PBS ‘Asian Americans’ documentary features director Ham Tran and refugee stories from Little Saigon

When director Ham Tran agreed to tell his story for the landmark five-part PBS docuseries “Asian Americans” that debuted last week, he was surprised to learn that two of his classmates from UCLA Film School — documentarian Grace Lee and cinematographer Jerry Henry — would be working on his episode.

“That was the icing on the cake,” Tran said, through an email interview.

Then he learned that the other person they’d be interviewing for the segment on Vietnamese American refugees was Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who happened to be Tran’s housemate in Los Angeles for four years in the late 2000s.

“That was the cherry on top,” he said.

“Asian Americans,” helmed by director Renee Tajima-Peña, traces 150 years of Asian American history, much of which is not taught in classrooms across the U.S.

Locally and among the Vietnamese diaspora, Tran is best known for his 2006 film “Journey from the Fall,” which traces one family’s journey from Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon to Orange County, where their trials and tribulations continue in a new country.

Tran remembers then-Sundance Film Festival director Geoffrey Gilmore telling him he was engaged by the film from the very beginning “because he hadn’t seen a film about the Vietnam War told from the Vietnamese perspective before.”

At the time, the Vietnamese immigrant community had rallied around Tran to raise money and support the film.

Tran and his producer Lam Nguyen cast non-actors from the Vietnamese American community in supporting roles. Through interviews, the filmmakers auditioned roughly 400 people. The Little Saigon auditions were done at the Garden Grove Ramada Plaza Inn, one of the community sponsors for the film.

This gave the film a certain authenticity, as refugees delivered performances inspired by their own memories of trauma.

“Some told us stories that they still haven’t told their own family because they didn’t want to put them through the pain of knowing,” Tran said.

One of his most memorable castings was a man he calls Mr. Hieu, who had lost contact with his daughter because of the reeducation camp.

“To that day, he still had no idea where she is or whether she survived the boat crossing,” Tran said. “We had a scene where he spoke to the photograph of his daughter, and Mr. Hieu couldn’t deliver the lines as they were written in the script. We shot for an hour, when I finally asked him to throw away the script and just picture his own daughter and talk to her.

“He did it in one take, and the whole crew was in tears.”

Tran was 8 when he came to the U.S. His dad’s friend took them to Orange County to visit an area they called Bolsa.

“It was just a little strip on Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, where a few Vietnamese opened a restaurant, a bakery and little grocery mart,” he said.

His family soon moved to Santa Ana, where he’d live until high school.

“By then the crime rate was just too high there,” he said. “To this day, I still have nightmares of the night there was a gang shootout between an Asian and a Latino gang. The blood along the sidewalk outside our front door was a clear sign that it was time for us to move.”

When he filmed his segment for “Asian Americans,” he took Lee and Henry on a tour of “Bolsa,” to the corner of the restaurant he visited in 1982.

“The restaurant has been replaced by a strip mall, but the Baskin-Robbins behind it was still there,” he said. “I also took them to the strip mall parking lot where 30,000 Vietnamese Americans came out to protest a video store owner for putting up the Vietnamese flag in his store. The thousands of protesters have left, but our community continues to be divided, even among the local Orange County Vietnamese American community.”

His filmmaking career took him back to Vietnam in 2012, though he visits so much that he feels like he’s never left Little Saigon.

He still remembers the first Orange County screening of “Journey from the Fall” at the Rose Center Theater in Westminster.

“My whole family came out to see it,” he said. “My mom couldn’t believe that Margie Rice, the mayor of Westminster at the time, had given me a placard in commemoration of the screening. I was very nervous because the film was screening in the heart of Little Saigon, and I was afraid that the people who lived that history would be watching with critical, scrutinizing eyes.”

But they loved it. Vietnamese diaspora communities all over the world have supported the film so much that 13 years later, it continues to screen every year on April 30, the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.

“It’s a great honor that people still remember the film, and I feel grateful that I have been able to contribute to the history of the Vietnamese American experience and the greater history of Asian American experience,” said Tran.

Tran said that once he sat down to watch the entire PBS series, he felt emotional.

“I think it’s great that we continue to mine our collective community’s stories,” Tran said. “When I was young, I used to help my grandfather water his pomegranate trees. He’d say, ‘You have to take care of the roots if you want the tree to grow tall and strong.’ Having the Vietnamese American history included in the series means I’m doing my part to help our community’s tree grow.”

Now, Tran is back in Vietnam, where quarantine efforts have been comparatively efficient and effective. Filming has recently started back up, though it’s limited to no more than 20 people assembled at any location at a given time.

He is finishing up his current movie, “Maika,” an adaptation of the 1978 Czech TV series “She Came Out of the Blue Sky” based on the book of the same name. The plot has similarities to Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”

Tran said “She Came Out of the Blue Sky” came to Vietnam in the late ’80s and early ’90s, so there’s a generation of Vietnamese who were huge fans of the show.

His reboot is about Hung, an 8-year-old boy coping with the death of his mother. One day, he sees a meteor shower and an errant falling star hitting the ground at a distance. There, he finds an alien girl from the planet Maika, who has come in search of her lost friend.

“Out of all the films that I’ve made, this one is the closest to my heart, because I’m making it as a dedication to my mom, who passed away in the fall of 2018,” he said. “Tragedies will always befall us, but it’s the love in our heart that help us to keep going. As long as our roots are deep, our tree will grow tall and strong.”

All five episodes of “Asian Americans” are streaming at pbs.com through the end of May, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Ham Tran appears in “Part 4: Generation Rising.”

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