Thang Nguyen 555

Early on in life, I heard French spoken as French colonial influence was waning.

Then of course our native language, Vietnamese.

By 1965, I began to hear helicopters, the humming of US Army jeeps fighting for right of way over horse carriages. Not to mention those Army’s C rations, like an opened cinnamon cake (those can- openers last forever – credits to the procurement department at the Pentagon).

From there, the sound of violin (Chopin) from my brother and guitar from my neighbor (My Sweet Lord) all mashed up with increasingly more frequent sounds of one-string band as our neighbor returned from the front in a flag-draped casket. Can’t help but putting on “Reflections of my life” when I heard animal-like shrieks for three whole days.

I took my first flight to Quy Nhon with my mom. We went to bury my niece who died pre-mature. That night was my first time exposed to the war front, with sounds of AK-47 raining down from the mountain, and M16 returning fires from the base, where my brother, a medic was pulling his tour of duty.

Not all sounds from my youth were war-related – except for those rubber-sandals stumping on tin roof (urban VCs got chased by police who shot them up with Colt 45’s.) That year (Tet 68) I heard a mix of gun battles and firecrackers in downtown Saigon, where Colonel Loan executed a VC terrorist point-blank.

I have seen a lot of running away from the ATM’s in my lifetime. Once during the evacuation in 1975, and the other, at Three-Miles-Island in 1979.

People in panic, people in motion. Life? both stability and uncertainty. People take side, people change side and people just be there (like Peter Sellers in “Being There”). The sound of Buddhist monks protesting, of tear gas (1963) canisters and of combustible karosene that incinerated the “burning monk”. Then, unmistakably, the sound of the British Invasion (“Imagine all the people”). But one particular sound I haven’t heard of late, and that’s “I love you” in my native tongue. I grew up hearing a lot of “Je t’aime” from Charles Aznavour (Et pourtant, je t’aime que toi, Et pourtant) Sylvie Vartan (Tour les garçons and les filles), and French idols: Johnny Halliday and Alain Delon.

Before I knew what had transpired, I was transported into a completely different “sound studio”, from man-eats-dog to dog-eats-dog world, where people call each other the “N” words, the “F” words and everything in between. It feels as if we had lost our way (Do you you know the way to San Jose).

Civilization, globalization and its discontent. I wouldn’t know where to begin to compare today’s sounds against the backdrop of the sounds from my youth (the ping, the ring, the fire alarm, the Amber alert etc….) So I watched “A Star is Born” , both versions, 4 decades apart.

And sure enough, I found what I was looking for: the sound in my head, and the sound outside of my head, co-exist but not co-locate ; on completely different tracks: like analog vs digital: each reflects an era and an ethos, an attitude and aspiration. Those sounds instantly transport us back to a time and a place, unmistakably. But the scariest of all, as we all know, is “the sound of silence”.

Go to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. near the reflecting pool, where you can sure relate to the sounds from my youth, my friends’ – of the many who shouted “Hell No, We won’t go” (or those who served, wounded and back to unwelcome parties). And “echoed in a well” of (an eerie) silence. “And the people bow and pray, ten thousands people maybe more”.