Kieu [p.2]

NHA: That’s powerful stuff.

THV: Yes. So, I was given a grant from the Creative Work Fund to collaborate with a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area. It started out with St. James Infirmary (and then finally) with Locus Arts and the API Wellness Center when they still had a women’s program—they don’t anymore. So, basically, we spent a few years doing research, visiting massage parlors, especially in the Tenderloin in San Francisco.

NHA: So what was your intent when you initially started out on this project?

THV: I was asked by St. James Infirmary to make an outreach video for Vietnamese massage parlor workers. To try and educate them about the diseases they may come in contact with, how to put on a condom, that kind of thing. It was not my arena. I wasn’t at all a documentary filmmaker. I was just someone they thought would be open-minded toward sex workers and I happened to make films. I’d made two shorts that premiered at the San Francisco Asian American Film Fest and the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Shut Up White Boy is a 16mm short and then I did a short on Super-8 called Each Night. I’ve been fortunate to have them get a lot of play.

I don’t know why [St. James Infirmary] called me to do an outreach video. I had mixed feelings about it. I thought it was very important to do outreach to massage parlor workers, but I didn’t want to be part of something that was too preachy or condescending.

So when I got the Creative Work Fund grant, which is supposed to be led by the artist [to make] new creative work as opposed to using the artist as a “tool,” I had more of a creative say in how the project was gonna be. It basically transformed itself into a new project. St. James Infirmary [then] decided they couldn’t afford to participate that much so the Creative Work Fund encouraged me to work with other organizations.

NHA: So you started out with something that was supposed to be an educational video, which you weren’t too thrilled about doing?

THV: Right. Because I was just gonna be used as a tool.

NHA: But then you started doing the research, talking to the workers, and going in your own direction?

THV: Right.

NHA: And that’s when you heard about the Tale of Kieu?

THV: Yeah, when the women told me their life stories it would come up. They’d say, “I am like Kieu from the Blue Tower”—Blue Tower meaning the brothel. “And I’ve suffered just like she did.” They’d talk about the [sufferings] that they endured similar to Kieu in the original story.

NHA: Sounds like they really inspired you.

THV: Yes. Well, there was an idea from someone working on the project at St. James Infirmary that “we should use the Tale of Kieu to encourage women to go get check ups” and do all this health care/self care kind of thing. And I was like no, let’s just make a modern-day story of Kieu through their eyes.

So the writers that went out with me to do research, we didn’t take pens, we didn’t take paper, we didn’t take recorders, we didn’t take a camera, we didn’t take anything except ourselves. The rule of thumb was just to go there and hang out. And if they tell us something, that’s great, but we don’t ask questions. It was kind of left up to their comfort levels and that’s why it took so long to actually write the script.