SEARCHING FOR HÀN MẶC TỬ: A POET AT THE QUY NHƠN LEPER COLONY.
Rewatching Trần Văn Thủy’s groundbreaking documentary Chuyện Tử Tế (1985), and the protagonists’ search for kindness and decency after war, and the death of his friend the cinematographer Đồng Xuân Thuyết, I recalled when my family in Australia had the surreal experience of seeing my Aunty Soeur Hương on SBS TV the multi-lingual public television channel in Australia.
Once Soeur Hương had joined the Catholic Order to work at the Quy Hoà Leper Colony in Quy Nhơn, she only ever visited home three times: to see me and my mother leave Vietnam for Australia, and to bury her two parents. This cinematic apparition was fleeting but stuck in our collective conciousness. Soeur Hương was one of many nuns filmed by Trần Văn Thủy in his search for kindness. This documentary in a way became a letter that directly told us that Hương was doing ok, going about her work in Quy Nhơn. During the 1980s and 1990s it was almost unimaginable for us to even think about returning home to Vietnam, let alone visiting a Leper Colony, or finding footage of our estranged relatives back in Vietnam. This cinematic miracle was a reminder that we had indeed left a huge part of ourselves and our loved ones behind. The coincidental apparition of Soeur Hương interrupted my parent’s effort at building up a new life and trying to assimilate into the colony of Australia.
This documentary also reminded my parents of the most famous resident of the Quy Hoà Leper Colony. Hàn Mặc Tử (1912-1940) - possibly one of Vietnam’s most important poets of the 20th century. Part of a group of artists who wanted to incorporate Modernism into Vietnamese folk poetry and the arts, Hàn Mặc Tử founded a new literary style he called Ðiên “Mad” and Loạn “Chaos” which drew on the Surrealist elements of Vietnam’s rich poetry traditions.
Contracting Leprosy in 1937, he was eventually interred and died there in 1940. Although his poems remain well-known, Trần Thiện Thanh’s song which honours his work and describes Hàn Mặc Tử’s lovers and romantic daliances of a problematic and complicated poet.
In this short documentary, footage from Chuyện Tử Tế is used in context with a pilgrimage to Hàn Mặc Tử’s grave site with the artist’s cousins. The search for Hàn Mặc Tử is a proxy to the inevitable romanticisation of estranged family members like Soeur Hương and the process of honouring the artistic and cinematic achievements of Vietnamese Modernist poetry and post-war cinema which plays a critical role in the artists’ visual language.
