Authentic yet Parochial: Legal and Historical Approach of the Vietnam War through Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone

Abstract

This paper offers a critical approach to Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone (2015), a play that presents an alternative view of the Vietnam War, from a legal and historical perspective. In American popular culture, the Vietnam War has often been portrayed as the backdrop of chaotic experiences faced by American individuals during that period, especially white American soldiers. Often, the representation of these experiences conveyed condemning messages about the war. In contrast, in Vietgone, the story unfolds from the perspective of Vietnamese refugees, providing alternative views on the war based on the experiences of the playwright’s parents. This alternative perspective stresses the functional aspects of the war as experienced by the refugees. However, Nguyen’s representation of the war falls short of legal and historical accuracy. First, his depiction of the war based on his parents’ experiences overlooks how problematic the war was in terms of international law, considering its development into an international war from an internal conflict and the deliberate misinterpretation of collective self-defense as stated in the UN Charter. Second, the play neglects US leverage on the war before the US military intervention in 1965. Further, it fails to represent the viewpoints of those who failed to obtain granted refugee or humanitarian protection. This paper concludes that as these issues are eclipsed by comedic nature of the play, such an attempt can be construed as twenty-first-century propaganda that justifies the war.