A Vietnamese migrants’ daughter breaches the barrier of silence
Ba’s Book: https://www.ashleyduong.com/projects
Daniel Nelson
A family lives in a village on the frontline of the Vietnam War. The crossfire is dangerous and the eldest son is at risk of army call-up. He gets an engineering scholarship to Iran and after the fall of the Shah, Canada accepts him as a refugee.
Years later he writes a book about his life, Dear Da-Lê: A Father's Memoir of the Vietnam War and the Iranian Revolution, which is strong on dates and data but thin on emotions and feelings, which he chooses to bottle up.
His daughter, Ashley, wants to know more about the family he left behind and decides to make a film about it, hoping to flesh out her taciturn father’s austere account.
Mum refuses to return to Vietnam — she says she is not brave like her daughter — but dad finally agrees to go for a short period.
At that point the floodgates open in this gentle but extraordinary documentary in which the family themselves re-enact incidents from the past. Everyone pitches in to build a replica of the house they once lived in, and the oldies tutor the youngsters who play the child versions of the adults. Ashley adopted this approach after realising that straightforward interviews wouldn’t work: the family didn’t want to talk about war-time experiences
The resulting film, Ba’s Book (Ba means ‘dad’} is totally absorbing. The re-enactments draw out family members’ feelings from the war and about Anh Dong’s departure and absence, skirted round in the 1960s and unspoken since. Misunderstandings and resentments rise to the surface — not angrily, but with a quiet sense of putting the record straight, sometimes with relief. You can see in the faces how entrenched views about relatives are relinquished or at least modified by the accounts of others or by explanations given. On the lack of letters from Anh Dong, for example, he says, “My family was lost in the chaos. All my letters came back marked ‘Return to Sender’. Day after day I wondered, What good is achieving my goals if I never see the faces of my family again?“.
They are not a demonstrative family, but the folded arms and set jaws or a momentary face twitch are as powerful as shouts and hugs.
Anh Dong himself never loses his reserve but he, too, begins to respond (sometimes in self-defence) and explain the whys as well as the where and whens. It is a joy to see him, and other members of the family, reacting to and correcting the re-enactments with care and thoughtfulness. The very act of re-creating family events prompts more memories.
This beautifully crafted film is fascinating look at a family’s memories: it glows with humanity, and is a precious historical document, for both Vietnam and migration.