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Boat People: Persistence of

Vision
By Justin Chang
ESSAYS — FEB 22, 2022

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T he first line we hear in Boat People is a command—“Don’t look at the

camera”—spoken to a group of schoolchildren in 1978 Vietnam. They’re
beautiful, these children, beaming in their crisp white shirts and red scarves as
they sing the praises of Ho Chi Minh and run a relay race through a watermelon
patch. The camera they’re not supposed to look at is being operated by Shiomi
Akutagawa (George Lam), a Japanese photojournalist who’s visiting the country
as a guest of the Communist government. Its hope is that he’ll help show the
world the joy and prosperity of life in Vietnam’s New Economic Zones, regions of
undeveloped countryside to which hundreds of thousands have been relocated
by the regime. It is, of course, a seductive lie: days later, Akutagawa will slip back
into this zone, this time without his camera, and see the stark truth of how these
children, no longer smiling or singing, really live.

Well before it delivers that twist of the knife, Boat People (1982)—the fourth
feature by Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, and the third entry in her celebrated
“Vietnam trilogy”—puts us on high alert. “Don’t look at the camera,” an order
meant to deflect children’s attention, has the exact countereffect of inviting the
audience’s scrutiny. Already during this early visit, it’s clear that these idyllic
sights have been orchestrated for Akutagawa’s benefit, even if he may not yet
grasp the full scope of what is being hidden. “I don’t want things arranged for
me,” he says early on, requesting the cultural bureau’s permission to wander off
on his own. And so we follow him into the streets of Da Nang, where signs
everywhere extol values like freedom and independence, but the injustices he
witnesses—petty thefts and deadly explosions, a family evicted and loaded into
the back of a police truck, strong-bodied men rounded up in crowded
marketplaces and dragged away—tell a radically different story.

Akutagawa learns a great deal about that story through the fast friendship he
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forms with Cam Nuong (Season Ma), a plucky fourteen-year-old who spends her
days scavenging for food for her two younger brothers and their sickly mother
(Hao Jia-ling). The journalist’s fate also becomes entwined with that of To Minh
(Andy Lau), a prisoner in a labor camp who, like more than a few of his
countrymen, is desperately eyeing the exits. With quickening momentum and
mounting fury, Boat People lays bare the conditions—poverty, enslavement, the
everyday threat of violence and execution—that spurred hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese to flee after the fall of Saigon. Between 1975 and 1995, they set out
in rickety, overcrowded boats bound for destinations like Malaysia, Singapore,
Thailand, and Hong Kong. Many perished at sea; those who survived found their
lives changed forever, haunted by memories of what they’d left behind and
overwhelmed by what awaited them in their not-always-welcoming new homes.

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Boat People
Ann Hui

These hardships struck a chord with Hui, a London Film School graduate and
former assistant to the legendary King Hu who began directing dramas and short
documentaries for Hong Kong television in the seventies. During this time, she
conducted extensive interviews with local refugees and melded their stories into
three distinct, narratively unconnected works, starting with an hour-long film
released as an episode of the drama series Below the Lion Rock. She followed that
with a 1981 feature, The Story of Woo Viet, a crime drama starring Chow Yun-fat
as a refugee adrift in Hong Kong and the Philippines. Next came Boat
People, which, despite its title (the original name of this largely Cantonese-
language film, Tau ban no hoi, translates as “into the raging sea”), addresses these
perilous sea crossings more briefly than its predecessors do. The last entry in
Hui’s migration-focused trilogy is the one that cuts directly, in reverse, to the
origins of its subject.

Along with her first two features—the ripped-from-the-headlines murder

mystery The Secret (1979) and the Cantonese-opera-themed ghost story The
Spooky Bunch (1980)—the Vietnam trilogy announced Hui as one of the major
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emerging talents of the Hong Kong New Wave. Four decades later, despite being
one of Hong Kong’s most prolific and decorated filmmakers, she still isn’t as
widely recognized outside Asia as some of her flashier New Wave
contemporaries, from action aesthetes like John Woo and Tsui Hark to that poet
of romantic melancholy Wong Kar Wai. That speaks to a certain self-effacing
versatility in Hui’s work, a resistance to easy categorization as either stylist or
storyteller. What do we first think of when we scan the nearly thirty features Hui
has directed? For some, the obvious answer may be humanism, an overused term
that nonetheless finds near-perfect expression in her moving domestic
dramas The Way We Are (2008) and A Simple Life (2011). But what of the
darkness and violence at play in true-crime stories such as The Secret and Night
and Fog (2009)? Or the complexities of national identity and cultural
displacement she explores in her semi-autobiographical Song of the Exile (1990)?

All these elements surface in Boat People. More classical in form than her jagged
earlier thrillers, but also boldly dialectical in its balance of documentary-
informed realism and forceful, sweeping melodrama, the film vaulted Hui to a
new level of commercial and critical attention even as it spurred controversy in
all directions. Released in Hong Kong theaters in October 1982, it became a
domestic hit and won five prizes at that year’s Hong Kong Film Awards,
including Best Picture and Best Director. It launched or boosted the careers of
any number of Hui’s collaborators, from actors such as Andy Lau and Season Ma
to her assistant director, Stanley Kwan (with whom she had first worked on The
Story of Woo Viet, and who would go on to become an important feature
filmmaker in his own right). From the beginning, too, it carried an unexpectedly
resonant subtext: for many who saw it, Boat People’s critique of government
oppression seemed to have a great deal to say—none of it good—about not only a
reunified Vietnam but also a Hong Kong just fifteen years away from being
returned to China by the United Kingdom. Decades later and twenty-five years
after the handover, the ongoing Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong’s
prodemocracy protests is one reason the film feels so ripe for rediscovery.

Confusion and anxiety over Boat People’s political messaging tainted its 1983
international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it had originally been

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selected to screen in competition, only to be withdrawn under pressure from the

French Socialist government, which was concerned that such a high-profile
berth for a film so critical of the Vietnamese regime might strain relations with its
former colony. And so the film was quietly (and, given its subject, fittingly)
smuggled into the festival, where it played in an under-the-radar “surprise” slot
that was nonetheless shrewdly calculated for maximum press attention. While
reactions were sharply divided, they were also largely united in their assessment
of the film as both a skillfully made melodrama and something of a blunt political
instrument, though there was plenty of disagreement over precisely whose
politics were being espoused. Left-leaning American critics rejected Boat
People on the basis of what they perceived to be its anti-Communist stance,
dismissing it as simplistic, heavy-handed right-wing propaganda. Meanwhile,
several French critics confronted Hui at her Cannes press conference, claiming
that because she had been granted permission to shoot the film in Mainland
China (namely, Hainan Island and the city of Zhanjiang), her work must be
hopelessly tainted by ongoing Chinese hostilities toward Vietnam.

Hui has long rejected easy political readings of Boat People, describing it as a
human story first and foremost. In a 1983 Film Comment interview with Harlan
Kennedy, she said, “Boat People is a survival story set in a tragic moment in
history. It’s not a propaganda statement against Communism.” She also noted
that, while she had had to submit the script for approval by the Chinese
government, no such anti-Vietnam sentiments were ever dictated or imposed. In
any event, she paid a steep price to shoot the film with Chinese cooperation; the
film was banned in Taiwan, at the time a hugely significant market for Hong
Kong cinema, and eventually in Hong Kong as well, despite its initial commercial
success there. Ironically, after having hosted and supported the production,
China also eventually banned Boat People, claiming the finished film didn’t go far
enough in criticizing the Vietnamese regime. These exhibition woes, many
prompted by reductive ideological readings and misreadings, can’t help but seem
like a grim joke in retrospect: for a while this Vietnam-set, China-shot, Hong
Kong–financed, refugee-focused drama was itself a film without a country.
There’s something doubly fitting about that state of affairs given Hui’s own
splintered sense of national identity, not only as someone born in Manchuria and
raised in Hong Kong but also as the daughter of a Chinese father and a Japanese
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mother. (Her bicultural heritage casts an especially fascinating light on her

decision to tell the story of Boat People from a Japanese photojournalist’s
perspective.)

In any event, the mere fact that the film spurred so much disagreement along
political and national lines should have been a clue that it may have been
advancing a more nuanced argument than those early dismissals suggested.
Decades later, with the various blockades lifted, Boat People looms ever more
impressively as one of Hui’s strongest films. It also seems an indelibly,
unmistakably political work, less for its advancement of any specific movement
or ideology than for its rejection of totalitarianism and its ardent defense of
human rights. Above all, it’s a film that regards the political and the human as
inextricable—and urges us to do the same.

In the early drafts of Chiu Kang-chien’s screenplay, Boat People was more of a
boat-people story. The film originally focused on the prisoner To Minh and his
harrowing escape, but when the logistics of shooting at sea proved too daunting,
Hui hit upon the idea of shifting the focus to a new character, a visiting journalist,
who would bring a unique perspective on the events of the story. The outsider
protagonist who serves as the audience’s point of entry into a little-known
culture can be a moribund cliché, but Hui sidesteps that trap by binding
Akutagawa so closely to the audience as to achieve a kind of complicit
spectatorship, a shared persistence of vision that becomes the movie’s entire
point. With great formal and conceptual rigor, she unites Akutagawa’s camera
with the unseen cameras being used to tell his story (wielded by
cinematographer Wong Chung-gei). In a sense, Akutagawa becomes a camera; he
becomes our eyes and ears.

This self-reflexive conceit is brilliantly established in a 1975-set prologue, which

follows a triumphant Viet Cong military parade through the streets of Da Nang.
Akutagawa’s tiny, white-shirted figure weaves nimbly in and out of the
uniformed procession, taking pictures from an ever-shifting vantage that merges
with our own. But as the camera tracks and pans and Law Wing-fai’s music soars,
something captures Akutagawa’s attention: an injured boy, hobbling down an
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alley on crutches, whom he follows and photographs from behind. The reframing
is quick but revelatory: in just a few seconds, we’ve been made privy to a more
intimate, quietly truthful angle on the celebration Akutagawa is there to
document. From there, the film jumps ahead three years to the photographer’s
1978 school visit, drawing a link between two tragedies—one quiet and mostly
hidden, the other publicized with forced smiles and slogans—in which children
pay the highest price.

Was it Boat People’s unrelenting focus on the suffering of children that led some
critics to recoil, deriding what they perceived as its shameless emotional
manipulations? Hui certainly spares us nothing: not the grisly spectacle of Cam
Nuong and her siblings visiting a godforsaken chicken farm and picking over
freshly executed human corpses for valuables, and not the sight of her brother
Nhac (Wu Shu-jun) foraging for scrap metal and accidentally picking up a live
explosive. But what makes these moments so piercing is the queasily matter-of-
fact detachment of their framing, as if Hui were approximating the view through
Akutagawa’s lens. The effect is to deepen and defamiliarize the melodrama, to
bring a corrosive realism to even the story’s more nakedly sentimental turns.
Movie characters become photography subjects, sometimes framed in distanced
group shots and sometimes in direct close-up, none more unforgettably than
Cam Nuong, whose haunted gaze—peering up at a photograph memorializing
her father, one of countless casualties of the Vietnam War—evokes a great and
terrible absence.

For all this, Boat People isn’t all despair. There’s a delightful, almost Spielbergian
levity to the scenes with Cam Nuong’s younger brothers: Nhac, with his street-
smart hustle and dangling cigarettes, and little Lang (Guo Jun-yi), with his
insatiable appetite for noodles. And Lam and Ma have a marvelous on-screen
rapport as Akutagawa and Cam Nuong, whether he’s photographing her in the
rain, in the movie’s most blissfully carefree interlude, or helping her chase a thief
before giving up with a laugh and a shrug. What makes the film so hard to pin
down is precisely this modulation of horror and uplift, the daily navigation of
dread and hope in a society still capable of presenting a false front to the world.
Until his fate is sealed in the astoundingly grim finale, Akutagawa seldom appears
to be in any real danger from a government whose representatives keep trying to
cajole him into submission.
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The men and women Akutagawa spends his time with are not so fortunate. Cam
Nuong’s mother, racked with illness, grief, and shame at having had to work as a
prostitute, is doomed from the moment this journalist invades her home. (The
film is hardly blind to the ways in which Akutagawa’s presence can make a bad
situation demonstrably worse.) To is doomed, too—if not by the buried land
mines he spends his days defusing then by his attempts to secure safe passage for
himself and a friend on a refugee boat, paving the way for the movie’s most
horrific sequence. (Incidentally, Hui had originally wanted To to be played by
her Story of Woo Viet star, Chow Yun-fat, but he turned down the role, fearing
that participating in a Chinese shoot would get him blacklisted in Taiwan. The
beneficiary was Lau, another Hong Kong star in the making whose youthful
charisma burns through the screen even in this truncated role.)

RELATED ARTICLE

Boat People: Becoming Refugees

By Vinh Nguyen

In contrast to these scenes of tense, unblinking realism, there’s an almost

dreamlike haze to the moments Akutagawa shares with Comrade Nguyen (Qi
Meng-shi), a soulful, world-weary cultural official still in thrall to his memories
of the French colonial past. (“Vietnam has won her revolution, but I’ve lost mine,”
he laments.) The melancholy drift of the imagery feels of a piece with Nguyen’s
rootlessness, something he shares with his cynical mistress (Cora Miao), a
Chinese beauty who, like her former home of Saigon, has passed through French,
Japanese, Vietnamese, and American hands. Together these two represent a lost
older generation, resigned to their lives in a country that no longer belongs to
them and perhaps never did. But neither does it belong to children like Cam
Nuong and Lang, whose best hope of survival lies elsewhere.

As Akutagawa tries to help them on their way, Boat People comes devastatingly

full circle. What began with a wounded boy hobbling down one alley now builds
to the image of two children racing down another But their safe passage isn’t
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to the image of two children racing down another. But their safe passage isn t
secured until after Akutagawa has sold his camera, a sacrifice that has been
foreshadowed all along, and which now triggers a startling thematic reversal: this
camera, meant to expose injustice and reveal truth, achieves its greatest value as a
piece of contraband. It’s a conclusion so bluntly honest that it can’t help but
rebound on Hui’s camera, calling into question the very worth of the images it
has recorded and whatever empathy it has managed to stir. Boat People ends with

another, greater sacrifice, a fiery obliteration: Akutagawa’s death means the

death of our eyes and ears. Our window onto this world slams shut, though not
before we catch a brief glimpse of Cam Nuong and Lang at sea, sailing toward a
future outside the scope of the frame.

Justin Chang is the film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s Fresh Air. He
teaches film criticism at the University of Southern California.

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