What’s To Lose If an Immigrant Media Legend Disappears

The Vietnamese American community is far from splitting at the seams, but the slow death of a production as iconic as “Paris By Night” surely forewarns an entire refugee generation soon to be lost to time.

Written by Raymond Lam

Illustrated by Chelsea Li

It’s not a stretch to say that pretty much every Vietnamese American has heard the ballads of “Paris by Night” at least once in their life. Dizzying potluck parties with unfamiliar aunts and uncles on karaoke, sun-bleached adverts on nail salon windows, radios in car rides to and from Southern California, and hazy evenings at home with TV dramas have all been graced with the single most iconic fixture of modern Vietnamese media. It’s hard to explain the sheer ubiquity of the show to those not acquainted with it. Every element of the nearly 40-year-old production, from its intricate choreography and traditional Vietnamese attire to its almost obnoxious dramedy skits and lovesick ballads, is nothing short of iconic to any Vietnamese person, abroad or otherwise.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, “Paris by Night” originated from the early French Vietnamese exodus in the 80s, founded by husband and wife Tô Văn Lai and Thúy Nga shortly after the conclusion of the Vietnam War. At its inception, the show was a staged collection of traditional folk songs, aimed at preserving the nostalgia and culture of the primarily-Southern Vietnamese diaspora through cải lương-style ballads soaked in a nostalgia-tinged pre-war aesthetic. As “Paris by Night” began to pick up steam through new DVD sales and moved production to Southern California — the most common destination for US-bound immigrants from Vietnam — it exploded into a part-variety, part-French-cabaret spectacle filled to the brim with Vietnamese trends and history, new and old. Nowadays, it crams everything from gaudy comedy skits and glamorous Áo dài dresses to ‘90s club beats over a gigantic four-hour-or-so sequence. The premier spotlight for any aspiring Vietnamese performer, it has launched the careers of countless celebrities and singers, such as the late comedian Chí Tài and the instantly recognizable hosts Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên and Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn. Even without necessarily knowing the names of its personnel or any one of its many, many songs in particular (“Paris by Night”’s 132nd show premieres this month), the aesthetic of Vietnam’s single, most significant media entity instantly sounds like home, evoking memories of a country’s former self.

Part of why the show has had so much cultural staying power within the immigrant population despite it’s contrived format is its spirited Vietnam War aesthetics, a common subject matter for its more downtempo selections. Modeled for a primarily Southern Vietnamese audience, the show’s themes frequently orbit around the defeat of the southern Republic of Vietnam and the untidy reconsolidation with its northerly, communist neighbor in 1975. To this day, it’s ultimately still hosted in a Southern dialect (distinct from modern-day Northern diacritics), and war still abounds in half-romanticized-half-politicized ballads produced within and outside the Thúy Nga company. “Hello Vietnam,” sung by Phạm Quỳnh Anh, quite bluntly bleeds into this homesickness:

All I know of you is all the sights of war
A film by Coppola, the helicopter's roar
One day I'll touch your soil
One day I'll finally know your soul
One day I'll come to you
To say hello ... Vietnam

From a modern lens, though, the nostalgia doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it used to, especially for a generation of American-born kids once-removed from the conflicts of days past. Long after the U.S. forgot its sympathies for the photographed scenes of casualty and airlifted calamity of the first escapees, less-flashy stories of communist re-education camps and refugee settlements along pacific archipelagos continued to quietly dwell in the Vietnamese cultural memory of older generations. Now that the Vietnamese exodus has borne a rapidly naturalized populace, fresher and living relatively middle-class all-American lives, the nationalism has died away as recent generations simply can’t find the same enthusiasm for a lost Southern Vietnamese cause.

That’s not to say any lingering nostalgia has been particularly beneficial, either for “Paris by Night” or the older audiences it depends on. Anti-communist rhetoric has often devolved to a modern red scare: Vietnamese Americans maintain consistency as the most conservative Asian voting bloc, with a particular deluge of Vietnamese-language misinformation that feeds into a penchant for jingoistic rhetoric (as in the Southern Vietnamese presences at the January Capitol Insurrection) at odds with younger generations’ politics.

Overseas, "Paris by Night" has already been banned in present-day Vietnam for its Southern Vietnamese leanings — now distributed entirely through bootlegs because of government censorship — even as the show has trended away from its usual explicit political fervor. A trend towards more benign pre-war nostalgia and inclusions of modern family dilemmas over a war fascination (like “Paris By Night 96”’s skit about a gay Vietnamese American kid) don’t seem to inspire the same popularity, and its repuation has taken hits over repeated accusations of the show of being communist-aligned (in one incident, the father of one of the hosts merely visited Vietnam).

It’s also easy to fault “Paris by Night'' for simply refusing to keep up with the times: each “chapter” by "Paris by Night" costs an average of $1 million to produce, yet it still pales in comparison with the efficiency and modernity of other American and Asian shows. Now, middle-aged and elderly Vietnamese Americans snap up the majority of the free tickets given away for “kitschy and campy” tapings of the production in tourist-trap casinos, and the output of the company isn’t as appealing as the likes of social media soundbites and international franchises that aren’t so narrowly refugee-minded.

Publications also reported on the Thúy Nga company’s financial difficulties as early as a decade ago, mostly as a consequence of its antiquated straight-to-DVD model in the face of rampant piracy. They’ve adjusted their distribution means in recent times, posting entire shows on Youtube and Facebook for ad revenue and contracting with local Vietnamese-language TV stations. The Thúy Nga company has even attempted an unrelated USA-to-Vietnam shipping business with the sole goal of raising supplemental income for "Paris by Night." The style of the show has retained its cultural imprint and supremacy over Vietnamese diasporic media, but withering financial viability means going under in the near future isn’t entirely implausible.

It seems like Vietnamese-language media, especially from the mainland, doesn’t seem to be dying anytime soon, though. There’s a more clear distinction Vietnam’s new post-war pop culture, with a minor V-Pop industry and a few underground music scenes in Hồ Chí Minh/Sài Gòn starting to gain firmer footing (a recent EDM-remixed Vietnamese Tiktok audio even seems to have hit the global airwaves.) But this is hardly equal to the unanimous unifying force “Paris by Night'' was, with trends in Vietnam globalizing towards cooler, newer media in vogue as opposed to the unique, hyperlocal Southern Vietnamese niche.

As for the younger, second-generation individuals growing up with “Paris by Night'' on the TV, there are a few hints of a urgency in keeping the Southern Vietnamese memory alive : wearing Áo dài for miniaturized Vietnamese Student Association “Paris by Night” parodies, writing school essays about grandparents’ war stories (because hardly are Vietnamese legacies more than a footnote in U.S. curricula), or maybe even picking up the language to impress elder relatives. Still, the fact that once-revered traditions (a kitschy icon like “Paris by Night” of least concern) need delicate anthropological preservation as other cultural offerings (and food) seamlessly slip into the U.S. mainstream means the refugee generation’s culture and views are increasingly lost on today’s forward-looking youth.

Perhaps the reason the show has thus far evaded doom and retained its legendary status is because of the incredible lack of new media for the refugee generation, leaving them to cling to the same old bittersweet songs of love and war for as long as they can. Without a new audience, “Paris by Night”’s future is propped up by these parents and grandparents who, hopefully, will be less reserved in passing on this strange marvel than in hiding the pains of integration and longing from leaving a homeland much too long ago. The decline of “Paris by Night” is more of a bellwether than anything else, heralding a slow death of the aging, trapped-in-the-middle immigrant generation and their fading memory of a conflict of the past.

Afterglow ATXDecember 17, 2021raymond lam, chelsea li