Refugees
generally leave a country in turmoil without a clear idea
of what comes next other than a prolongation of their lives.
In Green Dragon, the experience of some 134,000
Vietnamese refugees is condensed into short cuts of a few
characters with myriad adjustment problems faced at the principal
location of temporary housing, Camp Pendleton, where the film
was actually shot. As the opening credits roll, we see film
footage of the chaos of South Vietnam's last days, then the
means of transportation to America, arrival and processing
of Vietnamese refugees, and the temporary quarters, largely
Quonset huts and tents that were prepared for the refugees
in two days. Throughout the film, radio broadcasts provide
news updates until the People's Army of Vietnam triumphantly
marches unopposed into Saigon on April 30, 1975. Released
in Los Angeles one day after the twenty-seventh anniversary
of that event, the film's tagline is "A story from a
war that had been forgotten." The two principal characters
are Marine Sergeant Jim Lance (played by Patrick Swayze) and
refugee Tai Tran (played by Don Duong), whom Lance appoints
as camp manager because one day he demonstrates a command
of English in asking how he could be of help, clearly manifesting
survivor's guilt. Lance's assignment is to accommodate the
refugees until they have sponsors. (Indeed, the camp opened
in April 1975 and closed in October that year.) Lance asks
Tai to try to keep order in the camp by attending to the needs
of the refugees and by preventing disorder, but of course
the task is more than anyone can handle, since more than 10,000
refugees are cramped into a single location. For some refugees,
problems that they had in Vietnam are compounded, such as
a husband who has two wives. Wife #1 displays intense emotional
outbursts, believing that she has lost her "womanhood,"
though wife #2 in due course slaps her husband when she learns
that he will abandon her, neither apparently realizing that
no American would ever agree to sponsor a man and his two
wives. A few refugees inevitably insist on returning home,
so they have to be segregated from the general population,
though one man wants to drag his family along despite their
wishes to the contrary. Many refugees are sad that close relatives
have been left behind. Tai's niece and nephew keep looking
for their mother, but in time his nephew, adorable five-year-old
Minh (played by Trung Hieu Nguyen), becomes amazed by the
art work of African American Addie (played by Forest Whitaker),
a camp volunteer cook. The bonding, based on body language
and common appreciation for the comic character Mighty Mouse,
appears perhaps as a paradigm for why Americans and Vietnamese
have taken such a liking for each other in contemporary America.
At the center of Addie's secret mural, on which he encourages
Minh to use a paintbrush and possibly launch a career, is
a green dragon, which supplies the film's title. Political
discussions among the refugees tend to be accusatory, contentious,
and futile; those most disappointed with the plight of their
country identify Americans as having betrayed the people of
Vietnam, yet Sergeant Lance tries to reassure them to the
contrary while holding back his obvious guilt that events
turned out so badly for the United States. Yet no guilt is
more deep than a Vietnamese general, who ultimately commits
suicide rather than face an ignominious future. Indeed, most
refugees are afraid of their future life in America. One enterprising
young man, Duc (played by Billinjer Tran), has no problem
organizing business right in the camp, as he doubtless did
in Saigon, and he exchanges gold possessed by refugees for
various items brought into the camp by Addie, who later dies.
When Duc is sponsored by someone in Kansas, he leaves with
a smile on his face, determined to build a Little Saigon of
shops and homes (which is due course transformed the nearby
town of Westminster). But unknown sponsors do not excite everyone.
One night, a woman who had received word that she had been
sponsored, refuses to leave her friends and the photos of
her two sons, so she is forcibly removed by military police
while screaming. The obvious brutality frightens refugees
so much that Tai feels no alternative but to resign, having
felt disgraced in his role and humiliated that he was not
consulted beforehand. Though sympathetic to Vietnamese but
ignorant of their cultural sensitivities, Lance does not realize
that betrayal (of country, of family, and by the Americans)
is the strongest emotion dominating the camp, whose residents
are now in fear that they will be treated as harshly by Americans
as by the MPs. But Lance then brings peace to the camp in
a surprise ending: He takes Tai outside the camp to see how
Americans live. When Tai returns, he reports that the roads
of full of Cadillacs, the houses are beautiful and spacious,
and the stores are big and filled with goodies, some of which
he brings back in a paper sack. Nominated for last year's
Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Green
Dragon was written and directed by Timothy Linh Bui,
with a short segment directed by his brother Tony Bui (who
directed Three Seasons).
Timothy arrived as a refugee at Fort Chaffey, Arkansas, at
about the same age as Minh in the film, and the character
provides an opportunity for some autobiographical reflections.
In addition to the fictional stories about refugees, which
were constructed from the experiences that Timothy's mother
relayed to him about real persons, the film provides music,
dance, subtitled Vietnamese dialog, and an opportunity to
view Vietnamese customs regarding many aspects of everyday
living. The pace is so rapid that there is little time to
reflect during the film on the overall message. What dawns
on a filmviewer later is that the 1.5 million Vietnamese now
in the United States are a proud, energetic, enterprising,
sensitive, smiling people who have brought more good to America
than America ever brought to Vietnam. For the film's role
in bringing to light the pathos of the Vietnamese refugee
experience, the Political Film Society has nominated Green
Dragon for an award as best film exposé of
2002. MH
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