Daughter from Danang

I just want to note that, from my view and contrary to what many of the previous posts suggest, Heidi's family did not see her as a dollar sign. The Vietnamese are very straightforward when it comes to money and family. I was most surprised at Heidi's reaction. Someone should have guided her and helped her understand before she met with her family. She should have done some research on the Vietnamese culture as should have her family with western culture. I enjoyed the movie as it portrays how vastly different our cultures are and how we can easily misunderstand each other.

I lived in Vietnam for about 9 months and have been asked for financial help just as Heidi was. I however didn't cry hysterically as I understood why I was being asked. Whenever friends or in-laws asked for money, I jokingly explained that I really could not afford it. Mind you, I was only asked by a few people.. I explained how life is far more expensive in the west and how a westerner could find such a question offensive. In turn they explained to me their reasoning. We didn't make any rash judgments and because of it, we left the incident more aware, experienced, and as friends.

Heidi needed guidance in understanding the difference in cultures because she was obviously not prepared to meet with her family. Based on what I gathered from the movie, growing up, Heidi seemed to have been closed off from the world. I feel that she needs guidance in life and not only in Vietnam. I don't mean to judge her as I could be wrong; I only know what the documentary offered.

I just saw this movie, it was so difficult and emotional. I was so dismayed and touched by the footage of these children being separated from their Vietnamese mothers. How heart-wrenching it was to watch and I just thank God most of us will never be in that situation.

The warmth and affection Heidi received from her Vietnamese family was very endearing. I have to wonder if she was not at all coached that she would be hit up for money, she seemed so shocked. I also don't want to judge her because I will never be in her situation. Such little monetary support would mean so much to her family. 100 bucks here and there would really improve their comfort. I realize she is not a wealthy woman and is trying to raise her own family and she has a lifestyle to maintain.

I wish she would reach out with clear boundaries to her Vietnamese family. I just think she got overwhelmed and instead of trying to figure out how to work through it she just decided to ignore it.

Just like Heidi wasn't prepared for the way she was treated in Vietnam, I wasn't prepared for watching this emotionally violent documentary. I expected a "good feeling" documentary, showing what could be perceived as some kind of reconciliation between USA and Vietnam, by the public.. How can a daughter-finds-back-her-mother ever turn our to be a sad story? I had better braced myself.

The first moments of the reunion, at the airport, already start to show a distance between the mother and daughter. Such violent emotions.. You can feel the daughter shying away. I was thinking that the documentary would hide the bad stuff and only focus on superficial emotions. It did not, and that's why it's such a great documentary.

First off, it doesn't present a negative view of Americans nor Vietnamese. It just shows a few individuals from those two cultures, without attempting to make them look bad or worse. Heidi is not the typical American girl and neither is her mother the typical Vietnamese mother. It isn't any more Vietnamese than American to have strong emotions like Mai and pour out every time. Such characters exist in both cultures. Just watch Oprah and Dr. Phil and you'll see lots of crying and overreacting. As a matter of fact, many Vietnamese consider improper the display of strong emotions in public.

Now this being said, the movie shows what culture shock is all about.

Heidi has been raised in America, where bread is white and meat comes in burgers. She can't stand the smell of fresh fish in a hot market. She can't stand being in Vietnam for so long, with such heat, humidity, without her commodities. Many Americans and Europeans would feel just the same. To show it on film is not a stab at American culture or a display of American egocentricity. It is a mere fact of life : if you grow up in comfort, even at the expense of freshness and excitement, it is hard to give it up.

On the other hand, the whole "fillial obligation" thing in Vietnam is real, but it is not just about the money. I don't think Heidi was crying because she was being asked money, but rather because she saw them clinging desperately at her as if she were a Saviour. No one can handle that kind of emotional pressure, combined with all the extra attention she kept getting. However, she just needed say No and they backed off.

I think that the two sides need to work a little to make this a better relationship. I wonder how the viewing of this movie was perceived by both parties. It must be terribly difficult for them to watch.

Any documentary that keeps me glued to the set (I saw "Daughter from Danang" on PBS television) and can provoke compassion, delight, consternation, embarrassment, anger, admiration, and deep chagrin, is, to my mind, a great documentary.

"Daughter from Danang" fits that description. Regardless of my personal reaction to the players in this particular true-life drama, I will never see human relationships in quite the same way again. I'd challenge anybody to see it and come away indifferent.

A masterwork.

I particularly liked John Petrakis's Tribune review where he writes in bold print: "not recommended for young children." There is no blood, no violence, no profanity, but this rating is due to the high emotional content. You have to search through your vocabulary for superlatives here, featured throughout are extraordinary glimpses of faces framed in their own natural environment, the underlying original music is superb and perfectly balanced, there is a wonderful golden-orange sunrise on a quiet riverbank following her first night in Vietnam where the camera finds a dragonfly resting atop the highest leaf, when her Vietnamese childhood memories return they appear to be almost sketched onto a canvas in an impressionistic blur, all beautifully layered together.

This film begins in 1975 as the Vietnam War was ending with Operation Babylift, (an event which, on it's own, is worthy of it's own documentary, particularly the newsreel footage seen here of an American social worker attempting to convince Vietnamese women to send their children to the USA under the guise of an airlift for war orphans), when a 7 year old Amerasian girl is separated from her family and sent to the USA for adoption, supposedly for her betterment, and she becomes `101% Americanized.' Yet in her 20's, when she yearns to meet her real mother, she discovers her mother feels the same way about missing her, so after 22 years of separation, she travels back to Vietnam in what turns out to be one incredible re-unification, beautifully capturing unanticipated depths of an experience that even the filmmakers could never have imagined. Both the mother and daughter are immensely appealing and couldn't express more genuine affection, but both are overwhelmed and completely flabbergasted by the personal and historical abyss that exists between them, leaving them both reeling, as if stepping on a land mine, from the unseen, misunderstood emotional scars left behind from the aftermath of the war. What starts out as a well-meaning attempt to wipe away bad childhood memories only ends up compounded with still more complicated, bad adult memories. One irony here is that her Vietnamese name means `united.' Sometimes in a documentary, the most difficult decision is to let the cameras continue to roll when you know you are intruding into the personal regions of someone's private anguish. But here, it is the best part of the film – a heart-wrenching, emotional jolt for the whole world to see that is simply unforgettable. What this film has to say about love, that it is so much more than just saying words, that sometimes you are called upon to demonstrate your love with deeds, is indescribable.

There may be an inclination to consider the girl too naive and spoiled and to disregard her out of hand. But I would urge people to reconsider this view, as she was unexplainably (to her) separated from her own family, raised instead by a single mother who eventually had no use for her at all, was also raised in one of the more racially intolerant communities in America, which might explain why she was so unprepared emotionally to handle something as simple as affection, a family notion completely alien to her, and which she found, at the time, completely suffocating. ("Get away from me!") Is it any wonder that she might prefer the more emotionally distant relationship with her adopted American family, as that's all she really knows? It should also be viewed in another perspective, as the translator reminded her, that the family pressure and the cultural differences would diminish the longer she stayed. Contrarily, by shortening her visit, which she herself chose, she put even more pressure on herself and her Vietnamese family to finalize what was missing for 22 years into one final day - a sheer impossibility. From a Vietnamese perspective, they were simply trying to include her, permanently, as a member of the family, not just in words, but in deeds.

But what I found so compelling in this girl, who was born in Vietnam, was that she really had no more sensitivity or understanding of Vietnam than the US government, namely none, which certainly demonstrates how easily we can learn to drop bombs on one another, and how inadvertently, by being so Americanized, besides living in material comfort, she was also taught the arrogance and narrow-mindedness of our American values when it comes to understanding the importance or significance of cultures from other nations. What have we learned since Vietnam? Look at our Government in action today, and the contempt we show to other nations unless they agree with us in lock step. What I found so compelling about this girl is how she represents, through no fault of her own, a new image of the ugly American, that looks different but thinks so much like the old image, how little progress we've made on that front, and how far we have to go.