CULTURE CLASH
TEXAS TOWN RELIVES STORMY RACIAL PAST IN FILM ‘SEADRIFT’
PARK CITY, Utah — Tim Tsai wasn’t even born when tensions between Vietnamese refugees and longtime commercial crab fisherman on the South Texas coast erupted into violence, catapulting the small town of Seadrift into the national news in 1979.
But the Austin-based filmmaker became obsessed with telling the story after reading about it in a book called “Asian Texans,” with a chapter on Vietnamese Texans detailed by sociologist Thao Ha, a Houston native. The result is “Seadrift ,” a riveting documentary that premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival, a showcase for independent filmmakers that takes place at the same time as the larger Sundance Film Festival.
“When you think about Texas history and civil rights history, you don’t think about AsianAmericans, but this story really is a significant part of American history,” the 38-year-old filmmaker told an appreciative audience after the screening.
Tsai had been working on the project for more than seven years but needed additional funds when he learned in late November of last year that the film was accepted to Slamdance. The film’s co-producer Andrew Lee launched a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $50,000 in 31 days to finish the film in time for the festival, which began Jan. 25.
Says Lee, a Sugar Land native, “I’ve done five funding campaigns (for other films), and it’s the quickest one I’ve done.”
Tense and timely
The project was started long before Donald Trump was elected president, but Tsai believes it remains timely because its themes of the debate over immigration and fears stoked by white nationalists remain a focal
point of today’s news.
“What has struck me working on the film, the archival footage of what (Texas Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon) Louis Beam was saying back in the early ’80s is almost word for word what people are saying now,” Tsai says in an interview. “As a nation, we haven’t progressed as much as maybe a lot of us thought we had.”
After the fall of Vietnam in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States. Many made their way to Houston and South Texas, where the humid weather and proximity to the coast resembled their homeland.
Seadrift, a small town with a population of a little over 1,000 located about a two-and-a-half-hour drive southwest of Houston, became home to a growing number of refugees when a Maryland businessman brought them in to work in low-wage jobs at a factory processing crabmeat.
A clash of cultures developed when local fisherman feared that the new immigrants were overfishing the waters and the Vietnamese believed their livelihood in their new homeland was being threatened.
The tensions came to a head on Aug. 3, 1979, when a local crabber, Billy Joe Aplin, was shot and killed by Sau Van Nguyen in a dispute over fishing territory. Nguyen and his brother were charged with murder, but a jury acquitted them on the grounds of self-defense.
The KKK zeroed in on the dispute with rallies that escalated tensions. Several houses and boats were burned, and a number of Vietnamese residents fled Seadrift for Louisiana.
Nobody wanted to talk
When Tsai set out to film the documentary, no one wanted to talk to him. “Their first question to me was, ‘Why?’ They’ve gotten past the shootings, but they weren’t willing to talk about what happened,” he recalls.
But with help of Diane Wilson, a lifelong Seadrift resident, author and activist who made her living crabbing and shrimping on the Gulf Coast, Tsai gained the trust of the local white fishermen as well as the daughter of the slain man.
Tsai, whose family emigrated to the United States from Taiwan, doesn’t speak Vietnamese, found it even harder to gain the trust of the Vietnamese fishermen. Ha’s father, who lives in the Houston area, came to the rescue, serving as a translator and helping to persuade some to talk.
Tsai sought to present an even-handed account, unlike some previous efforts, including the 1985 film “Alamo Bay,” a fictionalized version that displeased residents who thought it portrayed everyone in Seadrift as bigots and rednecks.
Tsai’s documentary notes how residents rallied at a local city council meeting to demand that the KKK stay out of their town. A landmark federal lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Vietnamese Fisherman’s Association eventually halted the Klan’s activities.
Wilson says many of the misconceptions could have been cleared up if only there had been more communication. “When the Vietnamese came, I don’t recall any compensation, any town meetings, any get-togethers,” she says, noting there were white fishermen who could have explained the established rules of fishing the seas around Seadrift.
“But that wasn’t done, and it just escalated,” she says.
Seadrift today
Seadrift retains few traces of that turbulent time. Vietnamese-American residents, which make up about 10 percent of the town’s population, have assimilated into the community. The crabpacking plant is now owned by a VietnameseAmerican family, and Vietnamese-American fishermen coexist alongside their non-Vietnamese counterparts.
“People didn’t know how to control the situation, and they acted sometimes in the worst manner. But, basically, the bottom line is Seadrift is a town of good people,” says Wilson, who continues to live there. “And with the Vietnamese, we’re better for it.”
With the successful Slamdance premiere behind him, Tsai is hoping to present the film in Seadrift and in Houston later this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the shooting and its aftermath. He wants to foster dialogue about what was learned and how it relates to today’s world.
Ha, who now teaches sociology at Miracosta College in Oceanside, Calif., says it’s important for Asian-Americans like Tsai, Lee and others to tell their stories on film and in books.
“If we don’t do it, who will?” she says.