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Tiger's Apprentice

Q&A

Some questions M. Trinh Nguyen has received and her answers.

It seems you were confident you would see the world you documented in Vietnam. What would have happened if you did not see what you saw after you arrived in Vietnam?

I was both extremely nervous and confident while preparing to go to Vietnam. But I think I was more afraid than confident, because even though I was able to communicate briefly with my great-uncle and he told me that he treats a few people every day, doubt was still nagging at me. This is how deeply ingrained the skepticism was and some of my Vietnamese American relatives contributed to it. Even up to the moment when I was at the airport waiting to fly to Vietnam, a relative, who is a nurse, stated that she did not believe the (tumor) medicine exists, essentially declaring that my grandmother, who was sitting next to her, had imagined everything. It was my lifelong respect for my grandmother's wisdom and my cultural background that gave me the strength to rebel against the fear, and invest the hard earned grant money in the equipment and expenses, and go to Vietnam.

How did you prepare for the documentation in Vietnam?

I composed all the questions I could think of about the process of treatment with the tumor removal medicine, its history, my great-uncle's journey as a healer. I had questions for current and former patients. I worked on the questions for a substantial amount of time, then I translated them to Vietnamese and practiced asking them in Vietnamese. When I got there, I found they helped me a lot because I would have forgotten some basic but important questions otherwise in my being overwhelmed by seeing that world for the first time. I asked or tried to ask all of those questions, but every day a whole new set of questions arose while shooting, so I continuously prepared more questions. The experience was something that opened itself up to me more and more each day and it was quite intense.

The footage that I have were shot in the five weeks I was in Vietnam. This is usually the development phase for other filmmakers who normally would consider what I shot pre-interviewing and fact-gathering. Then they go back home and strategize so that they can go back and get beautiful images and pristine sound. However, I wanted to make a film on the discovery itself and I felt that if I tried to recreate the discovery, viewers would subconsciously sense that and that would undermine the film, so I used the real discovery footage, even though the decision to do that was risky because the footage is raw and the sound is bad. I didn't realize it was going to be so noisy there and that the whole house is tiled so that every motorbike going by echoed endlessly. It would have been a sound person's nightmare had I had a sound person.

Will you continue to apprentice with your great-uncle and practice the medicine?

I hope that my great-uncle's younger grandchildren will become more interested and continue the tradition. Usually, when you turn the camera on something, you glamorize it and it could be problematic. But in this case, I feel that I didn't glamorize it so much as planted a seed of pride that hopefully will germinate in time in the minds of the younger generation. The pride can be applied towards all other cultural aspects, not just the medicine. But if I feel I have to, I believe I will try to continue this journey. As far as practicing, I am somewhat experimenting with the poultice. And I discovered that I very much like the "cupping" treatment I received for my cold, and would like to learn how to do that, so at the very least, this experience has brought me back to some of the more common Vietnamese healing practices.

How does investigating the medicine relate to your quest for identity?

When my sibling and I began to assimilate into American culture in my teenage years, by acting and dressing in certain ways, listening to American music, etc., my parents said to us that we were "losing our roots." I then questioned what my roots were and was challenged by it for many years. I began to think that some of my Vietnamese American elders were not entirely Vietnamese themselves, particularly the ones who worship white skin and plastic surgery to look more European. Vietnam was colonized by France for a long time prior to the war the US was involved in, so I felt my parents also had lost parts of their roots, but didn't realize it. During my prior visits to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City),Vietnam, I was very happy to see my relatives there, but I didn't feel I was getting to fully understand my roots. I felt I needed to observe in-depth how a community revolves around something, how people interact and transact around something, and investigating my great-uncle's medicine practice has helped me do that.

Did you always know that you would be in the film?

My intention up to end of the shooting was not to be in the film. After much deliberation, however, I decided I couldn't suppress the dimension that the documentation had become a new kind of apprenticeship. My great-uncle knew all along that it would be and he wouldn't have let me go over there if he didn't want me to learn. Another reason to make Tiger's Apprentice a personal documentary was because I felt my evolution in thinking about the medicine should be included to act as a bridge for the viewer - being a cultural broker.

Another significant reason was I had come to fully believe no documentary film has ever been objective. The documentaries with the "voice-of-god" narrators are no more objective than the personal documentaries, they just believe they are objective. They contain codes that viewers have learned to translate as "objectivity," but these codes are culturally based. I find those types of seemingly objective documentaries to be potentially very dangerous. Take for example, Triumph of the Will, the documentary by Leni Riefenstahl on one of Hitler's rallies. It was an extremely successful propaganda film for the Nazis, but the filmmaker continues to insist that it is not mainly because there is no narration, no point of view. She didn't and does not realize that she couldn't see her point of view, that she was operating from a certain perspective, and many also failed to realize it. It won the Palme d'Or from Cannes. It wasn't until after the horrors of the Holocaust had come to light that the film was re-labeled as propaganda. We all approach everything we do from our point of view. It is better for us to know this and to acknowledge it and move from there. If you don't, you promote the assumption that your perspective on the world, even your perspective on "objectivity," is the natural one and others' are unnatural.

How did you come to use the television image?

This is a long and complicated answer. First, it was out of necessity while I was editing. The official asked me to erase several hours of footage shot on my dv (digital video) camera. But before I erased them, I transferred them to my back-up Hi 8 camera. The image quality decreased significantly when I did this but at least I still had the footage. Then, I decided to edit Tiger's Apprentice on a home computer to save money. The dv editing system that I used to download segments into the computer and edit them could not digitize analog video (Hi 8). In order to edit the censored material saved on Hi-8, I re-shot them off the television with my digital camera.

The other reason I used the television image was that I wanted to place the viewer in the position of being the potential censorer. I hoped to achieve this by framing the story with the censorship experience and using the occasional television images throughout the story. I wanted to try to let the viewer subconsciously sense his or her connection to the censorer and be aware of his or her potential individual acts of censorship. Maybe all I have accomplished is an in-joke, but this is a case where editing necessity and experimentation coalesced.

What was ultimately censored?

By Vietnamese officials, at first, everything was censored out of fear that westerners would indict Vietnam as continuing to be backwards. However, after the week of careful review, the official changed his mind and only about 4 hours of material that were deemed very directly political were censored.

By PBS, however, potentially everything will be censored. Though responses from festival audiences and various screenings have been very enthusiastic, the response from KQED (the San Francisco Bay Area PBS station), when Tiger's Apprentice was submitted for KQED's Asian Heritage Month, was that it was concerned about some of the images of treatment and declined to include Tiger's Apprentice in its Asian Heritage Month line-up. PBS shows many programs with gory images of western medicinal treatments, but because Tiger's Apprentice's medicine images are not western medicine images, they were censored. This is what the Vietnamese officials anticipated. Isn't democracy about embracing diverse ideas and perspectives? Or is democracy, like objectivity, illusive? The "victim" films (i.e., man killed by racists) are important, but unfortunately on their own they will not succeed in preventing racism and racist acts. In-depth cultural sharing is necessary to lead to true cross-cultural understanding and mutual respect.

Your great-uncle smokes, does he realize that it is ironic [for a healer to do so]?

My great-uncle doesn't fit the stereotype of a healer and I am glad he does not. I am glad that he is a dimensional human being with human frailties. He tried to shrug off the responsibilities of being a healer but couldn't. If the people he treats could all be treated by others, he would be very happy. But this brings up the issue of cigarette smoking in Vietnam. Most men in Vietnam smoke. Intense cigarette advertising came with French colonization and might have ceased briefly after the war, but is now just as heavy. Marlboro is the status cigarette in Vietnam. My great-uncle knows that it is not good for him. He exercises every day, but it is difficult for him to quit smoking even though it is causing him health problems. I went over there as soon as I could because it was reported that he may have lung cancer. Thinking now about his smoking, I realize that it is a very unfortunate metaphor for certain western influences slowly killing the medicine master.

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Leni Riefenstahl: Documentary Film-Maker Or Propagandist?

 

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