Hong Khaou | Hong Khaou (screenwriter and director) Monsoon / 2019

the inscrutable world of a forgotten childhood

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hong Khaou (screenwriter and director) Monsoon / 2019

 

British director, Cambodia-born Hong Khaou has already given us the truly moving film, Lilting and three short films before Monsoon, itself a film of immense scope and emotional intensity. It is interesting that Khaou’s family fled to Vietnam after the fall of Phnom Penh, and finally became political refuges in England when the future director was only 8 years of age. If there was ever evidence of an immigrant citizen offering something of immense worth to his adopted country, the case with millions of immigrants over the years, it is Khaou.

       But what does it mean to the children of immigrants who have lost all ties to their native country? It is precisely that question which is at the heart of Monsoon. And in this case, as it must have been for Khaou himself, it is even made more complex by the fact that the family’s escape was necessary for their survival in the morass of the sudden US pullout of the Viet Nam war and other shifts in power throughout Asia.

    Somehow this director is able to walk us gently through that almost void of forgetfulness while simultaneously exploring the guilt of a US son of man whose military service helped to desolate and destroy that country, a black man, moreover, who has returned as a successful clothes manufacturer to help in the stimulation of the contemporary Viet Nam economic revival—or, to see it from a different perspective, to use the cheap labor available to him in eager-to-be developed Viet Nam.

    Khaou points to many all the duplicities and confusions that came out of those years of violence, fear, and the absurd hate that dated back to the earlier French invasion, which included not only Viet Nam, but Laos and Cambodia, sweeping them up into chaos from 1955 through 1975.

    This film, fortunately, does not attempt to deal with most of the vast political and military issues of that Indochina war, but speaks only about the muted and confused emotions of its youngest survivors, Kit (Henry Golding), who returns with his beloved mother’s ashes in hand, with the excuse of seeking out a place to spread her remains; he is to be met there by his brother, his wife, and their two children, bearing the ashes of the father. Why, queries his childhood friend Lee (David Tran) late in the movie, does he and his brother bring back the ashes of two people who tried so hard to escape the country? That question is never fully answered, and we are never sure that Kit has ever found in his search through Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and Hanoi a proper place to scatter them.

     In fact, we quickly perceive, since Kit has quit his job as an apparently quite successful anime artist, is that Kit is also looking to discover something else in this voyage. He finds little of his past; his best friend from childhood, Lee, and his family are hardly recognizable, still grateful for the loan from Kit’s mother in order to open the camera and computer shop they still run. Kit brings gifts of candy, in a tin trimmed with the queen’s picture and scotch, which pleases Lee’s mother, but just a quickly alienates her with a thoughtless gift of a water purifier, presuming that the quality of the Saigon water system would be inadequate.

    And it is just this kind of small and sometimes larger faux pas that Kit, who recalls very little of the Vietnamese language, makes time and again. His memories of Lee’s and his own childhood are vague at best, and he finds their old home, almost a hovel, being torn down in order to create a modern apartment. The city is now a modern world of stunning high-rises, yet its streets—as we perceive in the opening credits—is filled with a balletic dance between automobiles, driven by the foreigners and the rich, with motorcyclists who represent most of the population. Although Kit arrives to his expensive hotel with all the luxury Western conveniences, he thereafter travels on the backseat of a hired motorcycle, the most common way of moving about the city.

    The young people he meets, such as the travel guide Linh (Molly Harris), are sophisticated and well-educated, but given that their parents have had to expend most of their savings for that education, have themselves been unable to leave the country or travel. Linh mocks her family business, which consists of pulling apart lotus blossoms to package as scented tea appreciated mostly by older tea connoisseurs, an endless activity with which she finds absolutely boring and wants no part of, while Kit finds his visit there as one of the most fascinating and enjoyable of his Hanoi experiences.

   Moreover, what few seemingly real memories Kit has, the morning where he and his brother were taken away and suddenly found themselves in a boat that deposited them eventually to England, is questioned, perhaps with some resentment by Lee, who suggests that his father first attempted to leave by himself, but having been found and returned for re-education had suddenly no choice but to attempt to escape with his entire family. In short, as critic Peter Bradshaw summarizes the event in The Guardian, “…Perhaps with a touch of cruelty, Lee is to challenge Kit’s memory of how and why he got out of Vietnam. Kit remembers the drama and the heartache of how they all left together as a family, with a kind of solidarity. But Lee tells him it wasn’t quite like that, and this revelation sows a seed of doubt and anxiety that silently flowers throughout the movie.”

     On the other hand, Lee has completely misread Kit’s reason for his visit, late in the movie explaining that he has not yet been able to raise enough money to pay of the loan Kit’s mother has made, without realizing that Kit has had utterly no intention of collecting on a debt that he doesn’t even recognize as anything but a gift from his mother.

     The series of subtle misunderstandings of culture put Kit, who is also an outsider in his queer sexuality, in a strange place as a child of a world he can no longer quite comprehend, while also having come to totally assimilate into a world (his mother insisted upon them settling in England because she liked how the queen looked) which may have not been entirely receptive to him. Emigrant children may feel at the edges of both cultures for their entire lives.

     If he looks in vain to find a wedge into his childhood world, he finds it quite easily through the growing sexual interest and finally love of another kind of outsider in Lewis (Parker Sawyers), the savvy and wise black man, whose father was involved in many a war operation, and later

committed suicide, perhaps in the response to the way his own country treated him upon his return. Lewis seems to know Saigon well, and serves as another kind of guide with whom Kit grows more and more comfortable and through whom he might even imagine a reason to remain in the place of his birth. If Lewis can be at home in a world that must feel so very alien to him, then perhaps Kit can also find a wedge into the fascinating cauldron of the old and new which Saigon has become, particularly as represented by young citizens such as Linh and assimilated outsiders such as Lewis.

     By film’s end, we do indeed witness a seasonal downpour, but it is not at all an earth-shattering monsoon of which the title hints. The film ends with our central explorer still in a state of perplexion, but nonetheless, just as we have been through watching this gently instructive film, slightly more aware of his surroundings and able to perceive nuances where before there were simply walls of confusion that resulted in exhaustion, as Kit himself explains his feelings to his brother and his family.

     This is a strange kind of road movie to a place of déjà-vu that seems vaguely familiar but doesn’t quite make sense, that yet nonetheless intrigues. Writing in Variety Jessica Kiang nicely expresses that feeling at film’s end: “Interactions are tentative, freighted with silences and glances; most exchanges end unresolved, right up to the abrupt, mid-air ending; even the sexual encounters, which occur with refreshing casualness, are portrayed rather chastely — not, one feels, out of prudishness, but because the act itself is too definitive for Khaou’s allusive, suggestive agenda.”

     All we know is that Kit has learned that there are no full-blown truths to be unearthed. There is no certain future. He stands, as he always will, in a kind of middle-ground, where meaning in life has always to be rediscovered, recreated, the place actually many us, particularly those of us who are queer, will always feel ourselves to be located: halfway in and halfway out of our own cultures.

That sense of duality is what perhaps helps many of us to simultaneously love and mock our worlds, to put it into expression as “camp.” Yet in Khaou’s vision, given the loss of life and identity, there is little humor left in the attempts at revival and resurgence. And only the company of his brother and his sons and in Parker, does Kit have a chance to truly smile and laugh.

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).