Contributing editor J. M. Tyree talks with NER 46.1 poet Cathy Linh Che about counter-narratives, the ethics of documentary authority, and her new book Becoming Ghost.
J. M. Tyree: In these compelling and poignant poems, movies play a complex role. They block out or cover up reality, as you write about how Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) blocks the view of what’s really happening for Vietnamese people. Your parents were used as extras in Coppola’s film while living in the Philippines after fleeing from Vietnam. What would you like readers to know about the award-winning short film you wrote about your parents, We Were the Scenery, which screened at Sundance?
Cathy Linh Che: The film, like the poetry collection, is driven by my parents’ storytelling about their lives before, during, and after their work as extras in Apocalypse Now. This frame subverts that of Apocalypse Now’s treatment of its Vietnamese extras, which set my parents and others like them in the background of the story. We Were the Scenery and Becoming Ghost foreground Vietnamese people and their voices, and in doing so, show that my parents’ lives are as epic as any film about the Vietnam War could possibly hope toward.
I’m very proud of We Were the Scenery and I’m grateful for all my collaborators, especially Christopher Radcliff (director/editor), Jess X. Snow (cinematographer/producer), and, of course, my family.
I love that the film allows me to play the role of listener and recorder and that my parents have the opportunity to tell their stories themselves. Throughout the film, even audiences who don’t understand Vietnamese are able to access my parents’ facial reactions and vocal tones, ranging from humorous to conspiratorial to contemplative.
I also love the ways that my parents tell the story together. The act of collective meaning-making and memory-making move me. Some of the footage is drawn from my family’s home videos, which, for the most part, are taken by my father. Ultimately, I see the film as an act of co-creation.
JMT: About your book, Becoming Ghost—how would you describe the continuities and divergences between your film and the new book? How do you think about the relationship between film and poetry?
CLC: The film and the book draw from the same story and, therefore, overlap in subject matter and mission; however, the film reveals parts of the story that are not in the poetry book, and vice versa. For instance, in my poetry book, I don’t talk about every character that my parents do in the film—in large part, because the film depends on the visual imagery of AN to guide my parents’—and those people don’t show up in the screenplay. The film also doesn’t contain all the stories that I have in the poetry book, in part, because of the time constraints inherent in the short film. The poetry book has the ability to sprawl a bit more, rather than staying tightly focused for fifteen minutes.
A continuity between poetry and film is that poetry often feels cinematic to me. Imagery can be so evocative. When I read or write poems, I can see the poems playing inside of the screen of my mind. I love how words can create a visual image or set of visual images that move through time. While text might evoke imagery for a reader, I also know that these are typically drawn from a reader’s own set of images. In a poem, it’s unlikely that someone will be able to hear the sound of my mother’s voice exactly. A film offers this intervention, wherein the audience is able to see what my parents actually look like or sound like.
A divergence is that poetry offers up formats that can’t be fully replicated in film. For instance, in Becoming Ghost, I use the golden shovel form as a means of marginalizing sentences from the screenplay of Apocalypse Now and filling in the rest of the text-space with my family’s narratives.
We attempt various forms of visual marginalization in the film by lowering the volume on the main dialogue of Apocalypse Now and having my parents speak over it while the camera zooms past the main characters to focus our gaze on the extras in the distance.
My parents’ dialogue functions as “the poem” of the film, but it’s different because it takes place verbally, over time, frame by frame, rather than moving down the lines of a page.
JMT: Film also has the power to reveal things, as when you write about how photographs prove people “once loved each other.” And in another important line you refer to yourself as a lens. Do I have this right, about your mixed feelings regarding this powerful and most haunted medium?
CLC: I have mixed feelings about the power inherent in all of these media: photography, film, and poetry. Where you aim the camera or the poem and whosoever is behind the lens has the power to determine what is in the frame, outside of the frame, onscreen or off-screen, on the page or off the page. The poet and the filmmaker determine who gets to speak, who is centered, who is de-centered, what languages are spoken, and to whom.
These art forms, as you’ve stated, are powerful and haunted. They also have the ability to create something new: a new addition to the archive, a new story, or a statement that had not existed before. The attempt, in writing the book and in making the film, was to create a restorative archive, wherein erased voices were offered a platform to speak.
Photographs, films, and poetry all have the ability, also, to document moments of tremendous love, grace, and wisdom—even as they cover over moments of great violence, unease, or tension. They are forms of documentation that reveal as much as they cover up.
JMT: A splendid passage in “Forgiveness” considers an alternative “Screenplay 3,” in which “Coppola scraps / his need to retell Heart of Darkness / and gives his millions to the refugees. / Here, he says. You tell your own story.” Are these poems what John Keane calls “counter-narratives” that reclaim the camera for yourself, so to speak? Or a form of ars poetica—art about art and art-making?
CLC: Yes, absolutely—many of the poems in the book serve as counter-narratives that reclaim the camera for myself and my family. That is central to the book, my desire to provide an alternative to what has dominated the American imagination of the Vietnam War. The overall imagery and language in the Vietnam War canon lack Vietnamese voices, perspectives, stories, complexity, and agency.
But the poem “Forgiveness” also asks ethical questions about what it means to be a director. One of the alternative screenplays imagines my own directorship—and the possibility that I might be using my parents’ stories and videos for my own fame. The poem also questions my father’s own ambition as a director, before speculating what it might look like to have Coppola give millions to refugees to tell their stories instead. What might the storytelling landscape look like if this were to have occurred? The poem asks: What would happen to art if we relinquish our need to become famous or acclaimed? What alternative modes to writing might be possible then—and which stories might be able to be told?
JMT: After you “become the lens” and this alternative cinematic apparatus starts heating up, you write about rewatching your family’s home movies. Through this process, you find yourself “at the center / untwisting myself.” I find this hopeful, not in a superficial way, but as a narrative of recovering one’s own stories beyond the warped layers of conventional narratives and accrued images made by others. How would you describe the relationships between the past, present, and future when seen through this lens of forgiveness? What is the connection between individual and collective forgiveness?
CLC: These are wonderful questions. I do think there’s an inherent hope in this possibility, even as it’s tied up in the self. The act of recovering one’s stories from warped layers of conventional narratives and accrued images made by others is at the center of the poetry collection. And this act also runs the risk of recentering myself as a daughter-artist, the one who has experienced war second-hand, rather than centering people who have experienced it first-hand. I ask: Am I doing something that is entirely different from what Coppola did? Is there some overlap there?
I wish I had clearer answers, especially around forgiveness. I wonder if the difficulties between my father and me are a result of inherited injury, and I wonder if the hurt I might feel from my father might actually be the hurt that he feels from the American involvement in the Vietnam War, or the ways my father’s patriarchal upbringing affects how he might treat me. So, part of forgiveness is the acceptance of the influence of context. And part of forgiveness is the attempt to feel free of feeling injured.
As an American (even as I am mad enough at America to not want to claim it, I also have to accept that it is the country of my birth, the citizenship, and passport that I carry and the enormous privilege that comes with it), I am complicit in Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestine. Even as I don’t want my tax dollars to fund it, it’s still happening, while I continue to work a job that converts my labor into capital that continues making weapons that maim and murder. Because of my complicity, I don’t expect forgiveness. Rather, I expect myself to do more each and every day so that I can earn forgiveness in the future.
Today, I saw an image of a child being burned alive in a hospital. The caption read, “I hope that Palestinians can forgive us one day.” I think that forgiveness can happen whether or not accountability takes place, but it puts the onus on the victim to have to do something bigger, better, higher than others would naturally want to take up.
I don’t know if I can forgive the erasure and dehumanization of my people, which led to mass murder under US arms (and not just US arms, but also French arms, Russian arms, Japanese arms, and arms wielded by other Vietnamese people, and so on, and so forth.)
If my/our actions actually stop the killing machine, only then might we earn forgiveness. Until then, forgiveness can be granted, but it will be unearned.
I hope that we can earn our forgiveness by accepting our great power and privileges as artists and do everything we can to change the course of history. What we do in the present determines our future. What we do in the present can also help to reshape the past.
It is imperative that we act collectively, as artists, to imagine new ways of keeping one another alive, so that we may be forgiven, and for our forgiveness to be earned.
Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025) and Split (Alice James Books, 2014) and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books, 2023). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed (New York), and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival.
J. M. Tyree is editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly and a contributing editor for NER, where he recently edited a film supplement on Wong Kar Wai. His most recent book is The Haunted Screen, a cine-novella published by A Strange Object/Deep Vellum.