Vietnamese Opera, Cai Luong, Fades With Assimilation

MISSION VIEJO — It was a concert the man known as the last great actor and singer of Vietnamese opera would always remember, for reasons he wishes he could forget.

As Viet Hung Huu Nguyen waited more than six hours to sing the songs that had made him a star in his homeland, he watched other Vietnamese performers entertain the crowd with more contemporary music.

At that moment Nguyen finally accepted what he had been denying to himself: cai luong, Vietnamese opera, may one day fade from the memory of the expatriate community as it speeds toward assimilation.

“Soon, I’m afraid, this music, which personifies the spirit of the country, the spirit of the people, is going to just disappear altogether,” said Nguyen, 76, who lives in Mission Viejo. “And when it dies, it will take with it yet another piece of the Vietnamese history.”

In Vietnam, cai luong, which incorporates dialogues with a low-pitched, twangy singing style far different from that of Western opera, was one of the most popular forms of entertainment, and its best-known performers were accorded pop star status. Now, opera performers and others within the arts circle said, it is disappearing because its audience is aging and dying off. At the same time, the younger generation snubs it in favor of more Western entertainment, television, videos and movies.

On the streets and inside the boutiques of Little Saigon, cai luong is often used as a slang to describe anything outdated.

“We are losing our youths to assimilation, but this is something immigrant communities before us have faced, and others will continue to face,” said Khoa Le, vice president of the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Assn., an Orange County group that promotes Vietnamese artists, writers and performers. “Sadly, we are finding what others before us have found and that is, there’s not much we can do about it.”

Cai luong, which was created in the 1920s by nationalists who spurned the French-influenced art culture, depicts Vietnam’s legends, society, history and politics. In the old country, it was an experience for the mass audience, and many productions were as popular as today’s “The Phantom of the Opera” or “Les Miserables.”

In the crowded theaters of their homeland, adults took notes of the social commentaries of the day while their children were captivated by the sword fights and dances performed by colorfully dressed and heavily made-up actors.

Stars such as Nguyen were the darlings of high society as well as the heroes of the working class because much of their music espoused nationalism and patriotism.

“But that was then when cai luong was king,” said Dong Phuong Thanh Ly, the editor of the weekly magazine, Van Hoi Moi, which means “new destiny.” Ly, 55 and a Westminster resident, also manages an opera troupe, which he said, “has work, but only a little and only every once in awhile.”

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The opera’s audience has decreased so dramatically that Ly and his actors have been forced to go door-to-door in Vietnamese neighborhoods in Orange County selling tickets for shows, which cost $10,000 to $20,000 to produce, just about enough to pay the cleaning bills for professional American stage productions. Often, Ly has had to arrange transportation for the elderly audience.

As recently as 10 years ago a show could draw thousands, Ly said, while today he can barely convince a few hundred fans to buy tickets and most of his shows lose money. “But we understand this going in,” he added. “We do this because we want to keep it alive for as long as we can.”

Yet, Ly also knows that in the direction it’s heading, the show can’t go on forever.

“I don’t know how we can go about getting the young people to see Vietnamese opera as part of their culture,” he said, “and not look at it as something from another era, something behind the times.”

Ironically, the theatrical signatures of cai luong, dated costumes and make-up and exaggerated body movements, are the very aspects that have turned off youths.

“Many young Vietnamese say the music is weird and the costumes are old-fashioned,” said 29-year-old Diep Bui, a film student at USC, who recently completed a documentary on Nguyen and how his dying art embodies “the sad truth of a young Vietnamese generation in the process of losing its own identity.”

Young people “have seen parts of it here and there, and without learning more about it, they just decided they don’t like it. All they need to do is educate themselves about the art, about the culture, and I know their attitude would change.”

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She pointed to herself as an example. Bui immigrated to the U.S. in 1975 when she was 7. During her adolescence, she embraced Western culture and mostly ignored her own. But as she grew older, Bui said, she yearned to learn more about her roots and educating herself about cai luong played a large role in it.

She hopes her documentary will pique the curiosity of young Vietnamese Americans and encourage them to learn about their heritage.

Le aims to help. His organization is launching a Vietnamese film festival in Westminster, scheduled for July, where Bui’s documentary will be featured.

A few others have also taken modest steps to preserve cai luong.

Ly is planning to produce a show at a Westminster high school in September. Chieu Quan, a Vietnamese restaurant in Santa Ana, has Vietnamese traditional music night every Saturday and sometimes features a cai luong show. And some artists have classes, teaching people opera-style singing and how to play the traditional musical instruments that provide accompaniment.

“We can’t do too much to save this endangered art,” Le said. “It sounds dramatic but the truth is, we don’t have too much time.”

Another contribution to the imminent extinction of the Vietnamese opera, Le and others said, is that the most famous performers are aged or have died, taking what they know with them.

Nguyen, who by all accounts is the last of the greats, is in bad health. In 1995, he underwent surgery for colon cancer. Two years ago, he had a heart attack while walking in a shopping center.

“I guess you could say I represent my art, once popular and loved, and now, dying,” Nguyen said one morning as he cleared his throat and begin to softly croon verses he had written for the disappearing cai luong singers.

Now, fate has left us, our destiny is spent.

Our voices have faded, our songs, disappeared.