Dinh Anh Nguyen | Hai Chú Cháu (Uncle & Son) / 2012

fable for lost sons

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dinh Anh Nguyen (screenwriter, based on a story by Huuthang, and director) Hai Chú Cháu (Uncle & Son) / 2012 [15 minutes]

 

Hung (Hoang Phi Tran), a child, lives with uncle Chu Ba Lua (Nhat Truong Ngo) in a small rural Vietnamese village. Hung’s mother evidently left for Saigon in order to make a better living, and his father, an alcoholic, left him behind in the care of his brother Ba Lu, promising that someday he will return.

 

     Ba Lua is a tailor who makes clothing for many of the people about. He is also gay, and Hung overhears, on his way by boat to school every day, the nasty gossip of the community, one of whom refuses to let her children even play with Hung, imagining the he might contract some strange disease. Out of the blue, Hung asks his uncle, as he sits through a haircut, “Are you sick.” One of the gossips has commented that Ba Lua should cure his sickness only by getting married.

      The child is clearly troubled by all the talk, Ba Lu attempting to calm him by telling him it’s just gossip, and that if he stopped making clothes for all the neighbors who gossiped he wouldn’t make any money. The gossiping neighbors all agree that “fags” like Ba Lu are dexterous with their hands, like the local hairdresser in a neighboring community. When one mentions that Ba Lu doesn’t look gay, a man mentions, however, that he walks like a “pregnant cat.”

      When Hung suggests his uncle might consider getting married, “just for fun,” cutting off all the gossip, Ba Lua, attempting to forego any sexual discussion, says that he will as soon as the boy’s father returns.

      Hung can’t sleep as Ba Lua continues to work at his sewing machine all through the night. And when Ba Lua wakes up in the morning, all that remains of his nephew is a note that he has gone off in search of his father to Saigon. He believes, if he finds his father, Ba Lua can get married and have babies. And when he discovers his dad, he will help him stop drinking so that he can better show his love to him.

       Running to the boat ferry, Ba Lua discovers that his has missed his nephew by several hours, the boy having left a noon. 

        To a visiting stranger, the nasty boat woman relates that Hung went to Saigon and Ba Lua went there in search of him a long time ago, having never returned. “Saigon ate them.” The stranger asks whether Ba Lua promised to return. She shakes her head in the negative. “No, I think he’ll come back only after he finds Hung. Here, he has no one else to come back for. Are you related?” she asks of the stranger.

       “Never mind,” he responds, presumably the long absent father come back to retrieve his son.

       Vietnamese director Dinh Anh Nguyen’s sad moral fable is about selfish people, bad parenting, community homophobia, and the problems of are not fully discussing sexuality with children. Hung, we fear, may have ended up as so many young children and teenagers do in large cities, as being sexually abused or worse. And the gentle Ba Lua will surely never forgive himself for telling the white lie about sexuality and his marital intentions. Because of this confluence of events, a child who was being lovingly cared for was perplexed by reality enough to go on a search to answer the riddle in the only way he knew how. To use a metaphor that this agricultural community might express their own experiences: hate sews seeds that reach very deep into the soil of nearly everything around it, uprooting and drowning out even the healthiest of plants.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).