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The Fall of Miss Saigon
by Mike Liu
2/27/05
A coalition of local Asian Pacific American artists organized a Feb. 24th production of Missed Sigh Gone, to respond to the racist and misogynistic storyline of the highly successful musical, Miss Saigon. Two Boston-area theaters are launching productions of Miss Saigon over the next several weeks.
To the cheers of a two hundred strong audience, the spoken word artists, actors and musicians produced poetry, slideshows, sketches, and songs to reclaim and recast the narrative. Organized around a series of sketches, Missed Sigh Gone counter posed the reality of the Vietnam and U.S. soldiers’ treatment of the Asian women with the lyrics and narrative of the play. Perhaps the strongest pieces were a hilarious sketch discussing the production of Miss Auschwitz with a Syrian-American lead portraying the Jewish victim. Son-Ca Lam’s and Vinh Hua’s moving spoken word pieces describing the case of a Korean bar maid killed for refusing sex and a lament for Vietnamese mothers and sisters. Giles Li and Chris Vu’s opening and closing songs were also effective mood setters.
Remixing the Narrative
Miss Saigon had opened in the
early 1990’s
with controversy around its casting decisions, where a white actor played
a lead part in “yellow
face,” These issues overshadowed the troublesome content of the
play. Descended from a line of Western, chauvinistic narratives beginning
with Madame Butterfly, Miss Saigon pictures Asian women as weak chattel
in need of rescue. There is also unflattering representations of Asian
men as evil, and the portrayal of American soldiers in Vietnam is positively
glowing. There is no mention of the racism and imperialist attitudes
that informed American foreign policy in Vietnam and all of Southeast
Asia.
To this writer’s knowledge, Missed Sigh Gone – co-sponsored by the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) and Boston Progress Arts Collective, is the first effort to publicly and popularly challenge these ideas.
