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Lieutenant colonel in the Oregon Air National Guard. Member of Oregon’s House of Representatives. Optometrist and small business owner. Now…playwright?
Rep. Thủy Trần (D–Northeast Portland) wears nearly as many hats as Barbie. This past weekend added another title to her growing résumé as her biography-turned-play Belonging: A Memoir debuted for one sole night at the Winningstad Theatre on Saturday, Aug. 2. Premiering to a packed house, with distinguished guests like Mayor Keith Wilson sitting front row, the play tells an abridged version of Trần’s life in barely 40 minutes. Despite its short run time, Belonging: A Memoir still garnered tears, sniffles and a well-deserved standing ovation.
Clad in an áo dài—a traditional, floor-length silk dress reserved for special occasions—printed with the South Vietnamese flag, Trần delivered a brief introduction before diving into the production, a collaboration with veteran director, writer and actor Libby Cozza. Belonging tells a chronological story of Trần’s life in five acts, starting as a young child fleeing the Vietnam War to the United States, all the way up to her landslide election to the Oregon House in 2022. Between acts, a video montage backed by somber Vietnamese music helped to place the scenes in time, contextualizing Trần’s history with that of such cultural icons as Madonna and Keith Haring, political uprisings, including the women’s rights and queer liberation movements, and contemporary issues like the George Floyd protests and the growing homelessness crisis. Starting off with real Vietnam War footage, the video montages reminded viewers right out of the gate the horrors of war, which affected and displaced many Southeast Asian children, including Trần.
The poignancy of this play cannot be understated, as it arrived on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, the historic moment when North Vietnam captured the southern capital, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City. It marked the end of the war and the establishment of unified Vietnam’s Communist government. Vietnamese people displaced by the war briefly ended up in refugee camps in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand before being sent all over the world, including to Australia, Canada and France (Vietnam’s previous colonizer), with the majority going to the U.S.
Here, many refugees congregated in Western and Southern states, creating ethnic enclaves in California, Washington, Texas, Florida and, of course, Oregon. Roughly 2.1% of the Portland metro area’s population identifies as Vietnamese American. Trần and four other state-level Oregon politicians—Reps. Hai Pham (D-South Hillsboro-West Beaverton), Daniel Nguyen (D-Southwest Portland-Lake Oswego) and Hoa Nguyen (D-Multnomah and Clackamas counties), along with Sen. Khanh Pham (D-East Portland)—distinguish Oregon as the state with the most Vietnamese American state lawmakers in the entire country.
With a sparsely decorated set and just five cast members, two of whom were onstage for only two minutes, Trần’s inaugural artistic endeavor quickly illustrated the complex beauty of her life in its short run time, though Belonging naturally left some viewers wanting more. Twenty-something Thủy (Christine Anjelle) delivered most of the production’s lines, including an emotional monologue breaking the fourth wall, pleading with viewers to both stand up and speak out about pertinent political and social issues.
Perhaps the most moving scene in the play came toward the end, with Anjelle putting on multiple jackets representing Trần’s long and varied career: a school uniform signifying her education, then a camouflage jacket representing her status as a lieutenant colonel, followed by a white lab coat, and lastly a gray suit jacket symbolizing her entry into politics. The postshow panel discussion, led by KOIN-TV journalist Elizabeth Dinh, lasted nearly as long as the play itself and gave viewers a chance to hear from the production’s creative team, including sound producer Joshua Lê and costume designer Huynh Pool.
Though brief and somewhat scrappy, Trần’s inaugural play gave a small glimpse into the complicated world of first- and second-generation Americans, and their attempts to assimilate into their new and vastly different culture. The only glass ceilings Trần left unshattered this evening were the theater’s track lighting and pulley systems, which thankfully she left intact despite bringing the house down. Representation in contemporary media helps paint a fuller story in an entertaining way. In the case of Vietnamese history, this can be found in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, and more recently Elizabeth Ai’s documentary New Wave. Belonging: A Memoir showed Trần’s life’s arc from a quiet, shy 9-year-old girl not knowing a lick of English, sitting in the back of the classroom, to standing onstage, holding a microphone, and telling her life story. The play’s closing line begged the same from the audience. “What about you, in the back of the room?” Anjelle asks, pointing at the crowd. Watching this play reminded me of my parent’s own journey as boat refugees, and the struggle that I, as a second generation Vietnamese-American creative, try to make worthwhile.
