From ‘Apocalypse Now’ extras to starring in my ‘Appocalips’
In 1975, my newly married parents fled Vietnam on a boat. Months later, while living in a refugee camp in the Philippines, they were hired to play extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film “Apocalypse Now,” which came out 45 years ago and won two Oscars.
Though my parents played a variety of characters – translators, Viet Cong, drivers, POWs – they had no face time and no speaking parts.
They escaped a war only to be cast in a reenactment that placed them at the margins of their own story.
My mother, Hoa Le, owned two sets of clothes then: one to wear, one to wash. On the set, the film crew dressed my mother in black pajamas. They issued her a machine gun. They gave her a Viet Cong hat and placed her under a thatched straw roof. She stuffed her ears with cotton. She shot up into the American helicopters. “Not to worry,” they yelled at her. “The bullets are fake. Keep shooting!”
“I was scared to death,” my mother would recount dramatically, or perhaps conspiratorially, and laugh. She was 22.
My father, Hue Che, played an interpreter, a POW, a Viet Cong gunning a car across a bridge. He had skills. He could speak a little English.
He had firsthand experience as an actual prisoner of war. He was caught, not by the enemy – but by the South Vietnamese army when he attempted to go AWOL to retake his high school exit exam. He never graduated, my bemused father would tell me, because he was so obsessed with building an airplane in high school.
Vietnamese voices from the war
These were the stories I grew up listening to, over dinner, around our kitchen table in Los Angeles, then Long Beach. As I grew into the world, these are the stories that I found absent from the greater narratives of the Vietnam War voiced on the radio, on TV and movie screens, in the newspapers.
My parents’ oral histories are the foundation for me to pursue writing as a path.
No first-person filmed accounts from the Vietnamese extras of “Apocalypse Now” seemed to exist, and I wanted to change that. In 2022 and 2023, I traveled to Vietnam, the Philippines and Long Beach with my filmmaker friends, director Christopher Radcliff and cinematographer Jess X. Snow, to document this particular story.
We sought to create a work that centered perspectives that have been historically erased from the master narrative. We wanted to create a piece that would help refugees, immigrants and marginalized people feel seen.
We visited the places where my parents lived, including their refugee camp in Mandaluyong, and Baler – the site of the movie’s famous napalm sequence, for which my parents and their friends were cast as extras.
Why ‘Appocalips’ now?
The refugee camp looked nothing like what I had imagined. It resembled a YMCA: five beige buildings, a basketball court. Baler, the fishing town, is now a tourist destination where one could book surf lessons and take guided “Apocalypse Now” tours to Charlie’s Point.
Over a year, we worked to create a 27minute, three-channel video installation called “Appocalips,” an Open Call commission now at The Shed in New York City through Sunday.
“Appocalips” – how my father labeled the VHS of “Apocalypse Now” he had recorded from television – is driven by my parents’ funny and heartbreaking storytelling. Vietnam War films often focus on trauma and violence, but my parents’ testimony upend these typical expectations.
Though they talk openly about their losses, they also make jokes, discuss friendships forged at the refugee camp and insist that the filming was fun.
At a recent public event for the video installation attended by more than 100 people, I wept as I read poems. I dedicated the reading to my family and to all refugees and families who have had to live under war.
As we continue to witness the ongoing devastation in Gaza, I am reminded of my parents, whose friends and families were killed during the war. Their stories taught me so much about narrative power and self-definition.
Over Christmas break, my family gathered in Long Beach in front of the TV to watch the video installation. No one had seen it yet, and I didn’t know what to expect.
For the next generation
As the film played, my 8-year-old nephew Legend asked, “Wait, is this real? Did this happen? They were in a movie?” I was touched by Legend’s interest in what he had seen.
As my parents age, I want their grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be able to access their story. I want them to know something about where they came from.
As I pointed out different presentday sites of Mandaluyong and Baler, my mom marveled.
As my father spoke on the screen, she listened and chimed in.
My father was silent. I wasn’t sure what he thought. His face lit up, however, at the end, when he saw that we had included his Super 8 and VHS home video footage of our family.
When the credits rolled, my mother clapped her hands together and declared, “Dinner time!”
Nobody spoke any further about the video installation.
Part of the listening process is setting aside lofty ideals around narrative reclamation to receive what’s in front of me. What I saw was three generations of my family, gathered and eating food together, sharing stories around the table. What I saw was our presentday lives co-mingling with the past that brought us here.
Cathy Linh Che is the author of the poetry book “Split” and co-author with Kyle Lucia Wu of “An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History.” “Appocalips,” her three-channel video installation made with Christopher Radcliff, is on view at The Shed in New York City through Sunday. Find her at cathylinhche.com