Reviewed by Alicia Glass

The film is half a recollection of displaced Vietnamese kids fled to America after the Vietnam war creating a community of their own around the super-popular New Wave music movement, and half a biographical journey of filmmaker Elizabeth Ai’s dive into her unexamined past and personal traumas.

We all know the Vietnam war had a ton of repercussions, both in Vietnam and here in America, affecting soldiers and civilians alike for generations to come. What isn’t often discussed, much less even acknowledged likely due to vast amounts of shame, is the displaced Vietnamese children who, with their parents or not, escaped to America to flee the war. These children tried extremely hard to find some sort of place they belong here in the good old US of A, and while their parents were carving out places for themselves by basically working themselves to death, the children had to build their own place to belong. This is where the New Wave music craze began, and these are their stories.

There was no market for Asian singers in general, much less focused Vietnamese performers, and so born-to-sing kids like the infamous Lynda Trang Dai took destiny in their own hands and began to cover the 80’s mega-hits from superstars like Madonna. The Vietnamese-language variety show Paris By Night began to showcase Lynda and others performing cover songs of the most popular hits too, and suddenly Lynda Trang Dai was at least a Vietnamese household name.

DJ Ian Nguyen recalls his rebellious years as a teenager finding out about the New Wave scene being born and deciding he would be a part of it, a much larger part than he ever anticipated. A friend actually built DJ Ian his first real turntable and he would sneak out with his friends to hold impromptu New Wave parties where DJ Ian would spin for hours, sometimes all night, always for free, immersed in the music and freedom of it all.

And somewhere in there, as the making of a documentary-style movie about the New Wave way of life and music scene stretched into years and filmmaker Elizabeth Ai birthed her daughter, uncomfortable questions about her own past traumas began cropping up. Why did Liz’s mother, a Vietnamese immigrant herself who came to America and unhappily became the sole earner for the entire family including those still left back in Vietnam, initially refuse to speak to her daughter about their shared traumatic past? Why would any grandma, regardless of nationality, not want to see her newly-born grandchild? In this instance, I suspect it was because Grandma wasn’t ready to face the very real problems her absence throughout Li’s childhood caused. But children, even the very young ones, pick up on far more than their elders think. And suddenly, the documentary Liz was making about lost Vietnamese-American kids and their musical therapy, was now being turned into a semi-autobiographical journey about Liz’s own personal journey into her past, to find a way to reunite with her estranged mother and a path together in the future.

Uplifting and sorrowful at the same time, a meditation on lost generations of Vietnamese refugees and their stories of loss and redemption through surprisingly good music, plus a very personal story of trauma and reconnection, New Wave will make you want to sing, even through your sympathetic tears!