War in the Media
Have you been to any exhibitions or museums dedicated to the Vietnam War?
I’ve been to the museum where they have airplanes from the war, and I’ve been to the cemetery for the soldiers who were in the Vietnam War. When I went to the museum, it felt kind of strange, because you’re seeing these things that were actually in the war, you just feel that it must have been intense. You see helicopters, parts of bombs, it’s really crazy. When I went to the cemetery, it was sad in a way, but I also feel very grateful to the people who sacrificed their life to protect ours.
Did you ever come across some sort of western media that portrayed Vietnamese in a way you found uncomfortable?
I saw this in the 201 cinema history class. Most of the time when I see movies or anything that has any mentioning of the Vietnam War, they just use the Vietnam War as a time period in history instead of portraying it, but there was one movie that I watched, I forgot the name, but there was a scene between two American people where they try to make money, so they try to create a play where they were playing the American people and the Vietnamese people. The American person who portrayed the Vietnamese had a performance that was over exaggerated. For some reason, I felt kind of offended by that, because they were not speaking in Vietnamese, they were making very high-pitched noises, and dressed in costumes that looked ridiculous, and that’s the only movie I found to be offensive to the Vietnamese culture, because that’s not how we look like and how we sound like. The way the person runs in that film just makes Vietnamese people seem to be always afraid, but that’s not true, because we won the war, right, so we did something right.