My aunt Co Nhung took me to see a Vietnamese contemporary play at Idecafe, a French cultural center in Saigon. The play was called Cam On Minh Da Yeu Em.
The story opens with a couple of grandparents and a young couple. The grandparents appear happy in their old age, and the young couple is happy in love. The grandmother and looks at the audience and says, “Don’t mind this happy couple [points at the young couple], just leave them alone. You know we weren’t always this happy.”
The curtains open to a scene of a living room. The husband/father is a successful C.E.O of a company. The wife/mother is a housewife, and pregnant. The husband’s son from a previous marriage lives in the house. The wife’s daughter, also from a pervious marriage lives there as well. So do the two grandparents met earlier. The house is happy and excited for the new baby.
Then one day, someone in the husbands company leaves a cigarette burning and the whole building burns down. That same day, the wife goes to the doctor for her routine pregnancy check-up and finds that she has breast cancer. Either she dies for the baby, or the baby dies for her.
The husband doesn’t want to tell the wife about the company because he’s afraid the news will put stressed on the pregnancy. The wife doesn’t want to tell the husband about her tumor because she’s afraid the news will put stress on the company. However, she is emotionally distressed and this causes the couple to continually fight, and this caused stress on the family. The wife decides she wants a divorce.
One day the wife goes out and the rest of the family looks through her bag. They find medical results and x-rays of her breasts. The husband rushes to the doctor’s house to demand an explanation. The doctor is a weirdo, she lives alone with giant doll children and puppets. She tells the husband, “So, what do you want me to tell you? That everything’s going to be okay? Either your kid will die, or your wife. The decision is up to your wife, that’s all I have to tell you.” The husband replies, “How can you be so evil?” Doc replies, “When I was pregnant, I chose to loose the baby, look at me now.” Then she laughs.
The wife walks in to see the doctor. The husband looks at his wife and says, “Why didn’t you tell me?” The wife replies, “I just didn’t know what to say. I knew it would hurt you.” The husband says, “Maybe you should loose the baby, it doesn’t know anything, then we can be happy again.” The wife shrieks, “No! Don’t ask me to loose my baby!”
Intermission.
When the curtains open again, the wife has given birth to the baby and lays dying in the hospital. She makes recordings for the baby to hear about lessons in life, being a woman, and how much she wishes she could be there to raise her. The hospital custodian comes in and he complains about his wife and him don’t have enough money to raise his children and pets. The wife in bed askes him what his wife does. He tells her his wife sells sticky rice. She tells him that she will buy enough sticky rice for all of the sick people in the hospital. The custodian is thrilled. Then, she says, “Because I wish I could stay alive and have no money, but be with my husband and children.”
The custodian leaves and the husband comes in. The husband tells his wife that she is going to be okay because they are going to Singapore for surgery. She tells him, “Please, don’t say things like that. You know, I’m tried of calling each other ‘Anh’ and ‘Em’.” The husband askes, “What are you saying?” She says, “I want us to call each other ‘Minh’. It just sounds so soft, tender, and closer.” [In Vietnamese, the common way for couples to address each other is calling the male ‘Anh’ and the female ‘Em’. ‘Minh’ is another way to address yourself, but it also means body.]
In the next scene, the wife has died, and the family is seen in the living room playing with the new baby, now a toddler. The young couple that we met at the beginning of the play turns out to be the husband’s son and the wife’s daughter. They run around the house and flirt with each other.
The grandfather is going through old things and finds mysterious tapes. He plays them and the family finds out that theses are the tapes the wife had made for her baby before she passed. On one of the recordings the wife says, “Oh child, when you turn 13 you will come to point in your life when you suddenly bleed. Don’t be a afraid this is a natural step to becoming a woman. Please ask your sister for guidance…” The recording goes on and the father picks up the tape player and cries, “Minh Oi!” (“Oh, Minh!”)
Curtain closes.
