gosh...

I just go back home from watching "Ao Lua Ha Dong" (The White Silk Dress) that screened at Berkeley thanks to the Southeast Asian Studies department....gosh...what an amazing movie. The symbolism, cinematography, acting, message. It showed how much suffering my people, our people went through because of the war, but it also showed the beauty of my homeland and the infinite amount of love that can come from within a family...the immeasurable, unconditional love despite poverty, loss, and sadness...and there was definitely a lot of sadness...=/...but...it showed it as it was. How war can tear a family apart, how the poor live dayto day, having barely enough to eat to survive...

The mother was the culmination of the spirit of mothers...she loved her children more than anything, sacrificing anything and everything to give her daughters a chance for a future, to make they can go to school to learn and to grow. This is the mother that I want to portray to the world through culture show...the unconditional sacrifice and love.

~kinda spoilers ahead...skip if you haven't seen it?

The movie was made in Vietnam, so it made me thing politically, about what message was being portrayed. Obviously the communists wouldn't allow themselves to portrayed in a bad way...but i guess, they toned it down...either that, or stuff was cut out. The Viet-Minh liberated people from a French controlled corrupt governor, the people going after the communist hurt the main character...the bombs that landed were marked with USA...but i think that's it...at least how I saw it...the story focused on the life of the family and the poverty and unjustice they faced.. yea..the cinematography: weather themes, color schemes, and foreshadowing was pretty amazing though.

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So after the movie...I call my dad and he told me never to go back to Vietnam again. He was going off about some island being sold or something like that (I didn't understand it all...my Vietnamese is getting hella rusty...) and so I hung up on him...oops...I probably shouldn't have done that, but I didn't want to hear it. I love Vietnam, I love my country, I love my family and friends that are over there. To never go back is like being severed from a part of my. My roots are in Vietnam and my Vietnamese culture. There, my people live and need help. I don't know the complications, the details, how politics work...when it comes down to the core of who I am...I AM VIETNAMESE and people in Vietnam are my people and if they need help...I want to do it somehow, even if one person at a time. Call me naive...but it's how I feel. I will be returning to Vietnam...I plan to for a year after I graduate, to learn the language and to see how it really is, to live, to learn, to explore a fundamental part of who I am and who I will be in the future. Bonjour Vietnam.