A New Home, Full of Smiles

This past Sunday was a special one for Smile Group, a grassroots organization that supports disadvantaged HIV/AIDS-affected families in Ho Chi Minh City.  After operating out of the Thao Danh drop-in center for more than a year, Smile Group has found its own house in a beautiful building with an enclosed courtyard shaded by a mango tree. You can tell by the photos how excited the families are to have this new space for their meetings and activities.

What will they do with that new space? Lots. One of the best things about Smile Group is their focus on enrichment. Documentarian and social worker Leslie Wiener’s photographs never fail to express the ability of Smile Group’s activities to foster community-building among HIV-affected families, some of whom face deep stigmas in their physical communities. With ample accommodations, Elisabeth Nguyen will make yoga sessions more sustainable by enrolling in a course on teaching yoga for children (with her costs covered by the Global Fund for Children). Leslie is also seeking opportunities to have Macs supplied to the house to teach the kids practical computer skills. And of course, the dancing, singing and musical performances will continue, not to mention invaluable workshops on living with HIV/AIDS.

Thomas Maresca’s “Living Positive” cover story that follows the lives of three Smile Group families is no longer in the AsiaLIFE archives, but you can read the profile of Leslie that I contributed to the July 2009 People Issue (issue 28), still available in the online archives.

Here are some more photos from the day, courtesy of Leslie:

A bit of new school…

And a bit of old school

Crashing the dance floor

The gang’s all here

Enjoying the new house

Tiffany Chung Opening at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

If you needed proof that there’s no escape from Saigon…

I’ll be returning to the States next week, with a stopover in New York at the beginning of November. Serendipitously, Tiffany Chung, a Saigon-based artist and co-founder of artist-operated space San Art, will be opening her new solo show, Scratching the Walls of Memory, at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in Chelsea (529 W 20th St.) on November 4 from 6 to 8:30 pm. It will be a two-week reunion of sorts, as another San Art founder, Dinh Q. Le, and a few other folks from the Saigon scene will be in the Big Apple. This will be a great opportunity to speak to some of the people on the forefront of developing contemporary arts infrastructure in Ho Chi Minh City.

For a bit of background, check out my cover story on the contemporary arts in Saigon (issue 25) and my Q&A with Dinh Q. Le (issue 27) in the AsiaLIFE archives. The Q&A is also available for faster viewing at San Art’s press section.

More information on the show from Tyler Rollins Fine Art:

For her second solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, taking place in November and December 2010, Tiffany Chung will present a new series of works inspired by maps of urban regions, featuring embroidery and appliqué works on canvas in addition to a number of drawings on paper. Chung has been fascinated with maps for many years, not only for their graphic possibilities but also for what they say about both our relation to the past and our visions of the future.

Her exhibition, entitled scratching the walls of memory, explores the topographic after-images of some of the past century’s most traumatic conflicts and includes maps of the Berlin Wall, the Korean DMZ, and the atomic bomb blast zones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The exhibition marks a turning point in her work, as it is the first time she interweaves important historical events with personal and family history.

Chung is considered to be Vietnam’s most prominent female contemporary artist. She is noted for her sculptures, videos, photographs, and performance work that use an exuberantly pop aesthetic to conjure hyperreal visions of contemporary Vietnam, which function as candy-colored counterparts to the more typical “traumatized” representations of Vietnam’s recent history…

Continue reading at Tyler Rollins Fine Art.

AsiaLIFE Shouted Out by Expletive-Rich Website

Three things I love: typography, Saigon and the f-word.

A new website called What To Fucking Do in Saigon distills many of expatriates’ pet loves and hates about Ho Chi Minh City into tidy little bits of advice for what to do in the thanh pho, all featuring the grande dame of curse words. The schtick often breaks down though, offering declaratives rather than imperatives. One such entry shouts out the Spotlight pages of AsiaLIFE HCMC, where we feature snapshots from night spots around town.

Does this mean we’ve arrived?

Editor. Writer. Occassional District 7 Lecturer.

RMIT Lecture

Yes, I was Googling myself.

That’s how I found this: a news bite on RMIT’s website about the lecture I gave to first year students in the school’s Professional Communications department. We’ve covered youth and education in Vietnam on a few occasions during my tenure at AsiaLIFE (check out the September issue, volume 30), and I always look forward to getting in a space with Vietnamese youth to get a better sense for their aspirations. And to share with them the cardinal sins of PR professionals.

Thanks to lecturer Jade Bilowal and RMIT for the invitation (and for selecting fairly flattering photos).

New Vietnamese Films Out This Month

Yesterday I sat down to compile the listing of movies due out in Vietnam next month for the upcoming issue of AsiaLIFE, and I was pretty surprised at the number of local flicks hitting the theaters.

Vuot Qua Ben Thuong Hai (Journey from Shanghai)

This period thriller follows the journey of Nguyen Ai Quoc–better known to the world as Ho Chi Minh–from Hong Kong to the Soviet Union by way of Shanghai. For those who don’t know the story, Ho Chi Minh escaped from prison in Hong Kong by conspiring to fake his own death. Journey from Shanghai follows the events immediately after his escape, and from the trailer, it looks like the filmmakers have gone for a noir-meets-martial arts tone. Central to the film is Ho’s friendship with Soong Ching-ling, the once wife of Sun Yet-sen who supported the Communists during the Civil War.

Saigon Electric and Bui Duong (Street Dust)

The trailer above isn’t actually for the 2009 Vietnamese hip-hop drama Street Dust–it’s for director Nguyen Duc Viet’s December 2010 release, Saigon Electric. Perhaps to build the anticipation for Saigon Electric, local theaters are re-releasing Street Dust next month. The film follows siblings Hanh and Nam’s journey towards hip-hop fame. After their mother dies, Nam gives gives up his dream to find employment, but Hanh is determined to secure them both a shot at a competition in Bangkok.

Saigon Electric was written by Owl and Sparrow screenwriter Stephane Gauger and similarly follows the dreams of a Saigon hip-hoppers to beat out a rival crew and advance to a competition in South Korea. Read more about the film here.

Canh Dong Bat Tan (Floating Lives)

Viet Kieu actor Dustin Nguyen (21 Jump Street, Heaven and Earth, Little Fish) continues to bolster the local film industry with his latest release, Floating Lives. The film follows some pretty heavy subject matter: love, infidelity and betrayal in a small town in the Mekong Delta. I haven’t found much about the plot just yet, but it’s based on Nguyen Ngoc Tu’s “The Boundless Rice Field” (available in English translation). It looks like director Nguyen Phan Quang Binh is continuing to push the envelope with some steamy-for-Vietnam scenes.

Raid on Illegal Vietnamese Wildlife Restaurants Gets NY Times Coverage

illustrated by Brenden Wenzel, AsiaLIFE March 2010

I woke up this morning to find the following news item in my Google Alerts: Vietnam Raids Restaurants Selling Exotic Meats. The piece, which ran on The New York Times Green blog, reports that a large, coordinated raid by the Lam Dong Forest Protection Department involving more than 100 wildlife agents led to the seizure of hundreds of pounds of illegal meat and the arrest of a dozen restaurant owners. The campaign was supported by surveillance work carried out by NGO Wildlife Conservation Society.

Back in March, I travelled into Lam Dong Province to visit a sustainable agro-forestry farm for a cover story on conservation in Vietnam. My research turned up some troubling facts about the imbalance between the profits from the wildlife trade and the resources available to tackle poaching and trafficking. In his research paper Wildlife Trading in Vietnam: Situations, Causes, and Solutions, Nguyen Van Song of the Hanoi University of Agriculture estimated that the Forest Protection Department employee’s monthly pay is roughly equivalent to daily profits at exotic meat restaurants.

Read the entire article in the AsiaLIFE archives, issue 24.

Extended Dinh Q. Le Interview on AsiaLIFE Blog

Dinh Q. Le at San Art, May 2010. Photo by Richard Harper for AsiaLIFE

For this month’s AsiaLIFE, I interviewed contemporary artist Dinh Q. Le for our Q&A section. Dinh has been one of the most recognized Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) artists in the contemporary art world since the 90s. On June 30, his three-channel installation The Farmers and the Helicopters will be the subject of a six-month exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. You can read the full interview on the AsiaLIFE blog.

Tweeting from Saigon

So I’ve finally heeded to the advice of my older and much wiser sister, Kate the HR wunderkind, and begun tweeting. I’ve long thought it a bad idea to start micro-blogging without a purpose, so with no aim in mind, I simply left my account as a placeholder. My purpose now: selling myself. Look for shameless self-promotion and randomness from thanh pho ho chi minh (like my sad, sad Carl’s Jr. confession)

PBS Picks Up Documentary on Vietnam AIDS Activist

Update: Watch the entire documentary at the PBS Global Voices website.

I recently spoke to Leslie Weiner, one of the three women behind Smile Group, and her documentary on Vietnamese AIDs activist Nguyen Van Hung will premier on PBS in the United States on May 10. I profiled the work of Smile Group and the legacy of Hung in a February 2009 AsiaLIFE article, “The Teacher’s Lessons.” Now, his story and the stories of those living with HIV/AIDS in Vietnam will be broadcast to millions. Check out the trailer for Thay Hung: Teacher below:

For those unfamiliar with PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), it’s the States’ most widely broadcasted nonprofit public broadcasting television service, with affiliates in more than 350 locations. Thay Hung: Teacher will appear under the banner of the PBS series Global Voices. If you live in the United States, check for air dates at pbs.org.

Vietnamese Recipes a la Thuy

goi thit bo xao - sauteed beef salad

Having recently set a date for my departure from Vietnam, I’ve been experiencing some pangs of remorse–particularly in my stomach. Anxiety over where I’m going to get my 3-times-a-week fix of bun thit nuong have begun to besiege my belly. Since Vietnamese street food is dirt cheap here in Saigon, I haven’t bothered to learn how to cook much any Vietnamese food at all.

Then while researching che for an article in AsiaLIFE’s May food issue, I found A Blog of Salt. This food blog is written by a Vietnamese-American student named Thuy who took up cooking when her mother embarked on a two-month visit to Vietnam, leaving her at the mercy of her culinarily-challenged father. Thuy has been blogging since 2008 and now has about 50 recipes posted, each with lots of photos, which should make trips to your local Asian supermarket a bit easier.

This should come in handy when I move back to the States, where it’s actually cheaper to cook your own meals.