The First Time I Spoke Vietnamese On Stage  //  By David Huynh

Every night during our production of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, I got to look into Eunice Wong’s eyes and say:

“Tất cả mọi người đều sinh ra có quyền bình đẳng. Tạo hóa cho họ những quyền không ai có thể xâm phạm được; trong những quyền ấy, có quyền được sống, quyền tự do và quyền mưu cầu hạnh phúc.”

Vietnamese.

The first language I learned and the only one my parents care to communicate to me with.

So much so that I started my schooling unable to speak English at a level comparable to the other five-year-olds in my class.  I had to take ESL (English as a Second Language) classes so I didn’t fall behind more than I already did.

I remember how awkward English felt in my mouth, how my body tensed when I made a mistake, and how my classmates mocked me.

I was five-years-old and ashamed of this gift my family gave me.

It’s December 2018.

We have started rehearsing The Trial of the Catonsville Nine without a script.  Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who became the most recognizable of the Nine, created one before he went into hiding, but our director Jack Cummings is adapting a new one specifically for our cast of three Asian-American actors.  For now, our script is elusive; hidden in a mountain of court documents, biographies, opinion pieces, and LIFE magazines we’ve assembled to stitch together the Nine’s story.

For anyone unfamiliar, these legendary nine were people who, on May 17^th 1968, raided an office of the Selective Service System in Catonsville, Maryland and with homemade napalm, burned 378 draft records as a nonviolent protest against the Vietnam War (and subsequently served lengthy prison terms as a result).  A record of that day lives on through archival footage: they stand in a circle around the burning draft records while reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

I find something in Vietnamese and share it with the room.  It makes it into the script.  Soon, with Mia Katigbak translating, I get to look into Eunice Wong’s eyes and say:

“All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It’s the first time I’ve ever spoken Vietnamese onstage.  It comes as easily as breathing.

I feel the audience lean in when I start, but then I feel them stall when I reveal where the quote is from: Ho Chi Minh’s “Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” dated 1945.

11 years before the American government officially became involved in the Vietnam War.

I wonder if anyone heard the plea in his riff on our Declaration of Independence.

I wonder where we’d be if we had listened.