Nguyen Kim Hong comes from Dong Thap Province in Vietnam, where her family were farmers and agricultural produce traders. They were making ends meet, but to help lighten the load on the family, Nguyen dropped out of school after completing fifth grade and went to work in the fields.

Nguyen’s warmth and empathy enable her to gain her subjects’ trust and get them to open their hearts. The photo at left shows her interacting with Nguyen Thi Be Hai, a subject of one of her documentaries. (photos by Jimmy Lin)

Broken transnational marriage

Nguyen has nine siblings, but the male chauvinism and patriarchal attitudes run pretty deep in her family. Innocent, hard-working Nguyen didn’t feel valued by her family members, and her frustrations pushed her to think about leaving home. She heard that other women in the village who had moved to Taiwan as “immigrant brides” were doing well there. Through an agent, she negotiated her own marriage. At 21 and somewhat clueless, she traveled to Taiwan, embarking on a journey that would take her through many more twists and turns of fate.

Married and living in Taiwan, Nguyen’s life was far from what she had imagined. Her husband gambled, fell into debt, and beat her. The marriage lasted eight years. She firmly believes that she worked at the marriage and did all she could to be a good wife and daughter-in-law. But she was never truly accepted by her husband’s family, so she gave up and boldly ended the marriage to make a life on her own.

Nguyen’s warmth and empathy enable her to gain her subjects’ trust and get them to open their hearts. The photo at left shows her interacting with Nguyen Thi Be Hai, a subject of one of her documentaries. (photos by Jimmy Lin)

Here comes the sun

After getting divorced, Nguyen had to care for her child as a single parent and work to make ends meet. Her life was difficult. Sometimes she could only eat one meal a day. At one point she had thoughts of suicide but felt that just as she had fallen, she could also pull herself up. She thus slowly got on her feet, attending self-help courses. She also volunteered for the Changhua New Immigrants Association, giving it her all.

She met her current husband Tsai Tsung-lung at a film seminar. Both divorcees, they are able to support each other in their lives. Nguyen says that unlike her former husband, Tsai was willing to help her out, even though he wasn’t then family. After a few months the two of them decided to get together. Meeting Tsai she regards as a gift from Heaven. It prompts her to repeat her favorite Vietnamese saying: “After rain, the sun comes out.” And right now she is basking in the sunshine.    

Out/Marriage was nominated for the best documentary prize at the 2013 Taipei Film Festival. The photo shows Nguyen (right) accepting a certificate of nomination from the festival’s chair, Sylvia Chang.

Using video to tell stories

Tsai is an assistant professor of communications at National Chung Cheng University, and it is thanks to him that Nguyen began to film Out/Marriage. Nguyen says that she has from time to time discovered that old friends have divorced as well. Their stories prompted her to make the documentary.

Out/Marriage is informed by Nguyen’s own experiences. Like her, the leading characters have experienced a failed marriage. Tsai says that he gave the camera to Nguyen because she would—as a result of her gender, her language abilities and her own personal history—be better able to get her subjects to open up. She put her own story into the film as well. The point of view shifts between the director and her interviewees. The film follows the interactions and heartfelt revelations of four women, and there are many scenes that a male director simply wouldn’t have been able to capture. Because of ethnic stereotypes in society, when marriages between immigrant women and Taiwanese men fail, most blame the women. Consequently, Nguyen hopes to use the camera to change how people think about these “mail-order brides.” “I didn’t come here because I wanted money,” she says. “What I wanted was to be happy.”

Lovely Strangers is a video that Nguyen and Tsai worked on together. It describes Vietnamese migrant workers who have illegally changed jobs while in Taiwan. Unscrupulous Vietnamese middleman took large introduction fees from them. Despite working overtime, their earnings were not enough to support themselves, so eventually they had no choice but to leave their designated workplaces for other employment. During shooting, some of the workers were deported. As a consequence, Nguyen was the subject of a lot of unwarranted gossip. The experience was draining and caused her to suspend shooting for a year. Eventually, she got her mojo back and once again began to investigate the situations of deported workers. In order to preserve the trust of these migrant workers, the film hasn’t been publicly released, and they plan to screen it only at schools and at film festivals. They’re quite insistent about that.

Behind the camera, Nguyen quietly focuses on the lives of her subjects.

A progressive and fulfilling life

Shooting Out/Marriage required outlays of money, and Tsai encouraged Nguyen to apply for a Cloud Gate Wanderer grant. She drew up her own proposal, created a PowerPoint presentation, and went to the first interview of her life. Nguyen has always lacked self-confidence, and Cloud Gate not only gave her a grant—it also greatly boosted her self-esteem by awarding her the first Wanderer grant ever given to a “new immigrant.”

Shooting documentaries has been challenging for Nguyen. She has had to learn how to communicate with her subjects, face large groups of people, make connections, and build trust. In the course of her work, leading subjects of her documentaries have pulled out, and she has had to suffer through all manner of misunderstandings and unfounded rumors. She had never expected that her life would lead in this direction. She used to be a very competitive woman, always alone and ruminating with no-one to confide in. But the new Nguyen, since she met Tsai, is gentler, more understanding about life, and better able to cut herself some slack.

On the day we interviewed Nguyen, we asked her to wear a traditional ao dai for the photo shoot. Off to the side, Tsai documented the whole thing, taking photos with his cell phone. He said that when he first met Nguyen, she was in bad shape and never laughed. Now she’s all smiles. He wants to shoot more photographs of her to hold on to. Nguyen frequently has photos printed and puts them into albums. She says that this way when they get older they can look back on the good times they’ve had together. Nguyen forms a heart shape with her hands and makes a gesture of giving the heart to Tsai. At this point she laughs with carefree joy.

Having endured dark days of divorce after falling victim to domestic abuse, Nguyen Kim Hong, seen here in a traditional Vietnamese ao dai, has emerged bright eyed and brimming with self-confidence. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

So much more to do

Apart from working as a director, Nguyen is trying different things. To take some of the load off her husband, she is learning to drive. She is a host of the public television show Far and Away and goes overseas to track down the backstories of the “new immigrants” she interviews. She is designing a curriculum for teaching Southeast-Asian “mother tongues” to the children of immigrants in Taiwan’s schools, as well as teaching children to sing Vietnamese folk songs. She has helped to curate a migrant workers’ film festival in Yunlin. Under the auspices of an organization serving immigrants, she goes into communities to hold activities that allow her to personally communicate with the elders there and convey their concerns. Nguyen says there is so much she wants to do. She wants to go on making documentaries and to write a book that tells immigrant women’s stories. And she’s putting short clips of her observations onto PeoPo, a citizen journalism website affiliated with public television, so as to share them with other people.

As for those immigrants still having a rough go of it, encountering setbacks and frustrations, Nguyen asks them simply not to give up their right to happiness. “This is a life lesson that Heaven is giving you. Trust that you will eventually see sunny days.” This earnest exhortation has roots in Nguyen’s own experiences.

Nguyen and her husband Tsai Tsung-lung together curated a film festival in Yunlin focusing on migrant workers. At its opening, she and her daughter wore traditional Vietnamese ao dai. Her father happened to be in Taiwan for a visit, so they were able to take a family photo as a keepsake of the occasion.

A Cloud Gate Wanderer grant helped support Nguyen as she went to Vietnam to shoot Out/Marriage. She is the first “new immigrant” to win one of these grants.