'New Wave' Documentary Revisits the '80s Soundtrack of Vietnamese American Youth

Blush as pink as flamingos and lipstick as red as apples. Hair teased to the gods. Jackets and sweaters suggestively slid off shoulders. Bodies enmeshed kickin', jerkin', and groovin' on the dance floor. Love songs crooned over brooding synthy and infectious beats.

For many, the trends and styles of the "new wave" music — popular in the '80s — are most heavily associated with punk-ish white kids in metropoles, disaffected from society. However, amongst the post-war Vietnamese American community in the United States, new wave music served as a cultural unification point amongst first-generation and refugee Vietnamese youth. So much so, it spawned its own branch of the genre, where singers blended Vietnamese and English, covering the Eurodance-y songs with their own unique flair.

In Chinese-Vietnamese-American director Elizabeth Ai's excellent documentary, New Wave, the popularity and impact of new wave music in Orange County's Vietnamese American community in the '70s and '80s are explored through archival footage and interviews with Vietnamese new wave icons. However, new wave's appeal stretched beyond California and was popular with Vietnamese youth across the country. On May 29, Rainier Arts Center is screening the film and will have Ai, SEA Vinyl Society's Thanh Tân, and filmmaker Martin Tran on deck to discuss the connections.

Framed as a remembrance for her young daughter, the documentary also serves as a jumping off point to investigate her own history and estranged relationship with her mother, a nail salon owner she rarely saw growing up. New Wave is an often surprising time capsule of growing up in a community still reckoning with trauma.

"I've been asked a lot, 'Why this music? Why do you think it's this music?'" said Ai in a recent interview. "But I think that this music helped [Vietnamese Americans] build the thing that they didn't have, which was community."

As a kid, Ai was mainly raised by her grandparents and her rebellious young Aunt Myra, who were all refugees from the Vietnam War. Her mother spent most of her time opening nail salons and sending money to people back home, rarely coming back to check on Ai and her sister. It was her Aunt Myra who introduced tween Ai to new wave music, mainly on car rides in the California sun. A lot of other Vietnamese kids got hip to the genre after watching Paris by Night, a diasporic variety show where new wave icons like Lynda Trang Đài (aka "Vietnamese Madonna"), Thai Tai, and Trizzie Phuong Trinh would have elaborate, provocative numbers.

New Wave talks to many of these icons as well as fans, DJs, record store owners, and Ai's family members to weave a story of a community largely ignored and ridiculed by mainstream culture. She zooms in on a few figures in particular, like Trang Đài and DJ Ian "BPM" Nguyen, using flashbacks and old photos and videos to flesh out their stories of immigration and relationships with their families. Trang Đài, we come to learn, was responsible for caring for a massive extended family who clashed over her decision to go into the entertainment industry. And after her career faltered, she eventually opened two sandwich shops in California as a means of keeping it going.

Ai got inspired to start the documentary after giving birth to her daughter in 2018 and wanted to have a time capsule that said "there were Vietnamese people in the ʼ80s who listened to this music," she said. At first, her research extended mostly to her family, curating pictures and video. But once the pandemic hit in 2020, she used grant money to hire research assistants who went much further afield into the Vietnamese diaspora, sourcing stories, pictures, and memories for the documentary. New wave music wasn't solely popular in California, but across the country.

For Dr. Tam Dinh, a social work professor at Seattle University, new wave served as a lifeline to the Vietnamese community outside of her hometown of Boise, Idaho. She remembers watching Trang Đài twirl on Paris by Night in the ʼ80s. "I didn't know she was singing covers," Dinh remembered. "I thought it was just her!" Because Boise's Vietnamese community was so small, she couldn't get her hands on any new wave tapes unless she visited family in California. By the time she came to Seattle in 1992 for school, her love of new wave was a shorthand for friendship.

"It gave me a natural connection to other Vietnamese who were from different places," said Dinh. "We were all connected through this music. And in the beginning, I thought new wave was uniquely Vietnamese!"

In her pursuit of unraveling music in New Wave, Ai gives viewers an intimate look at her own family. At one point, she brings her daughter to meet her estranged mother in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There, we see grandmother and granddaughter connect for the first time, and Ai gives space to her mother to tell her side of the story. Though the documentary started as an exploration of the Vietnamese American music community in the ʼ80s, Ai built it into an affecting portrait of her community, wading through the emotional wreckage and displacement following the end of the Vietnam War.

"The atrocities that happened in Vietnam aren't very different from what's happening in Gaza. There is literally not a single Vietnamese person who has not been devastated in this, whether their lives being completely lost or emotionally, mentally [affected] for generations," said Ai. "So to have a little reprieve — like a little bop or seeing a cute girl or guy at a garage party — means I could feel something else outside of my home, outside of what happened to us … They listened to this music, it was cool, and they found each other."

"New Wave" is screening at the Rainier Arts Center on May 29 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. Director Elizabeth Ai, Thanh Tan, and Martin Tran will participate in a Q&A after the screening.