Chapter 5 - Seeking a passport: the transnational career of Kiều Chinh

Summary

Robert Wise, the Hollywood director, best known for The Sound of Music (1965), had met Kiều Chinh1 (one of South Vietnam's most prominent actresses) in Taipei before the fall of Saigon. Chinh was all set to work with him in a film that ultimately did not materialise (Chinh 2017). After Saigon's fall and the reunification of North and South Vietnam, Kiều Chinh, fleeing the nascent communist Vietnam, found herself a penniless refugee, in Vancouver, Canada, from where she later moved to Sacramento, California. As she reached out to her Hollywood contacts, Robert Wise, among others, came forward to help her, writing recommendation letters to major studios and directors. One director who took an interest was Francis Ford Coppola, then casting for a small part in Apocalypse Now (1979). Chinh was cast as the wife of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, the enigmatic rogue soldier turned cult leader who would be immortalised by Marlon Brando. However, when shooting in the Philippines was to begin, Chinh was unable to join the set. As she was not a permanent resident of California at that time, the Department of Immigration barred her from leaving the United States, leading to the role being removed from the film. Ironically, if her Vietnamese and/or her Asian identity made it possible for her to land a role in Apocalypse Now, the same identity as a Vietnamese immigrant proved to be a bureaucratic barrier for her as well. Nevertheless, Kiều Chinh would soon find her first Hollywood paycheck opposite Alan Alda in the television series M*A*S*H, portraying a Korean princess fleeing the war. Her career in America, thus, began by straddling a series of racially stereotyped Asian parts with those of war-afflicted migrant Asian-(American) characters.

Kiều Chinh's career span of fifty years has been intricately bound up with the fate of Vietnam and the turbulent national and racial politics that marked the Cold War decades. Chinh's stardom and her capacity to manoeuvre within such volatile socio-political contexts cannot, therefore, be seen outside her own biography. Born after the Second World War into a gentrified Buddhist family from northern Vietnam, Kiều Chinh migrated from Hanoi to Saigon in 1954 under Operation Passage to Freedom.