Week #8: Class Notes

The Beautiful Country (2004)

Vietnamese American film.

Directed by Hans Peter Moland.

Bui doi – Vietnamese children with American GI fathers conceived during the Vietnam War. (considered to less than dust)

Setting: Vietnam 1990

Main character: Bihn (a bui doi)

Bihn is taller than everyone else (tall American father). He was abandoned by his mother and his family he lives with is ashamed of him – he is not aloud to eat at the table.

Bihn travels to Saigon to meet his mother – he lives with her and his younger brother (Tam) and joins his mother working for a rich family. Mother is sexually abused by the son of her boss, (possibility of being Tam’s father.)

Shoes – motif. (all he knows about his father is that he had big leather shoes, camera emphasizes the leather shoes of the boss son.

During an altercation while Bihn and his mother were cleaning, their boss slips and dies. His mother tells Bihn and Tam to leave, she stays behind. Bihn and Tam board a boat to America to get help from his birth father. They end up at a refugee camp.

They meet a woman at the refugee camp, Ling. She has sex with the guards for favors and money. However, Bihn and Ling have feelings for each other.

Shoes – motif. (Bihn says he will sell shoes in America, camera emphasizes Ling’s shoes)

They leave in the middle of the night for another boat for America. Ling has $2,773 it costs $8,000 – man of the boat said they will work off the rest. The conditions on the boat are horrible – not enough food, people dying and the captain of the ship kills the man in charge.

Tam gets sick and dies. 🙁

They arrive in New York City. Bihn becomes a delivery boy and Ling becomes a sex worker. She becomes involved with an older man and they split ways.

American Homecoming Act – Bihn learns that he could have gotten citizenship and a free flight to America due to being the son of a GI. (never had to go to refugee camp, boat, Tam would of survived.

Bihn travels to Texas to find his father, Steve. He gets a job on the farm where he works. Steve is blind and Bihn never tells him he is his son.

Steve tells Bihn that he had a wife and family in Saigon. But one day, he had mistaken an explosive as beer. He woke up in Maryland, blind.

He said that he never went back because his wife already had a baby to take care of and he didn’t want her to have to take care of him too.