, all the more harrowing for their pettiness: ‘When we went to a restaurant in Richmond, they didn’t want me to use [their] phone. My tyre was flat — got soaked and wet in the rain. They showed me there was a public phone out there. They didn’t want me to use the phone from the restaurant. But the public phone — I can’t even get in, because the door’s narrower than the wheelchair and it’s got little steps. Eventually they lent me the phone and as soon as I got off it they cleaned the whole phone up like I’ve got a disease or something. In a Vietnamese restaurant, would you believe it?’

AVYM productions typically use a variety of performance modes — acting, music, dance, martial arts — as well as pre-recorded film and live music. The effect is more along the lines of Paris By Night than anything Brechtian. Heavy-handed didacticism is shunted in favour of a montage of life stories. The narratives draw on a dizzying combination of modern / traditional, Eastern / Western cultural references; from Vo Vi Nam (traditional Vietnamese karate) through to Manga-style demon incantations; from Viet-pop karaoke through to Vong Co (Vietnamese opera); from declamatory existential monologue through to television skit.

Dominic explains that the next show will be similarly non-sequential: ‘It’s like a pack of cards. So Ty holds the clubs while the other people hold the hearts and it’s like it’s shuffled … the two different styles of cards … and you spread them out and you have almost like a patchwork of stories. So there’s not a linear structure … it’s like catching glimpses of aspects of people’s lives.’
Founded in 1994 by Tony Le Nguyen and currently under the artistic direction of Huu Tran, AVYM have developed a profile for producing bilingual theatre that has drawn its audience from both communities. Dominic: ‘It’s very important that the shows are bilingual. Some audience members are older Vietnamese who don’t understand English, and then there’s people like me, who don’t understand Vietnamese at all.’

As many reviewers have noted, stereotypes are deliberately ‘turned up to 11’; Aussie equals football, meat-pies and casual ethics; Vietnamese equals karaoke, fish sauce and authoritarian patriarchs. Dominic suggests stereotypes work as communication: ‘I can understand why people criticise our shows. It may seem like we rely on stereotypes to make a point but that’s not the case. We use stereotypes as a visual pinpoint so the audience will immediately recognise what it is.’ And then, more pointedly: ‘We use stereotypes to throw back at the community what they dish out at us. If that’s what you want to see, okay … we’ll give you what you want.’

AVYM welcomes inquiries and new members: info_avym@yahoo.com  / (03) 9311 3407. http://vicnet.net.au/avym

Lian Low is currently studying amongst computer geeks at Swinburne University. She has developed a love/hate relationship with technology and multimedia. She now finds 90 per cent of her time is spent staring at monitors and is convinced that this has very bad side effects.

Scott Brook share-houses in Footers and takes the 402 bus to school. He also works at Footscray Community Arts Centre where he's been conspiring with others on West of the West, a print / CD anthology of Westie stuff (Altona & New York: Common Ground, forthcoming).