Marie’s Story
By Marie Nguyen
Some kind of headline?
I was born in Saigon and grew up there until I was five. My parents are both from the central part of Vietnam. My father was held prisoner during the war because of his religion. My grandmother (on my mother's side) and most of her children were refugees. They left Vietnam as boat people and relocated to California. My mother failed to escape and remained in Vietnam until my grandmother sponsored our family to the US. My mother went from being a doctor in Vietnam to working blue collar jobs as we tried to make ends meet.
Growing up as a poor immigrant shaped much of my perspective as a producer and artist. The themes that I find myself questioning - ones of identity, class, war, familial love, power, racism and sexism - stem from my experiences assimilating to a Western world and trying to reconcile a fractured identity. This divide is something I have always tried to explore in my writing, as an Eastern artist trained and working in a Western context. It is important that I find stories with nuance and duality. My personal perspective on morality and violence, especially in storytelling, comes from inherited war trauma.
As an immigrant, I am especially critical of language and its authentic use in my personal writing. I wasn't able to read and write English at grade level until I was ten. Storytelling has been the only way I've really known how to navigate the world. When I was young, I would go to the library and find films to watch, mostly as a means to learn English. This is where my love of cinema and television began. The rest, as they say, is history.