Vu Pham, an independent filmmaker based in Portland, is working on a documentary film about his mother’s murder, which took place when he was a young child.
Pham and his mother fled Vietnam by boat in 1981. The film, Sea Rose Ashes, explores Pham’s journey learning more about his mother’s past and making efforts to take restorative justice pathways with her murderer. Pham joins us to discuss his journey and his current film.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. After a career making fiction films, the independent Portland-based filmmaker Vu Pham has spent the last three years working on a documentary. It is an intensely personal project. Pham and his mother fled Vietnam by boat in 1981. They made a new home in the Portland area. But a year and a half after they arrived, when Pham was only seven years old, his mother was murdered. Pham’s documentary in progress explores his journey to learn more about his mother’s past and to try to forge a restorative justice relationship with her murderer. Vu Pham was featured recently on OPB’s Oregon Art Beat, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Vu Pham: Thank you very much for having me.
Miller: Even though you’ve spent most of your life in Oregon, the film that you’re currently working on, I understand, was sort of born in Alaska. What brought you to Alaska in March of 2020?
Pham: Well, from the fallout of a personal relationship, a heartache situation that I found myself in, a breakup, in other words, I decided to self-exile to Juneau, Alaska. Unfortunately for me, my timing was a little off. I flew to Juneau, Alaska on March 17, 2020, exactly the day that Governor Dunleavy shut down the entire state because of the pandemic. I discovered that I was a stranger in a strange land in a very strange time, living in a closet in this apartment, essentially. And I had a lot of time to reflect and think about a great many things that were important in my life, and my mother’s past and my past were among them.
Miller: Had you always planned to make a movie about your mother’s past?
Pham: No, I actually had not thought about making a film about my mother. I think that my mother’s life and her experiences and her influence on me obviously became a part of my films. They were sort of a character, you could say, of my narrative structures, my personal struggles. To make sense of her life and her death were also a very prominent character of the narrative structures of my films as well. But explicitly, I’d never considered it. I sort of fantasized at some point down the road in a feature film that perhaps maybe more literal autobiographical elements of my life might actually make it on screen.
Miller: So what changed? When did you decide this – I’m making a full-length documentary about my life and my mother’s life?
Pham: What changed for me was that on these long, aimless walks through the empty streets of Juneau, and along the silent boardwalks, I was turning over some personal emotional heartache, as I had said, and in doing so, I ran right up against my mother’s own past and her tragic life; namely, her tragic love story. Which really, she was haunted by a series of romantic relationships that you could say at the heart of it were violent men of war.
And when I found myself on a precipice where I, for the first time in my life, had considered that I might actually hurt myself, might actually kill myself because of the emotional turmoil that I was in, I knew that there was a door there that I needed to open into my past, directly into my mother’s life. Because I was terrified that I somehow was going to be condemned to repeat the tragic patterns of life that had taken hers. And so, at that moment when I realized that I needed to take back the agency that had been stolen from me, there was only one way to do that, and that was to speak to the man that took her life.
As I was getting ready to leave Juneau, Alaska, I knew that when I returned to Portland, I would begin the search for the man that was responsible for her death. And with that came my own passions to be able to take this story of personal suffering, put it into a narrative form, and transform it into something that could be meaningful and useful for others.
Miller: You ended up getting involved in a restorative justice program. I feel like plenty of people have heard those words – restorative justice – but may not have direct experience with what it actually means in practice. So, what did it entail for you?
Pham: Restorative justice is a philosophy and a process that focuses on developing meaningful accountability from the responsible party, and it does so generally, and in the most ideal setting, by bringing the responsible party and the harmed party together in some kind of facilitated productive dialogue.
Now, for me personally, it’s a little more complicated than that. And while that essential framework is what I am in the process of developing, for me, it is to simply be able to stand, sit in front, look at the individual that was responsible for my mother’s death and be able to see that there was some flicker of recognition in his eyes that would acknowledge that the man standing before him today is essentially the same boy that was there when he took my mother’s life.
And something about that essential recognition is so deeply necessary and so deeply meaningful for me, that, were there to be anything else more sophisticated than that, more evolved than that, where there might be some moral redemption, some reconciliation, I would say that is beyond a win and that is sort of something beyond the moon. But for me, it is to simply be able to have him acknowledge my existence as a human being today.
Miller: But you haven’t gotten that yet, am I right?
Pham: That’s correct.
Miller: My understanding is that you eventually wrote a series of letters to the man who killed your mother. Do you feel comfortable giving us a sense for what you wrote?
Pham: Yes. I feel that the series of letters that I wrote were letters that were grounded in an openness and a universal compassion and a graciousness in which I simply told him that, should we have the chance of meeting, that I would, as I do now, see him simply as another man who was born into this world, like myself, who did not choose the tides of history that precipitated him, and that we would be able to speak as two human beings. And my hope was simply to be able to find some sense of understanding, some amount of healing and closure that could possibly happen from that.
Miller: How much of your own sense of the closure you’re seeking… Maybe closure is not the right word, but next steps in the evolution of your understanding of your own life and the end of your mother’s life… How much of that is dependent on a response, an acknowledgement from this man, and how much do you think can come from you, internally? I’m asking because so far he hasn’t responded, and let’s say that he doesn’t. I’m wondering how much you can get without him?
Pham: I think that’s a great question. It’s one that I suppose I’ll try to delicately unpack, because there is a part of me that deeply yearns and depends on his response, and that part of me is the one that is entirely driven by ego, and entirely driven by this rather single dimensional self, that certainly just views his desires as an extension of will and the materialization of his expectations to be the natural outcome of his will. There’s that side of me, and that is an amalgamate of both ambition and drive.
But there’s another side of me that knows, at bottom, the process itself, of reaching out, of writing these letters, of reflection, of storytelling and filmmaking, can generate the sort of redemption that I want in an oblique way. In a way that gives me some scaffolding to climb, some road to walk, that I guess allows me, like you said, not necessarily closure, but perhaps maybe some process that tells me
I’ll be able to still have healing and purpose and meaning for something that I did not then control, and cannot presently control.
Miller: As part of this process for this documentary, you brought your mother’s remains back to Vietnam. Why did you make that choice?
Pham: It was a hard decision. I’ll say that. It was a very, very hard decision. In the process of trying to understand my past and my mother’s past, I reconnected with my aunt in Vietnam, someone who I had not seen or spoken to since the day that we fled Vietnam in 1981. And I think, to her fundamental character of just directness and kind of, enterprising and, how do I say this? Sort of like an almost entrepreneurial spirit that she has, she simply just saw what she personally wanted. And in several months of video chats, she just popped the question out of the blue and said, hey, you know, something I’ve been thinking about is, are you able to exhume your mother’s remains and cremate her and bring her ashes back to Vietnam?
I mean, I was gobsmacked by this request. I’m essentially a Western-minded American who has no religious framings and ancestral worship framings around my mother’s remains or her “spirit.” And so I was initially very discomforted by the rather macabre element of this idea. The last thing I wanted to do was to exhume my mother’s remains. But after giving it some thought and speaking with my partner Ned about it, I realized that this would have been something my mother would have wanted for herself.
And so, through the generosity of a facilitator from an organization called the Center for Trauma Support Services, she helped me to apply for Crime Victims’ Compensation with the Department of Justice in the state of Oregon, and then they gave me the financial backing to go through this process. And so, in the fall of 2024, I returned to Vietnam with my mother’s ashes for the first time since I had left.
Miller: You’ve said in the past that despite the traumas you have endured, you consider yourself the luckiest human alive. What do you mean by that?
Pham: Yeah, you must be picking through some old articles...
Miller: Yeah.
Pham: I’m glad you did your research because that’s a great quote for something that I really do feel is the essential message of my film, which is,
Miller: Still?
Pham: Yes, one of peace and hope because I can say with near absolute certainty that for many people who’ve been on the same road as me, to have experienced a rather complex intersection of traumas such as I, that they have not done so well for themselves. They have been afflicted by all manner of continuing terrible luck and seem to live in a world that lacks the love and support that I have. And they don’t have the kind of process, the type of path that allows them to creatively engage in social cooperation with the world in order to tell stories that are personally meaningful to them.
And because I am a person that has been given these opportunities, I do feel for where I came from, which almost sometimes feels to me as if I’ve climbed out of the muds at the bottom of the Mekong River where I recently was, and essentially climbed to a place where I have this world before me. I do feel that in that sense, I am the luckiest man that I know.
Miller: Vu Pham, thanks very much.
Pham: Thank you very much.
Miller: Vu Pham is an independent filmmaker and writer based in Portland.
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