By Crispin Long, The New Yorker, February 17, 2021
For a project in film school, Carol Nguyen set out to make a fictional short film about three generations of a family as they experience assimilation after immigration, but the process revealed a different story, one closer to home. Nguyen’s parents each moved at different times during the nineteen-eighties from Vietnam to Canada, where they met, got married, and raised two daughters, with Nguyen’s father’s parents as part of the household. To prepare to tell the invented story that she had originally conceived, Nguyen began to interview her parents and sister. She soon realized that asking them questions about their lives so directly produced an unprecedented openness. Although the events they described were familiar, she told me, “I had never heard them confess their emotions this way.” She decided to reconceptualize the film as a kind of social experiment: she would interview each family member separately and then gather them at the dinner table to listen to excerpts from the interviews together.
The result is the short documentary “No Crying at the Dinner Table,” a striking depiction of what families avoid discussing, and what can happen when those taboos dissolve. Growing up, Nguyen said, she was regularly told not to cry at the dinner table—hence the film’s title—and felt discouraged from overtly expressing sadness. “I learned how to cry silently, so that I would never get caught,” she said. One memory stands out in particular: after her dog was hit by a car, she saw its body and was traumatized by the sight. It seemed to her that there was a finite period of time in which it was acceptable to grieve, even though she was affected by the event long after. Her parents had witnessed war and death in Vietnam, and, next to the gravity of those painful experiences, her own losses felt insignificant. Before she made “No Crying at the Dinner Table,” Nguyen had never heard the term “intergenerational trauma,” but when a film programmer used the phrase in a description of her documentary, it struck her as an apt expression for what she had been grappling with in her work.
The interviews give a kaleidoscopic image of the family members’ private pains, and expose patterns in their shared struggle to communicate. Nguyen’s mother recounts challenges similar to Nguyen’s in expressing emotion with her own parents. She and her mother, Nguyen’s grandmother, did not often hug, and she remembers the one time she gave her mother a kiss, when her mother was very ill. She never hugged or kissed her father. “In Vietnam, the way parents express their love to children isn’t through physical intimacy,” she says, adding that the lack becomes normal. “You get used to it.” Nguyen’s sister talks about her memories of their grandparents (their father’s parents, who lived with them): her sense of safety when spending time with them while their parents worked long hours, or running up to their room to watch movies with them when she didn’t want to do her homework, and the enduring grief that she has experienced since they died, when she was young. “But I guess you’re never really finished mourning anyways,” she says, “so I guess it’s not that big of a deal.”
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