Since fleeing from Saigon as the city fell, Hung Le has turned his experience of war and refugee camps into an unlikely comedy act. He speaks to Larry Schwartz.
HUNG LE spent his earliest years in a city under siege. One day, he looked up from his studies to see an aircraft bomb the presidential palace across the road from the family home in Saigon.
“All you see is this black smoke and the windows are just smashed in.” So vivid is the memory, he describes in the present tense a scene witnessed more than 20 years ago.
American GIs and South Vietnamese soldiers were housed next door. At night, the family would rush outdoors and sit in the car with the engine running until the shelling stopped, then return to bed.
All of which would hardly seem the stuff of good humor. Yet the Melbourne comedian has made the most of his ordeals. Along with a maid and chauffeur, he quips, the family had its own sniper to wake them each morning from a nearby roof.
Fidgeting with a glass of cafe latte at a Brunswick Street cafe, Hung Le seems pensive, even melancholic. He sports a (diminishing) shock of dyed, blond hair. At 30, he says it’s “midlife crisis yellow”.
The lanky comic wears thick, rimless spectacles. He delivers a deadpan humor derived not just from reminiscence of childhood in Vietnam but experience on the outer as an Asian in Australia.
“I wanted to fit in so much I had to pretend to be dumb at maths,” he says in jest of his early experience at St Kilda Primary school in the mid-1970s. That was after arriving in Australia with just three words of English: “table”, “chair” and “bathroom”.
HE can mock xenophobia. “Yellow Fever Hits Melbourne,” was the subtitle of a recent show. He’s understandably chary of discussing immigration.
“I just came here and tried to integrate as much as I could. There weren’t any Vietnamese people here when we came in ’75. I just hung out with Aussie guys . . .
“But there are always people who knock you just because of the way you look. You can’t win. If you’ve got a job they say you’re taking their jobs and if you haven’t, they say you’re a dole bludger.”
He’s weary of being asked about national loyalties since the immigration debate was fired again by comment from the controversial views of Pauline Hanson.
“I say to people, ‘I will always be Vietnamese’. I was born there and I want to go to live back in my own country. I was only nine years old when I left. I missed out on 21 years of my own country. I feel a longing to go back. One day I want to go and live there.”
He has been described as a kind of Vietnamese Maurie Fields or Paul Hogan. His latest show, ‘Ho and the Honky’, with Hong Kong-born friend, Barry Wong, ended its run last weekend at a Fitzroy venue called the Night Cat.
Hung Le has a book due out from Penguin to coincide with next year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival.
We wander back to his agent’s office. Fitzroy is home and, in Brunswick Street, Hung Le is recognised and greeted amiably. The hub of self-conscious bohemia must be a far cry from the streets where he’d once stroll wide-eyed among beggars with napalm burns and photos of their families around their necks.
Even so, his was a relatively privileged start to life. His mother came from a family of landowners. His father, an artist and lecturer in fine arts who served in the South Vietnamese forces, had organised passage on a boat with sufficient food for his family. As the Communist forces neared and panic increased, well-made plans fell through.
A family friend telephoned to say the tanks were hours away. “So we just packed our bags and left the dog in the house, left the key in the gate, drove down to the dock, left the car running . . .” (Granny ate the dog in the comic account).
At the docks, he saw boats berthed alongside each other. He was a small boy among crowds frantic to go. People clambered on board any departing vessel that could take them aboard. Children rowed alongside, selling Fanta to the escapees.
He remembers racing from one full boat to the next, hastily boarding a cargo ship with little more than a case of dry biscuits, some sea-sick pills and papers and a suitcase full of clothes for four adults (his parents and grandparents) and four children, of whom he is the second oldest.
From the deck, he looked back at the city. “The dock was just packed with people who had missed out. Just standing there not knowing what’s going to happen to them.
“We set off and the whole place got dark.” It seemed to him then that the entire country must be in flames. “All you could see was fire and that was it.”
There’s a fine line in his work between jest and jeopardy. What are we to make of a comic who jokes about a bombing that kills an illegal Mexican gardener and blows the head off a family image of Buddha?
He used to worry that his audience would not get the joke. “I tell my jokes and it takes ages for the laugh to come. I have to get my character across. Yeah, I’m this friendly sort of guy, don’t worry about it.
“But people are very uneasy about it. ‘Should we laugh at this guy being sniped at?’ You know, if it’s funny, you should laugh at it.”
The intended audience is middle Australia. “I’ve done shows for schools in Springvale, Dandenong and stuff like that. And the kids . . . they’d been through worse stuff than I had. It’s no news to them so they don’t even laugh.”
A sample of his patter. “You know how people say that Vietnam brought the war into people’s living rooms? Yeah, right. You’re telling me, mate. We didn’t even have a TV.”
In the comic account of his escape, his family is on a leaky prawn trawler with “no food, no water, no karaoke, nothing. I was so hungry I used to lie there and dream about crashlanding in the Andes and having people to eat . . .”
But set the jokes aside and it must have been a nightmarish voyage into the unknown. As the ship sailed into stormy weather, he watched men raise sheets over their families. They ran out of fuel days into the journey.
He remembers people running to the side of the boat screaming, waving sheets bearing hasty SOS messages. Somewhere mid-ocean, they boarded one of several barges that had been used by the American troops for carrying ammunition. For days, they floated along, drawn by an old army boat.
“All you could see was the sun. We had no food, no water. Old people were drinking urine out of polystyrene cups. People were just dying.”
The US Seventh Fleet waited in international waters to collect the refugees. They were then ferried to the Philippines. “That was when I had my first hamburger. Everyone got a cheeseburger and a Pepsi. There’s got to be a joke there somewhere, you know . . .”
Then came four months in camps in Guam. The refugees were offered a choice of destination: Canada, France or Australia. Hung Le’s family chose the latter because an uncle had studied in Melbourne and settled here. His stage act now includes a reference to “the family reunion scam”.
The Qantas flight to Melbourne was “full of refugees just lying about in the aisles, just yapping on. I wonder what the other passengers thought. We were just a whole bunch of pyjama-clad people,” he says. They arrived in August 1975. “Oh, it was freezing cold. I had never been so cold before in my life.”
The extended family shared a one-bedroom unit in a migrant hostel. He and his older sister, now a Qantas flight attendant, became the only Vietnamese students at St Kilda Primary. Several of his first friends were of Greek descent.
“No one hassled us. Nobody had heard of Vietnamese people before so we weren’t a threat to anyone. Kids were coming up to us telling us that you must barrack for Carlton now. This is cricket . . .”
His mother worked as a machinist in “sweatshops” in Richmond, his father as a spray painter for Toyota. Then as a tram and bus conductor, who’d sculpt and paint before and after work. In recent years, he has lectured on oriental architecture at RMIT and now concentrates on his art.
Hung Le’s father insisted that each child learn a musical instrument and the son still plays a violin during his stand-up routine.
HE came to comedy after a stint at the Conservatorium of Music. Fresh out of school, he delighted in perceived freedom and “spent most of my time in the pub” until he was finally expelled. “Every year I had to go and see the non-progressive board. You sit at the end of this big table and all the lecturers are sitting there and you have to beg your way back . . .”
For a time he joined a string quartet that busked in the Bourke Street Mall. To attract attention, they sped up the music and added a bit of slapstick. At a busking contest, one of the Doug Anthony All Stars suggested they take their act to Edinburgh Festival. They did, with success.
Hung Le won a busking contest in London’s Covent Garden before returning to Australia after two years in Europe. Then came an appearance on TV’s ‘New Faces’ talent quest.
“I had no idea. If you see it on the video, I was just standing there, just sh. . . . . . my pants. Bert (Newton) was really nice. Ronnie Burns gave me 39 and I needed a 40 to be in front, and Kamahl was saying, (here he lowers his voice) “Take care of yourself. I think I like your humor very much, 39.”
He had started out just clowning around. “But then I thought I’d tell these stories of the war and living back there because it would be an angle into something different that people haven’t heard . . .
“When I started telling these stories people listened . . . Maybe they won’t hear it from anyone else for a long time. More stories will come out as people get better at the language or know how to get the message across.”
The Sunday Age, 27-Oct-1996
Larry Schwartz Writer 