by Dawn Sands
Miss Saigon is Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s second hit musical, telling the tragic love story of a Vietnamese girl and an American GI at the end of the Vietnam War. I love it almost as much as I love their first musical, Les Misérables, for many of the same reasons, and it has been incredibly successful (despite the fact that it hasn’t been on tour in three years… not that I’m bitter at all). However, it has been dominated by allegations of racism ever since it opened in 1989. In this article, I’m going to explore these allegations - are they justified?
One of the main criticisms of Miss Saigon is that it promotes the ‘white saviour’ trope, in which a white character travels to a foreign country and ‘rescues’ the people living there from whatever struggles they are facing, and is thus hailed as a hero. And essentially, yes, this trope is a major feature of the show. Chris falls in love with Kim, promises to take her back to America and save her from the wretched life she has been forced into, and, when it turns out that this will never become a reality for her, Kim commits suicide to secure her child’s future in a final, broken act of desperation. Not only does this present Chris as a white saviour, but it also glorifies America as culturally superior to Vietnam, reinforcing the goal of the ‘American Dream’. This American Dream is, in fact, a prominent feature throughout the musical - the songs ‘The Movie in my Mind’ and ‘Last Night of the World’ centre heavily on the concept, and there’s even a song called ‘The American Dream’. However, at the end of the musical, does Kim ever achieve that dream? No, she doesn’t. And does her son Tam ever get to experience that life either? The likelihood is - no.
The American Dream is a concept explored in many forms of art and literature: the dream that haunts the minds of so many, yet rarely ever emerges into fruition. It’s almost impossible to achieve, because it basically doesn’t exist. In almost all cases, when the concept is explored in literature, this is the aspect of it that is focused on: its utter futility. The tragedy of Miss Saigon is not that Kim never gets to live the American Dream, but that there is no American Dream. Kim lives her whole life waiting for something that simply doesn’t exist. Her struggle was all for a lost prospect.
Meanwhile, while Kim and her son would never have experienced the American Dream, in Chris’s life, the American Dream is a reality. This could help support the claim that Chris was written as a white saviour, however, with my speculations about the American Dream in mind, I think this highlights his flaws rather than anything else. Chris is a very immature character, though immature in a sheltered sense, rather than a childish one. We can see this in his song ‘Why God Why’ - he has no idea of the realities of war, and experiences quite a culture shock when arriving in Vietnam. There's a part of the song where the tone changes entirely and we see what was going through his mind upon signing up for the war - "I went back and re-upped/Sure Saigon is corrupt/It felt better to be/Here driving for the embassy/'Cause here if you can pull a string/A guy like me lives like a king/Just as long as you don't believe anything...". He has no idea that what he has experienced in America is nothing like what Kim will experience if she goes. He's been living the American dream, he believes in the American dream, and he knows no truth other than the American dream. In ‘Last Night of the World’, he sings this to Kim: ‘On the other side of the earth/There’s a place where your life will have worth/I will take you, I’ll go with you/You won’t believe all the things you’ll see/I’ll know ‘cause you’ll see them all with me/When we’re together that’s when we’ll hear it again…’. It’s all wrong. Kim never gets to see America, but she lives her life with hope. Yet in reality, there never really was any hope. What would really happen when she got to America? Poverty, work, stress, exploitation, all these things exist in America as in Vietnam. But she doesn't see that. She sees only what she is told. Kim sees Chris as a white saviour, for sure, but does this not highlight her tragedy? That she is so besotted by a man who is so clearly so flawed? A common argument that I see is that Chris does not really love Kim - after all, Kim was a prostitute, and that is how they met. While they may not have loved each other initially, I believe that Chris did grow to genuinely love Kim; however, that does not make the way in which they met any better. Essentially, Chris exploited Kim. Furthermore, upon arriving back to America, knowing fully that Kim relied so heavily on him, Chris married another woman, Ellen. (This is a tangent, but arguably the most harrowing song in the entire musical is I Still Believe, in which Kim sings about how, despite the cruel circumstances in which she has to live, she still believes that one day, she will be reunited with Chris. Meanwhile, Chris is sleeping miles away in America, surrounded by comfort (a stark juxtaposition with the poverty Kim is living in) while his wife sings to him that she still believes he will be able to open up to her about his experiences in the war. I wrote an article a while ago about how Schonberg and Boublil manage to spin Valjean and Javert’s lives together so intricately in Les Misérables, and this is exactly the same, except the dramatic irony is heightened even further by the fact that they are singing at exactly the same time. Anyway.) To summarise, Chris is hardly presented as a perfect character, and, therefore, I do not believe the creators of Miss Saigon intended to portray him as a ‘white saviour’ nor do I believe that they idealised the American Dream. Kim's tragedy was not that she couldn't achieve the American dream, but that she was exploited to believe that there was an American dream waiting for her. Miss Saigon may not be the best musical to look to for Asian representation (something which is greatly lacking in media in general, honestly); however, I don’t think this makes the show inherently racist.
However, while the story of Miss Saigon in itself is not racist, the production of it, especially the original productions in the early 1980s and 90s, undoubtedly were.
A lot of the controversy surrounding Miss Saigon originally sprung up around some questionable casting decisions, which I expect led to the allegations about white saviourism and idealising the American Dream. The original production of Miss Saigon had Jonathan Pryce, a white man, playing the role of the Engineer, a Vietnamese character who is - well - not white. In the original 1989 production, they used prosthetics to alter the shape of Pryce’s eyes and makeup to change his skin tone, techniques which are, understandably, hugely frowned upon today. After complaints and protests about this all around the world, they only employed Asian actors to play the Engineer after 1991, however it is worth bearing in mind that originally, the Engineer was played by a white actor, and the producers saw no issue with this for a long time. Furthermore, there is a section of the performance in which the characters speak Vietnamese, and in the original productions of the show these sections were not authentic Vietnamese, but gibberish. This, too, has been changed, and in modern productions the actors speak Vietnamese; however, originally, this was not the case. A major problem that still stands is with the logo. The logo depicts a character from an Asian alphabet which looks like a helicopter, derived from the large helicopter that lands on stage during the show. I actually love this logo, and am maybe a little more obsessed with it than I have licence to be (the woman’s face etched in the sky is everything) however Vietnamese actually uses the Latin alphabet - our alphabet - rather than using a character-based alphabet. Therefore, the logo does not represent Vietnam at all, and is actually pretty ignorant stereotyping on the designers’ behalf and a huge generalisation of Asian cultures and languages. This issue, as far as I know, has not been addressed at all.
In conclusion then, since this article is getting long, the way I believe the musical was intended, Miss Saigon does not promote the white saviour trope nor is the story inherently racist - however, early productions of it certainly were, and we should bear this in mind when watching it today.
sources:
Comments
Post a Comment
Comments with names are more likely to be published.