Front Porch: While the particulars are different, play shows immigrants’ shared story

There is a certain commonality in the American immigrant experience, no matter where you came from. Or where your people came from way back when. Go back far enough and we’re pretty much all immigrants to America.

This is not the beginning of a political rant but rather a realization of how fortunate I am and how seeing on stage the portrayal of another immigrant experience, very different than my family’s, reminded me again how much immigrants share with one another – even across generations and cultures. Some come here out of joy, some because it’s no longer safe at home, some against their will. But they come, and they become American.

“Vietgone” is a wonderful memory play with an innovative presentation, an unconventional love story written by Qui Nguyen, who was born in Arkansas to Vietnamese parents, two of the thousands evacuated from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. They met at an Arkansas resettlement camp. Most of what has been dramatized about this war has been through the lens of Americans, but this view is a Vietnamese perspective, one that sees the war not as a good or bad thing that America was involved in, but rather a defeat in their own civil war and the loss of a homeland.

The play runs through October at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and if I may be permitted a shameless plug for it, OSF is also presenting it in Seattle in December in cooperation with the Seattle Repertory Company. Go see it! (But a heads up: It contains strong language.)

The Vietnam War is the backdrop to the story, but what I recognized on stage was my own father and my grandmother, the road to assimilation, working past discrimination and guilt – what immigrants share as they develop roots in a new country. I was crying by the end of the performance, as it brought up images long forgotten over the decades since my youth.

I was born in America. My father, as I have written about before, came here as an 18-year-old in the mid-1920s, leaving his mother and sister behind in their native Germany. He came for a better life, for the ability to work and make something of himself and have the privilege of being able to send a little money home to his family. My mother was born in the South Bronx to immigrant parents and grew up there in an ethnic enclave of Germans, Russians and Poles, where she and her siblings worked their way out and into the mainstream of America.

Like with the male lead of the play, a helicopter pilot in the South Vietnamese Army, there was no going home again for my father. The pilot would be killed if he did. My father had become politically active in his new country, working against Nazi support groups in the Brownsville section of New York while his extended family in Germany was moving in the other direction. Not only had he left home, but home had left him.

The female lead in the play brought her mother with her, kicking and fighting the whole way. She refused to learn English and complained about all things American – but, believe it or not, did so with quite a bit of humor. My father brought his mother to America after World War II, and she was not happy here. Nothing was as good as back in the old country, even though much of Berlin was in ruins.

And I, like so many other children born into recent-immigrant families, was speaking a language other than English as my first language. We spoke German at home because that’s what Oma understood, and it wasn’t a popular thing to be speaking in New York City right after WWII. I only learned in adulthood the problems that caused my parents. If my grandmother wanted to say something to a friend of mine who was over at the house, or if someone came to the door while my parents were at work, I would translate. Today American-born kids are still doing that in a myriad of languages for their own parents or grandparents.

At the end of the play there’s a devastating but loving scene between the grown son of the pilot in which he is interviewing his father and presents to him a very American view of the Vietnam War. His father won’t have it and reminds his son that he has the luxury of an American attitude because his parents made it possible for him to be born American.

My family doesn’t look like the family on stage, but I saw them up there. I imagine I wasn’t alone in that.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/columnists.