The Fall of Miss Saigon

The Fall of Miss Saigon by Mike Liu

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. “Miss Saigon portrays the Vietnam War as romantic and beautiful,” said Ching-In Chen, AARW’s Director of Programs.  “They sing love songs and have big dance numbers, but the stark realities of the Vietnam War are nothing like that.  It’s an insult to the millions of Vietnamese and several tens of thousands of American soldiers who died because of American military action in Vietnam.”

“The original musical has been a perennial favorite for much of America since it was first produced in the 1980s,” says Jane Jung, Director of Missed Sigh Gone. “It’s marketed as a love story, but the play ends with the Vietnamese female lead taking her own life rather than live without a white American man.  The public tends not to give any thought to this kind of demeaning portrayal of Asian women as weak and submissive toward white American men.”

Without foundation grants or other legitimizing institutions, the voluntary and spontaneous artistic organization of Missed Sigh Gone recalled the spirit of guerrilla theatre and community-based art of the 70’s. However, production values were dramatically higher. The manifest support of the audience indicated that they spoke for a growing and conscious community.