| Esther Wu: 'Miss Saigon' comes to end; moral lives on 01/04/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News The final curtain for the Tony Award-winning play Miss Saigon comes down Jan. 28. One of the longest-running shows in Broadway history, Miss Saigon tells the tragic story of love and sacrifice involving Kim, a young Vietnamese girl, and Chris, an American soldier during the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Miss Saigon captures a moment in history. In some ways, the story has become a benchmark of this country's social intolerance.
In one of the play's pivotal scenes, Kim pleads with Ellen, Chris' American wife, to accept her child by Chris. Kim tells Ellen that if the child stays in Vietnam, he will be nothing more than a bui doi, or dust of life – children of U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese women shunned by both races.
There were racial overtones offstage during the show's U.S. debut. The show opened in New York in 1991 amid controversy over producer Cameron Mackintosh's decision to have British actor Jonathan Pryce play an Asian character.
Seeing the show last August, I couldn't help but feel that while the story lines remain fresh, the role of race has taken a back seat. Ten years after it opened, a Korean-American actress is playing Ellen, a role usually played by Caucasians.
'Times have changed'
"'Mellowing out' is a good term for it," said Mary Nguyen, a mental-health nurse at the veterans hospital in Dallas. "Times have changed. Racial intolerance is still here, but it's not the flash point it was during the war. Amerasian children are more a part of our culture – just as interracial couples are."
Ms. Nguyen is all too familiar with the story of Miss Saigon. A former nun and pediatric-care nurse, Ms. Nguyen was a nursing instructor in Vietnam with the U.S. Agency for International Development from 1969 to 1971. She met a lot of Chrises and Kims. "Some made it work; others didn't. In a way, they were casualties of war."
The blond, blue-eyed woman from Little Rock, Ark., met her first husband, Dan Chapman, in Vietnam. In 1979, after the couple divorced, she married Hieu Nguyen, whom she met while in Washington, D.C.
She left Vietnam before the fall of Saigon, but she continued to help the war effort through her work with a Vietnamese orphanage.
Airlifted children
"At the close of the war, the U.S. government allowed seven adoption agencies to bring children out of Vietnam. I was in Fort Benning [Ga.], where I helped set up a makeshift pediatric triage station in one of the hangars." More than 300 children were airlifted to Georgia; many were children of Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen.
"Many of these children had a hard time finding acceptance in the United States, as well as Vietnam. These children were painful reminders of the war. They were truly children of the dust.
"But a lot of things have changed in the last 10 years. I think there is generally more acceptance, more understanding and, hopefully, more racial tolerance.
"When Hieu and I moved to Dallas in 1983, we were staying in an affluent neighborhood. We were stopped for no other reason than the fact that we were an interracial couple. That wouldn't happen today."
Now that's a nice way to ring down the curtain.
Esther Wu can be reached at P.O. Box 655237, Dallas, TX 75265 or at .
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