In 2018, Elizabeth Ai was pregnant with her daughter and on the verge of another profound change: Already a film producer, Ai was beginning a 6-year journey that would lead her to become both a filmmaker and author.
“New Wave: Rebellion and Reinvention in the Vietnamese Diaspora” is the title of Ai’s debut documentary and accompanying book. Both delve into the community of 1980s-era Vietnamese American teens, many of whom were born in Vietnam during the war and raised largely in the U.S. They were kids who connected over a shared affinity towards synthesizer-driven dance music of the time.
“When I was pregnant with her, I was like: This is my chance to tell a different story,” Ai says by video call from Monterey Park. “I want to leave something behind for her.”
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As Ai describes in both the film and book, this new wave isn’t necessarily the music that typically springs to mind when you hear the term. Often created by artists from Germany or Italy (where it was more commonly known as Eurodisco or Italo disco), the scene led to the rise of local Vietnamese American stars, like Lynda Trang Ðài. The music was heavy on synthesizers, high in energy and often filed in the same new wave record bins as bands like Depeche Mode or New Order.
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“Really, at first, I just want to tell a story about my people that doesn’t center war and trauma,” says Ai. “I want to tell a different story about Vietnamese people that are coming of age, that are punks and rebels and found their own scene. We deserve to have our own story like that. That’s really where the journey started.”
After four years of work and many interviews, Ai knew – she was hearing it from her advisors and collaborators – that something was missing from the documentary.
“I had been crafting a narrative to try to make sure that it was celebratory and joyful, but I was doing a major disservice to the truth of the matter,” says Ai, “which is that people were in a lot of pain and this displacement caused a lot of fractures in families.”
So Ai looked deeper into her personal history, which is something that becomes a connecting thread throughout the documentary.
Born in 1980, Ai grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, where she lived with her grandparents while her mother worked. There, Ai’s young aunts and uncles took care of her and in the process exposed her to new wave. “I was just a little kid, so, obviously, it wasn’t my music,” she says. “I was in the back seat of the car. That’s where I was able to absorb this.”
Ai recalls hearing German pop artists like Modern Talking, Bad Boys Blue and C.C. Catch. She also recalls “Paris By Night,” a popular variety show amongst the Vietnamese diaspora that was distributed via VHS tapes in the 1980s and 1990s, where Lynda Trang Ðài often performed.
“I started there, but didn’t examine why these teenagers were taking care of me,” says Ai. “That’s what the next two years took. That music, why did it hold an anchor in this period of time in my life?”
In the film, which won the Tribeca Film Festival Special Jury Award for Best New Documentary Director, she interweaves her personal story with people prominent in the new wave scene.
In the book, Ai showcases a bounty of archival material, including photos, newspaper clippings and cassette covers, as well as essays from other writers about growing up in the Vietnamese diaspora and the impact of new wave music.
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The book developed in part out of the Instagram account that Ai created for “New Wave,” which she launched in 2020 when filming the documentary came to a pandemic-related halt.
“From that, so many archives came poring through DMs,” she says of the social media arm of the project. “I knew already that they were gorgeous archives, beautiful photos, and I believed that it needed a space and, even in the 90-minute film that we have now, there was so much more story to tell.”
Making space to share these archives addresses another issue that Ai saw, which is the lack of images of Vietnamese people in publicly accessible U.S. archives. “You’ll see a lot of black-and-whites at a refugee camp, but just in terms of seeing Vietnamese people living full lives, going to concerts,” she says, those were a rare find.
“I think that’s what was amazing about the crowdsourcing of the archival materials was that we had excavated so many things that were just sitting in people’s garages, deteriorating, underneath their beds in a shoebox, in albums they hadn’t looked at in decades,” says Ai. “I thought that was a big and really special part of it that needed to exist beyond the film.”
The documentary has upcoming screenings at theaters in San Diego, Garden Grove, Culver City and more. For more information, go to https://newwavedocumentary.com/screenings.
