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.
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.”
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.
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).
