Oscars 2023: Why Vietnam Doesn’t Celebrate Ke Huy Quan’s ‘Everything, Everywhere, At Once’ Award | Movie theater

“I spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow ended up here, on the biggest stage in Hollywood,” he said.

“They say stories like this only happen in movies. I can’t believe it’s happening to me. This is the American dream.”

Quan is the first person of Vietnamese origin to win an Oscar and one of two nominees this year: the other was Hong Chau, from “The Whale”, whose family also fled Vietnam on a boat.

However, in Vietnam, the official reaction was less than enthusiastic. The Vietnamese press — which is almost entirely state-controlled — paid little attention to Ke Huy Quan’s award and his past.

Some outlets emphasized the actor’s Chinese ethnic ancestry rather than his Vietnamese origins.

Ke Huy Quan was born in the capital of southern Vietnam, Saigon, in 1971. His family was part of a successful ethnic Chinese minority, something common in many cities in Southeast Asia. None of the Vietnamese media mentioned his flight from the country as a refugee, in a mass exodus of so-called “boat people”.

The Thanh Nien newspaper just wrote that Quan “was born in 1971 to a Chinese family in Ho Chi Minh City [o nome oficial de Saigon] and then moved to the United States in the late 1970s”.

Tuoi Tre, one of the country’s leading daily newspapers, noted, “Quan Ke Huy was born in 1971 in Vietnam to a Chinese family, with a mother from Hong Kong and a father from mainland China.”

VN Express said the actor “has Chinese parents in the Cho Lon area”, Saigon’s commercial district traditionally inhabited by ethnic Chinese.

No one in the Vietnamese government has spoken out about the actor — unsurprisingly for the country’s Communist Party.

Why this reluctance to celebrate a successful and now world-renowned actor who openly acknowledges his Vietnamese roots?

The exodus of the “boat people” in the 1970s and 1980s was one of the darkest episodes in recent Vietnam history.

More than 1.5 million people have left, most of them ethnic Chinese, on often fragile ships across the South China Sea.

According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), between 200,000 and 400,000 people died, some at the hands of pirates.

The Communist Party—which at the time had just defeated the military might of the United States and presided over spectacular economic growth—prefers to forget this episode. Ke Huy Quan’s Oscar brings the subject back to the fore.

The tragic flight of the “boat people” is a testament to how tense the relationship between Vietnam and China has always been.

The two communist governments were officially very close in their formative years after World War II, with huge amounts of Chinese aid going to North Vietnam during its fight first against the French and later against the Americans.

But by the time of North Vietnam’s victory in April 1975 and the country’s reunification, relations were becoming increasingly strained. This happened when Vietnam’s communist leadership allied with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet dispute and after China’s rapprochement with Richard Nixon’s US.

The large ethnic Chinese population, particularly in Cho Lon—including Ke Huy Quan’s family—was affected by these geopolitical changes. Since the communist victory in the Vietnam War, they were already persecuted by the communists as the main capitalist group in South Vietnam – and considered suspicious of loyalty to the defeated regime. Many were sent to re-education camps.

Vietnam’s economy was in a deplorable state for many years after the war, affected by the colossal damage it had suffered, its international isolation, and the new regime’s inflexible socialist policies. Since they usually had money to bribe officials and hire boats, ethnic Chinese began to flee in large numbers from September 1978 onwards.

The exodus accelerated after the Chinese attack on Vietnam in February 1979, a time of strong anti-Chinese sentiment in the country that continued for over a decade.

The conflicted relationship with China continues today, although ethnic Chinese are no longer the main focus. Many Viet Kieu, as those who fled are called, managed to return to Vietnam and prosper again.

But resentment of China’s aggressive policies on disputed islands in the South China Sea and its growing economic clout fuel strong anti-Chinese sentiment among the public.

“He [Ke Huy Quan] is not of Vietnamese descent, he is only Chinese-Vietnamese and was born in Vietnam. We have to make that clear,” wrote one person on the BBC’s Vietnamese service’s Facebook page.

“They must write very clearly that he is Chinese-American, that he used to have Vietnamese nationality! Can’t I see any ‘Vietnamese origin’ here?” wrote another.

But another comment says that “we should say he is Vietnamese as he was born in Vietnam and is of Chinese descent”.

From Ho Chi Minh City, writer Tran Tien Dung suggested on Facebook that Ke Huy Quan’s identity is as a “Saigon-Cho Lon” person: “For me, Quan Ke Huy gets his energy from his birthplace in Saigon -Cho Lon and his fame for growing up in America. So I want to congratulate him and share the joy with the public on social media.”

“I think the way the state media has neglected Ke Huy Quan’s story as one of the boat people is disgraceful,” says Nguyen Van Tuan, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who also emigrated from Vietnam the same way as the actor.

“The story of the boat refugees in the 1970s and 1980s is a tragic chapter in the country’s history. Most of the Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the US at that time were Chinese or ‘purely Vietnamese’, they were very poor. They didn’t even speak English. But they survived and thrived.”

“Today’s generation in Vietnam cannot imagine the plight of refugees back then, in part because they didn’t learn about that sad and painful period in our history.”

*Jonathan Head is the BBC’s Southeast Asia correspondent. Tran Vo is a journalist for the BBC Vietnamese Service based in Bangkok, Thailand.