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 filmmakers search for kindness and decency following 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 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 had only ever visited home three times, to see me and my mother before we left for Australia, and to bury her 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, but the documentary was almost a letter directly to our family informing us that Hương was ok, just doing the work she was doing. During the 1980s and 1990s it was almost unimaginable for us to even think about returning home to Vietnam, let alone seeing footage of our estranged relatives. This cinematic break was a reminder that we had indeed left a huge part of ourselves and other people behind. The coincidental apparition of Soeur Hương interrupted my parent’s effort to working and assimilating 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) is possibly one of Vietnam’s most important poets of the 20th century. Part of a group of artists who wanted to incorporate Modernism into folk poetry and the arts, Hàn Mặc Tử founded a new style of poetry he named as Ðiên “Mad” and Loạn “Chaos” which drew on Surrealist elements in the Vietnamese literary tradition.
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 is the most famous cultural reference of the 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 Vietnam’s beorgenoining re-development and Nationalist tourism industry.
