Found another good, melodic duet by a Vietnamese man, Manh Dinh and a woman, Y Phung. I decided to look for a possible YouTube video of them performing. Found it (their love ballad begins at 2:10 here, at the Houston Grand Opera, no less) and I noticed, hey, that guy’s wearing an ARVN uniform with jump (or pilot?) wings.
All these thirty-six years after the ARVN (the Army of the Republic of (South) Viet Nam) fled their Northern cousins, the communists?
Turns out to be a performance of Paris By Night, a video series of variety shows featuring 1960s-era Vietnamese ballads from Saigon nightclubs, and some new material. Like a Broadway or Las Vegas show. The tapes have been produced and sold throughout the world’s Vietnamese refugee community, particularly the Viet Kieu, the Vietnamese Americans, since 1983.
The communist government of Viet Nam considers them a “reactionary cultural product” and tries to block them from sale in the People’s Republic, but they reportedly still get through to the interested via the black market.
The theme of many of the songs is the lost war, hence Manh Dinh (much too young to have been in the war) wearing full ARVN, including U.S. Army jungle boots. It makes sense. Many of the refugees, at least the initial waves, were middle- and upper-middle class urban South Vietnamese. The intelligentsia. With enough discretionary income to buy videos. And to be sentimental about what was, and was not to be.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 