New World a-Coming, Ch. 4

It Vu Cong speaks...

I was born in Cholon, in 1944. My father was a Foreign Legionnaire from Alsace, fought the Vichy government and the Japanese during the Second War in Cochin China. His father’s people, Irish, came into Asia in the 1920s: my great grand-father left the Connaught Rangers after the 1916, and came east. There was a family story that he met Eric Blair / George Orwell in the Burmese police, around the time of the events Orwell described in “Shooting an Elephant.” But he married an Annamese girl from the Trinh dynasty, and kept heading east—maybe he was fleeing something, more than he was approaching. Later on what’s why I came to learn court music and dance; my mother was a Confucian scholar and she insisted that we had to learn culture. But I was raised up amongst the colons—when the Legion offered my father citizenship, after three years’ enlistment, he grabbed it. I was born in Saigon but father hid us on a cousin’s rubber plantation during the War, before we went back to Cholon in ‘46.

I loved the fiddle, partly because of my father’s stories of my grandpere’s playing, but it didn’t love me back. Flute came easier, and when I was a child, playing music was a haven—a place where nothing could hurt me and I was surrounded by people who loved and believed in me.

After Diem came to power, my parents wanted to get me out of Vietnam altogether, so they cobbled together the money to send me for an audition to the Aix en Provence Conservatory. But the flute professor called me a “pied-noir peasant” and sent me home. It made me cry, but I thought—well, that’s it: there isn’t a future for me in music.

I tried ballet and singing, but in the end I was more drawn to photography. There was an old Leica in our house, left behind by a French newspaperman, and I still have some photos I took of my family in the early Sixties. That life—my sisters in their grammar school uniforms; my grandfather dressed in white and with a colon’s straw hat, in the garden with a cigar and glass of wine, my mother in an ao-dai standing behind him—that life was already disintegrating as the French government collapsed.

My parents kept trying to get me and my sisters out of Cholon—my only brother was already at university in France—and a year after that Aix audition, when I was seventeen, I managed to land in a music contest in Manila. My beloved Śamū’ēla Jaṅgalī, the fiddler from the BNRO, heard me, and later she told me she’d rung Yezget-Bey over the trans-Pacific line, and yelled to him they had to get me into the Band. I arrived at the Conservatory in Ballyizget in August of ‘62, on a full-ride flute scholarship. And then within a few weeks, I’d been sucked into the Band.

That was a strange time in the BNRO: they were already pushing boundaries around socialist realist music—as a matter of fact, in ‘62, they’d been photographed for the cover of LIFE magazine, with a slugline that read “New Currents from Behind the Iron Curtain.” From ‘47 onward, they’d been sponsored as official state folkloric ensemble, but that meant that Yezget-Bey and Madame Szabo were always tiptoeing around the kommissars and their restriction on repertoire. It was kind of like being in a centrifuge: we were going around and around, on tour and radio and in the recording studio, and with Khruschev loosening restrictions, it seemed like “liberalism” began to pull the classic Band apart.

At the same time, there was good new energy: Rahmani Boenavida came back on piano and voice, and Krzysztof Arczewski on double bass, and that was good, but they also brought word from outside; we were starting to be hyper-conscious of greater opportunities—maybe—in the West.

I was 21 when we boarded the Sea-Witch and went to Newport.

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[1] Ít Vũ Công literally translates as “Little Dancer”.

[2] “Eh bien, il ya une certaine passion, mais elle joue comme un paysan, comme un pied-noir.” (Pied-noir is a derogatory term associated with mixed-race North African and Southeast Asian colonial peoples.)