Trip to Vietnam was a life-changing event

By Barbara Black

When film production student Hong An Nguyen went to Vietnam during the December break to make a documentary about his parents’ generation, he got more adventure than he bargained for.

While he was there, he heard about the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26, and he went to Thailand to help in the relief effort. Before he left Vietnam, however, he sent an emotional e-mail message to his friends and colleagues through his professor, Peter Rist, about a woman he met on the beach in Quang Dong province.

Hong was about to take a sightseeing boat to see some caves when a local woman approached him, carrying a small camera. She asked him whether she could take pictures of him for a dollar each. When he politely refused, she burst into tears, and told him her story, which Hong related in his e-mail.

“Her name is Liu. She is 35 years old. She has five children; the younger is two, the oldest is 17. Her annual income is about $70 US per year. Liu and her family don’t eat any meat because it is too expensive, except for the holidays. Obviously, her children don’t go to school; they work every day on the farm with their father to grow the vegetables they need to survive.

“Each day, Liu wakes up at 4 a.m. and rides her bike for two hours to the city to borrow a photo camera from a rich family. She then goes back to the mountains, waiting for tourists to take the boat to visit the caves. She asks them if they wanted pictures; most of the time, they refuse. Half of the money she earns goes to the government; she makes about 50 cents a picture for herself.

“Liu sells about 10 to 12 photos a month, making her monthly income about $5 or $6. Once she’s taken the pictures, she gets off the boat, puts the camera in her bag, swims back to the riverside, rides her bike to the photo lab and gets the film developed before the tourists come back to the riverside.

“This year, Liu’s husband and her oldest son travelled to Thailand to work in a hotel so that they could have a good meal for the holidays. He was supposed to come back before Christmas so that they could eat together. Since the earthquake, Liu hasn’t been able to contact them. They were working on the small island of Phi Phi, where about 1,500 (to date) people have died because of the tsunami.

“I travelled with Liu to her house, where I met her four children. They are skin and bones. I dug into my pockets to find two remaining $20 bills, an amount she would have made after seven months of work. It broke my heart to see with my own eyes people living in such condition. No one on earth should be treated this way.

“If Liu lost her husband, that would be equal to a death sentence to her. Right now I am making the necessary contacts to try to find him.” Hong’s e-mail ended with an appeal for financial help for them and other tsunami victims.

Hong went to Banda Aceh and worked as long as he was allowed, six days, in a refugee camp of 6,200 people. When he got back to Vietnam, he reported on Liu’s situation to his uncle in Saigon, who knew who to call, and he was assured that the family would get the assistance they needed.

His appeal to his friends in Canada was effective. “Most of my friends responded, and told me they will or have already donated something for the tsunami victims,” he said recently.

“I also got a lot of e-mails from people I don’t know, people who were deeply touched, including a woman who told me she was planning a trip to Vietnam because of my e-mail. I was very happy that people responded to me through their emotions.”

Hong didn’t start film school to make documentaries: “I was more concerned about aesthetics than content. But my voyage to Vietnam has somehow changed the way I see things. I met people on the road who absolutely wanted to tell the story of their life on camera; most of them had fantastic anecdotes. Through them I discovered a society still affected by a war that ended 30 years ago.”

Hong wants to go back to Vietnam and get some more footage. “I discovered that I can learn much more, not only about the subject being documented, but also about many technical aspects of filmmaking. I am also developing a fiction film on the assimilation of immigrants in Western society.”