There’s a scene in The Sympathizer, HBO’s post-Vietnam-War-era miniseries, in which the protagonist, the Captain (Hoa Xuande), steps onto a movie set and is suddenly transported back to his childhood, deep in the lush green jungle.
The same sensation struck Sympathizer star Kieu Chinh time and time again on the set of the espionage thriller. As they filmed a tense Saigon airport evacuation sequence in Thailand, fake gunfire and bombs raining down around them, Chinh was brought back to April 1975, when she fled Vietnam with nothing but her handbag and the clothes on her back. It also evoked the chaos of another airport some two decades earlier, after the French were defeated in North Vietnam. There, she saw her father for the last time as he instructed her to get on a plane south.
Chinh’s character makes her first appearance just before the airport scene. She stares out a bus window, her cheekbones and graceful bearing prominent. Her eyes convey an anguish that’s all too familiar to any refugee.“You’re leaving your country, your family, your life, your identity, and getting on a bus with all these strangers, heading to a destination you don’t know,” the performer says in a video call.
“I did not act,” Chinh adds. “I just relived.”
It was painful work. But Chinh, 86, has been waiting most of her 67-year career for the opportunity to be part of a largely Vietnamese cast in Hollywood, telling Vietnamese stories about the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective. The Sympathizer is a work of fiction, an adaptation of Viet Thanh Ngyuen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. But it’s an accurate representation of Vietnamese refugees after and during the war. “So many books have been written about the Vietnam War, so many movies have been made about the Vietnam War, but from the point of view of the outsider,” Chinh says. “The Sympathizer was written by a refugee himself. I think it’s about time that a story like this should be told.”
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Chinh’s character—the unnamed mother of The Major, played onscreen by Phanxinê—does not appear in the novel. But Chinh’s career and life story are so revered by Vietnamese audiences that, when Chinh went to a reading of the book in 2016, Nguyen recognized her in the audience and declared she would have a part in any screen adaptation of his work. “He said, ‘Oh, my god, ladies and gentlemen, we have our legendary actress Kieu Chinh in the audience’,” she says, smiling. “He then raised his book and said that, if someday the story moves to the screen, Kieu Chinh had to be in the story.”
Before the fall of Saigon, Chinh was a prolific figure in Asian film, with acting credits opposite some of the American film industry’s biggest names: She starred in 1964’s A Yank in Viet-Nam with Marshall Thompson and 1965’s Operation C.I.A. with Burt Reynolds. But her remarkable journey from Saigon to Hollywood is what secured her legendary status, particularly among Vietnamese refugees. Nguyen even makes reference to it in the novel, mentioning an unidentified movie star and her determination to get to Hollywood as a victory that the refugees celebrated as if it were their own.
Chinh landed first in Toronto, still shaken and heartsick from the loss of her home. When a refugee employment agency asked about her professional skills, she told them she was an actor. “We don’t do castings here,” they replied sternly. The only job available for her was a minimum-wage one hosing down a chicken coop; to get there, she had to wake up at 4 a.m. to catch a train to a farm outside the city. The woman who spent decades wearing beautiful costumes specifically fitted for her was handed a uniform of galoshes, a raincoat, and a face mask that did little to lessen the noxious odor of chicken waste.
She worked that job for three days before she realized that her grief would only intensify if she couldn’t return to performing. She took her earnings, and the $75 provided to her by a charity, and put it toward making a series of long-distance calls to Hollywood.
Her first was to Burt Reynolds. He didn’t pick up. Next, she tried William Holden, whom she had met a number of times at Asian film festivals. He was out of the country on a hunting trip. With the last of her money, she reached out to Tippi Hedren. It was a long shot—they had met in 1965, when Hedren visited the troops on a USO tour. “Tippi,” Chinh asked tentatively. “Do you remember me?” She did. Three days later, Chinh received an airline ticket to California. Hedren had sponsored her visa and invited her to stay at her home until she got back on her feet.
Chinh is the first to acknowledge that she was one of the lucky ones. “I was able to go back to my career,” she says. “So many doctors, lawyers, teachers and artists could not.” But it was hard, even though Holden did eventually help her get an agent and register with the Screen Actors Guild. She was famous in Asia, where she had her own movie production company and hosted a talk show. But few knew who she was in Hollywood. She had to start again from scratch, during a time when roles for Asian actors were few and far between.
“When I first arrived here, it was very much like The Sympathizer,” Chinh says. “I felt lonely, lost, homesick. I missed my past life when I had a name. I came here and lost everything, even my own identity.” She landed some great roles—she played Alan Alda’s love interest in an episode of M.A.S.H. and misunderstood mother Suyuan Woo in blockbuster The Joy Luck Club—but she was also forced to play characters like unnamed “Chinese woman” and unnamed “Asian woman.”
“I had to accept whatever came, even the very tiny parts—one line here, one line there, one scene here, another there,” Chinh says. “I took everything. I had to work.”
That’s why now, even at the age of 86, Chinh has no plans to slow down. She recently wrapped filming an upcoming Apple TV miniseries, Sinking Spring, and has a role in Shal Ngo’s upcoming thriller, Control Freak. “I love what I’m doing. I love my career,” she says. “I have lost so much, and it hurt my career for so long. Now, like my life, I want to rebuild my career.”
While The Sympathizer required a lot of the actress, asking her to emote in both Vietnamese and French, Chinh adored her time on set. She gushes over how Robert Downey Jr., an executive producer, went out of his way to make sure she felt welcomed. Before shooting began, Downey, who delivers an unforgettable performance as four different characters, hosted a cast lunch during which he sought her out, pulling out a chair for her at a place of honor at the table. At the premiere, as photographers shouted for his attention, he held her hand, making sure she was in the photos as well. “He’s a great gentleman,” Chinh said.
Over the past few years, Chinh has thrilled in seeing Asian representation grow in Hollywood, with films like Past Lives and Everything Everywhere All at Once giving Asian creatives and actors the opportunity to tell Asian stories. After working with so many impressive Vietnamese actors in The Sympathizer, she is hopeful not only for their future—“This generation will go far,” she says—but also for more opportunities to tell stories about her homeland.
“During the Vietnam War, more than one million soldiers were in and out of Vietnam. For 15 years daily, Americans saw Vietnam on their televisions, in the headlines, in print media,” Chinh says. But they only knew Vietnam in relation to conflict and bloodshed. “For me, I do not look at Vietnam as only a war country. There was life there. There were people, there was culture, there was art. I hope that someday there will be different kinds of stories told about Vietnam.”
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