Post-VCN
Sunday, April 24, 2011Thank you everyone who came to the show.
We hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something new about Viet Nam, it’s people & culture.
If you have any comments or suggestions for the show please email UCSD VSA at vsa@ucsd.edu
SCRIPT WRITER’S NOTE
Ever since the beginning of Winter Quarter, VSA has started putting together the necessary preparations leading up to their biggest event of the year, which was hosted annually for the past 16 years. Each year’s show is different from the next but the purpose of each Vietnamese Culture Night (VCN) remains the same: to preserve and showcase Vietnamese culture.
Keeping the purpose of VCN in mind as a script writer, I wanted to present a theme that can connect with the young as well as the old generations. I took into the play a prominent issue that exists in many Vietnamese-American families today: the difficulty of passing on the Vietnamese language, traditions and values abroad.
The goal of this year’s VCN was to bring the audience on a trip back to Viet Nam, to experience the country and to learn about the land through the eyes of Lan, the main character. This year’s goal presents a very difficult task: to bring Viet Nam to the stage at UCSD live.
In order to do so, a good portion of the lines and conversation in this year’s play contained a lot of Vietnamese. This was a factor I was worried about as a script writer, but I can’t deliver Viet Nam without the language that the locals use to speak in their daily conversation. With clever manipulation, a good balance of English was blended in so that the audience can still understand the plot without having to be fluent in Vietnamese.
Other than having the right settings and scenarios, having the right actors, in particular, were important to convey the personalities of local Vietnamese. I was fortunate enough to find five main actors who carried the authenticity of the characters described in the script: Tracey Nguyen as Lan, Luan Bach as Hieu, Ngoc Le as To Nhu, Duy Duong as Minh and Vivian Pham as Ba Ngoai.
Because I wanted the characters to be as true and close to themselves as possible, the actors were instructed not to memorize their lines word by word. They were to take their parts of the script and make it their own so that everything they say can sound as natural and genuine as any conversation they would have in real life.
With that, I have to say that my favorite part of culture night was to watch the main actors bring their characters and their stories to live on stage. Scene by scene, they were taking the audience for a trip to Viet Nam until the very end. The acting was completed by Vietnamese singing performances, traditional dance, Digga Hip Hop and Fashion Show making this year’s VCN a package of wholesome goodness.
With the theme “Return to the Roots”, I wanted to remind all the young Vietnamese-Americans out there that it is very important to know their language and traditions, to know their culture and to take pride in it. Because like our parents have said in so many different ways, for so many times: “It’s who you are and where you came from.”
So take a trip to Viet Nam like the main character Lan did in this play, take a look inside yourself, talk to your parents, google it up, read a book, do something about it. Little or small, a lot or a little, anything we do now as the young generation of Vietnamese Americans to preserve our culture will matter for the next generations, for years to come.
