{"id":6116,"date":"2019-08-03T09:14:54","date_gmt":"2019-08-03T16:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/?p=6116"},"modified":"2020-01-08T22:22:36","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T06:22:36","slug":"close-the-curtain-on-miss-saigon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2019\/close-the-curtain-on-miss-saigon","title":{"rendered":"Close the Curtain on ‘Miss Saigon’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/strong>Opinion | Close the Curtain on \u2018Miss Saigon\u2019 – The New York Times <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is a musical that perpetuates a Western fantasy of Asians as small, weak and effeminate people still so popular? <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Opinion | Close the Curtain on \u2018Miss Saigon\u2019 – The New York Times
Clive Owen, left, as Rene Gallimard and Jin Ha as Song Liling in a 2017 production of “M. Butterfly.” Sara Krulwich\/The New York Times <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

LOS ANGELES \u2014 \u201cMiss Saigon\u201d is revived and on tour again, playing in a theater near me. This is exciting news for some fans of\nBroadway musicals, and for Asian and Asian-American actors with the chance for important roles. For others, to whom \u201cMiss\nSaigon\u201d perpetuates deeply held notions of Asian inferiority, this is bad news.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMiss Saigon\u201d is about a Vietnamese prostitute in Saigon during the war years who falls in love with a white male American G.I.\nHe leaves for America without knowing that she is pregnant. She bears his son and when he returns, gives up the child to him so\nthat he can save the boy and take him to the United States, far from Vietnam. Left behind, our prostitute kills herself.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw the musical in New York City in 1996, paying for tickets in the fourth row, an extravagant expenditure for a graduate\nstudent on a minimal fellowship. In my earnest idealism, I believed that I should see a work before I criticized it. But sometimes\nthings are as they appear on their yellowface.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All around me, audience members sobbed at the tragic love story. I was disgusted. I could not help but think of how \u201cMiss Saigon\u201d\nwas based on Puccini\u2019s opera \u201cMadama Butterfly,\u201d set in Japan. In Puccini\u2019s by-now universal story, two star-crossed lovers, a\nJapanese woman and a white man, together embody Rudyard Kipling\u2019s dictum: \u201cEast is East and West is West and never the\ntwain shall meet.\u201d Because East and West are fundamentally opposed, the lovers are doomed, or, to put it more accurately, one\nlover is doomed \u2014 the Japanese woman. Happy to see that her child will live a better life in the West, she takes her own\nworthless life.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The playwright David Henry Hwang saw the absurdity of this story. His still-relevant play \u201cM. Butterfly\u201d precedes \u201cMiss Saigon”\nbut might as well be satirizing it, too. In this ultimate sendup of \u201cMadama Butterfly\u2019s\u201d wish-fulfillment fantasy of white male\ndesire, he reverses the roles of seducer and seduced. In Mr. Hwang\u2019s play it is the white male, Gallimard, a French diplomat, who\nis conned by Song Liling, a beautiful Chinese opera singer who plays Madama Butterfly.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat would you say if a blond homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman?\u201d Song says. \u201cHe treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it\u2019s an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner \u2014 ah! \u2014 you find it beautiful.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it turns out, however, Song Liling is actually not a woman. Gallimard\u2019s fantasy is the West\u2019s fantasy of the Orient, where Asian\nwomen stand in for Asia as a whole \u2014 feminized, weak, in need of a strong hand to rescue her from oppressive Asian patriarchy.\nThe gift of rescue is so appreciated by the weak Asian woman that she will do the most O. Henry of things, kill herself in gratitude\nfor having had her life saved. Mr. Hwang draws a direct connection between these interpersonal, individual fantasies and the\nAmerican conduct of the war in Vietnam. The United States\u2019 biggest mistake in that war was to think, like Gallimard, that Asians\nwere small, weak, effeminate people who could be cowed by the strong masculine power of the West.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people who are irritated by these criticisms of \u201cMiss Saigon\u2019s\u201d enduring popularity will say, It\u2019s only a show, nothing more.\nBut the enjoyment of the show\u2019s fantasy is precisely why the show matters. Fantasy cannot be dismissed as mere entertainment,\nespecially when we keep repeating the fantasy. Fantasy \u2014 and our enjoyment of it \u2014 speaks to something we deeply want to\nbelieve. The enjoyment of this show is based on the privilege that the audience feels, the privilege of not being that Asian woman\nwho kills herself, the privilege of seeing the world from the viewpoint of the powerful white male savior who can both be so\nattractive that a woman would kill herself over him and be so paternal that he can adopt the mixed-race child who will stand in\nfor childlike Asia, in need of Western benevolent guidance.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Racism and sexism are not incompatible with art, as Chinua Achebe showed in his attack on Joseph Conrad\u2019s \u201cHeart of Darkness\u201d as racist. Our enjoyment of a work of art does not mean that the work cannot be racist or sexist, or that our enjoyment does not come from a deep-seated well of derogatory images of Asians and Asian women. The unsettling paradox here is that we can indeed love and desire people whom we see in completely racist and sexist ways. That is the real, unintended universal truth of \u201cMiss Saigon.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Should \u201cMiss Saigon\u201d therefore be censored or canceled? The question is a distraction from the real answer, which is that\ncensorship or cancellation does little to address the inequities of Broadway and Hollywood. Perhaps those of us who detest the\nmusical would not be so upset if there were other stories about Asians or Vietnamese people that showed their diversity. If there\nwere a thousand stories onstage and onscreen about us \u2014 or even if there were just a dozen \u2014 we might forgive \u201cMiss Saigon.\u201d\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1993, not long after the Broadway debut of \u201cMiss Saigon,\u201d the writer Jessica Hagedorn titled her anthology of Asian-American\nliterature \u201cCharlie Chan Is Dead.\u201d Charlie Chan, indeed, seems to be dead. Now it\u2019s \u201cMiss Saigon\u2019s\u201d turn to die.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We\u2019d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here\u2019s our email: letters@nytimes.com. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of \u201cThe Refugees\u201d and the editor of \u201cThe Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.\u201d He teaches English at the University of Southern California. @viet_t_nguyen <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 3, 2019, Section SR, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: \u2018Miss Saigon\u2019 Must Die <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opinion | Close the Curtain on \u2018Miss Saigon\u2019 – The New York Times Why is a musical that perpetuates a Western fantasy of Asians as small, weak and effeminate people still so popular? LOS ANGELES \u2014 \u201cMiss Saigon\u201d is revived and on tour again, playing in a theater near me. This is exciting news for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1283,187,1205],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nClose the Curtain on 'Miss Saigon' - Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2019\/close-the-curtain-on-miss-saigon\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Viet\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2019\/close-the-curtain-on-miss-saigon\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2019\/close-the-curtain-on-miss-saigon\",\"name\":\"Close the Curtain on 'Miss Saigon' - 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