First Person: Kieu Chinh’s long road from refugee to Sympathizer

Produced and edited by James Chung

My name is Kieu Chinh. I am a Vietnamese American actor. I am so honored and proud to work for an amazing story, The Sympathizer, by the Pulitzer Prize winner, author Viet Thanh Nguyen, and production by HBO and A24. The story background is about war, and war is not only being damaged by males, by soldiers, but by women as well, especially a mother.

So my character is a mother of a major in the army, and of course there are pain, suffering, drama for a woman during the war time. I am very happy to see that at this time, the director Park and the producers of The Sympathizer cast Vietnamese for Vietnamese.

I am so proud to be one of them because of the culture, the customs, the languages, so it is amazing to see in The Sympathizer. Even it is a fiction, but you see so much of history there, so much of reality there, and played by the Vietnamese cast. And super work by the Academy award-winning Robert Downey Jr. He portrays four different characters in the series. I can’t wait for the audience to see it. I was born in Hanoi, North Vietnam, in a well-to-do family.

Until 1954, everything changed when Vietnam was divided into two parts, North and South. And I left North to South by myself and became a refugee within my own country at the age of 16. I was discovered by the famous director, Joseph Mascowits. He was in Vietnam looking for a Vietnamese lady who could play the lead in the movie The Quiet American. But at that time, the movie industry was so new in my country, and my family, my ex-husband family at that time did not agree that I would become an actor until a year after that.

Another local movie company invited me again to become an actor. At this time, my character was a Buddhist man. Then my mother-in-law allowed me to become an actor. But after that first movie, I became right away well-known and working one after another.

Before working in Hollywood, I had been working all over in Southeast Asia. I’ve been working all over. And I also have my own movie company in Saigon, Vietnam. And then in 1975, when Vietnam, South Vietnam fell into a communist. Again, the second time, I became a refugee coming to the United States under the sponsorship of actress Tippi Hadren, and with the help of actor William Holden. That was 1975.

It’s not much work for Asian actors. But I considered myself lucky that I landed my very first work in Hollywood. I landed in the TV series, TV shows, MASH with Alan Alda. Then later, I continued to work in TV shows like The China Beach, Vietnam War Stories, and many others until the Joy Luck Club in 1993.

I think the Joy Luck Club kind of paved the road for Asian movie, Asian actors working. And it became so famous. I’ve been continuously working in the last three years, continuously, nonstop working. So which means that there’s more stories, more shows, more films for Asians as an actor.

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