1.8.05--I am controversy.

Happy new year.

All this weekend, I've been wrapped up hosting this show called "Miss Saigon with the Wind." It's all women, all Vietnamese American kickass performers. I'm not Vietnamese, but heck, neither was Lea Salonga. So hell. My friend Viet who curated the show thought that even though I am not Vietnamese it could be subversive and in theme with the show to have me do performance interludes inbetween performers.

So what I am doing as a host is a satirical tribute to Miss Saigon inbetween performers. I don't outright hate the musical or anything. I sure as heck never found it as romantic as everyone else thinks it is. I never got why the 17-year old prostitute was so hung up over this American soldier she sleeps with for one night and has to kill herself at the end when he goes back to his wife in America. Some of the lyrics and storyline are a bit orientalist for my taste (ie "Which one of these slits here will be Miss Saigon?"). And I always resented growing up and feeling like all I could look forward in a career as a professional performer was playing the prostitute who kills herself over a white guy or some other caricature who landed a tragic death or was the butt of a cheap joke.

I didn't want my satirical tribue to Miss Saigon to rip the musical to shreds or put it under critical fire-- musicals do that to themselves. What I wanted to do was in a campy, ironic way, play with how American Broadway musicals turn tragic historical events like the Vietnam War into glitzy, glamorous, razzle-dazzle musical masterpieces that have the ability to sustain stronger cultural and historical images in the American memory than the actual historic event-- and with all the Vietnamese characters played by Pilipinos! What's even more ironic about Miss Saigon is that now you can sing the songs at home high and drunk with a karaoke machine. Songs about how the prostitutes feel so sad and jaded when they sleep with the GIs ("Movie in My Mind") and songs about prostitutes up for bid to misogynistic GIs ("The Heat is on in Saigon").

Musicals like Miss Saigon are that kind of Americana that have their own built in commentary and don't even need to be chastised. They are what they are.

So here is the gist of my performance interludes: I have the karaoke lyrics from the songs of Miss Saigon projected onto the wall. I sing each of the songs with heart, but poorly as only Kristina Wong can (still chocked with campy entertainment value). I come out in among other costumes: a goofy 80's unitard with matching legwarmers lit with over 100 battery powered Christmas lights, a half man-half woman costume (a la "Putting on the Hits") to sing a duet, and a prostitute after work hours in smeared make-up.

I also lower a toy helicopter from the ceiling complete with a helicopter soundtrack. I scream towards the 3-inch toy helicopter as it is lowered, "The American helipcopter! Please take me to America so I can be with the white guy! Please!" It's a silly lo- tech version of Miss Saigon's most amazing theatrics-- the infamous "helicopter scene." It's one of the final scenes that leads to Miss Saigon's suicide. When the lights go out on me at the end of the show, I shout a lo-tech "pow pow" into the audience to indicate that I have offed myself because I can't go on without the "white dude."

My performance interludes have been going over quite well with this audience. Laughter abound. And I think without slamming any kind of political agenda down people's throats, the silliness of my performance bits are enough for the musical to offer commentary to itself.

Tonight after the show I got some critical feedback from a woman who said that while I was very funny and talented, my performance made her want to cry.

This woman was a white woman from Australia. She said she knows a lot of Vietnamese women. And it made her very sad to see me "mock" the experiences of these women who really did have to run after the American planes during the war, because that was the only hope they had of escaping the war and life in Vietnam. She said that she's heard their stories and it made her very sad to see me, an Asian women make fun of their experiences and "mock" them. And that as an artist performing at Highways, I should not be causing further oppression with my work.

I was totally caught off guard by this feedback. My performance made her so sad and upset that she talked to Viet, the curator, about her feelings and felt compelled to stay and talk to me about it. I don't know if she wanted me to change my performance. But she was visibly upset with me and what she saw as me mocking women who were victims during wartime.

I tried to explain to her that I was working within the context of the musical "Miss Saigon" and the years of strange subculture that has followed it. I was feeling tired of growing up seeing Asian women always playing tragic prostitutes or deranged dragon ladies. Tired of seeing women as the mindless sexual objects to white men. Tired of seeing women who were not funny. Tired of seeing war as a plotline for a bestseller or Broadway smash.

I tried to explain that the jumpoff point in my "satirizing" of these women was with the broadway musical, not the women actually affected by the war. This is why I specifically have the karaoke lyrics projected on the screen, and why I tell the audience this is my "tribute" to the musical.

She said she was familiar with the musical, and still, did not think that my performance was appropriate to what these women had to go through.

I've been prepared for conversations like these for years now. Waiting for someone to tell me, "That's not funny. You can't make it funny. It's tragic. It must stay tragic." But when that woman approached me last night to talk about this, I was so thrown off. I didn't know where to start. I really just wanted her to say what she wanted to say. I didn't want to argue and figure out who was right or wrong. That's not what these things are about anyway. I can see how certain satire just doesn't make any sense to different generations of people who are operating in another context and with different information, but I don't know what to say to people who insist that tragedy must always stay tragedy. That I have no right to laugh, ever, even if it is healing. That even with art, the artist does not have permission to reappropriate images and recreate the world and instead, must only repeat and relive the tragedy. That art does not have the right to reappropriate images that have already been co-opted. That satire that risks being "oppressive" is not worth showing to the world at all.

It did disturb me that she (a white woman) was telling me that as an Asian woman I had no right to make this situation humorous. It reminded me of the footage I had seen from the Sundance screening of "Better Luck Tomorrow" where a white audience member chastised Director Justin Lin and the cast for portraying Asians doing negative things. When the truth is that white filmmakers never have people scold them for "portraying the white race poorly."

I did thank her for her feedback and hugged her. I do wish she wrote her comments down because I do want to honor her opinion by restating it as accurately as possible.

She also asked me, "Would you do something like that about an Iraqi woman?" I said, "If there was an over-the-top Broadway musical done on it and an outrageous and somewhat problematic subculture to follow it. Sure."

But no, I wouldn't do that now. I have no reason to.