My childhood sometimes feels like a blur. Partially because, when you’re a kid, your memories collide into a haze, and partially because years of absorbing English makes the memory of me, an outspoken, eccentric Vietnamese child, seem the tiniest bit foreign. However, the one thing that always stuck out from my childhood in Vietnam was listening to musician Elvis Phuong.
Elvis Phuong, born Ngoc Phuong, is a popular Vietnamese jazz artist in the 70’s through the 90’s, particularly around Saigon and South Vietnam. He was known for singing a variety of songs, from true and traditional Vietnamese classics that have been around for decades, Vietnamese war ballads, love songs, Gospel music, and — perhaps what he’s most known for — French songs translated into Vietnamese lyrics. Especially for native Saigonese, which was a popular trend in music at the time, given Western influence (“nhac Tay,” they would call it), French classics were adapted and translated into Vietnamese, creating a glorious blend of half-sung French and half-sung Vietnamese lyrics, two languages dancing into one.
As you can imagine, the name origin of this artist is not a boring one. When five-year-old me asked my mom why he was named Elvis, she laughed and told me, “He loved Elvis Presley. So his stage name is Elvis Phuong.” So then, people called him Elvis Phuong.
His voice was deep, powerful, both soft and strong, and could hold a wide range, not unlike Elvis Presley, which surely must have pleased him. More than that, to his audience, Elvis Phuong had something unique. Though he didn’t write his own songs, which was common at the time for singers, he made each song his own. For me, the soft vibration of his voice when he belts out lyrics of love, versus the testimonies of pain in war ballads that were sung like he’s yelling, is like a seashell that I can hold up to hear the ocean of words, a tunnel into which I get to see and feel the lyrics.
I loved Elvis Phuong partially because of my mom. In my narrow, two-story home in the city, with white French doors stretching across the living room, my mom would pop one of his CDs in a CD player and the sound would bounce off of the thick walls of my house. She grew up in the 1980s through the 1990s, a time in Vietnam that went crazy for jazz music.
It vibrated throughout the square living room, rising up to where pictures of my family members hung for dam gio (an altar that served as the “great memory” of our ancestors), and filling up the space that my sister and I used for watching TV and doing weird shenanigans, like yelling into a metal stand fan to hear how weird our voices sounded.
It was well into my years living in the US that I truly began to appreciate Elvis Phuong as an artist. The further I lived from Vietnam, the more I connected to his lyrics. One day, when my mom and I were shuffling through his old songs out of nostalgia, I particularly grew in love with one ballad: “Con Yeu Em Mai” (“Yet I’ll Love You Forever”). When I asked my mom further what the song meant, I found out it was written by a man, Trung Cang Nguyen, as he recounted his experience during the Vietnam War.
A war song, but not the kind your history class shows you during the Vietnam War unit, filled with angst, political anthems, and metal — it was about a husband and wife. During the Vietnam War, the songwriter, Nguyen lost his job and, especially as a man in Vietnam, he didn’t know what to do. He was lost and humiliated.
His wife, a slender and small Vietnamese woman, stepped up and helped support him by selling down in the streets, where other Vietnamese now found themselves making a living after the war. Moved by feelings of shame, and also gratitude and humility, Nguyen did what he did best, despite being fired. He wrote a song, that reached to the depths of his oppression.
“I am alone in the mountains / Here, I hear the ice / Even a verse or ballad / Would bring all the more sadness to a broken spirit // Though I’m now isolated from life / Though we’ll never be apart / I lament the days and months / Why wait for me anymore? Are there any more minutes of joy?”
While, admirably, never forgetting his wife.
“Even though we are far away, we are tired / The marks of love remain / It warms the withered body / My love is like the wind that brings clouds, calling rain to cover the whole sky // My dear, I dream of the day that will come / When we meet, I’d cry for joy because of happiness.”
Nguyen’s soul is captured in his delicate embrace of his vulnerability amidst endurance and challenge, yet still bravely held by hope of his love. After commissioning Elvis Phuong to be the voice for his song, “Con Yeu Em Mai” is now one of the most popular and beloved songs among Vietnamese of that generation.
Though it’s a song inspired by war, I’ve found myself relating to it more as a universal anthem of love. Elvis Phuong’s voice, with lyrics by Nguyen, in this song represents the heart of Vietnam for me. A nation that — though others see it as a war-torn country, a hub for poverty, or even a vacation destination for just 3 months out of the year — I see as a resilient and sentimental people. A people who profess their love for their family and each other, a people known most for their humility and sacrifices; a people who live their days with gratitude and endurance, and who love their country.
As we grow older, it’s also the cry of refugees and immigrants across the world; after all, what migrant doesn’t know the paradox of pain mixed with love Phuong and Nguyen feel?
When I was younger, an eccentric and outspoken child living in Vietnam, I liked Elvis Phuong because of his melodic and mesmerizing voice, which still leaves layers unexplored. However, now, I associate Elvis Phuong’s music with not just his voice, but with the stories he carried, and the mirror he held up as a Vietnamese retelling Vietnamese stories.
I love the way I can imagine, now, as if the jazzy tones could have traveled 5 feet into the small kitchen, where my grandma and I once ate Danisa butter cookies on a 5 A.M. morning; or maybe backward, passing the room where my mom, sister, and I had many candle-lit campouts when the whole city blacked out; or upstairs to my dad’s workroom that I associated as Rapunzel’s tower because of the long, drawn-out staircase.
Even after re-exploring years later, there are a lot of Elvis Phuong songs that slip through the cracks. Despite scrounging the depths of YouTube (the trick is to type Vietnamese words into the search bar) or looking at his profile on Spotify, it’s almost one of those things where, if you know you know. Neither YouTube nor Spotify represents all of his songs, his profile only including a handful out of perhaps dozens of what he’s sung. That’s why I constantly probe my mom’s memory, manually finding and adding his songs to my playlists. If you know, you know; otherwise, there’s very little way to pass on his music.
The saddest example of this that has struck me recently was when my mom announced from an article from Nguoi Viet, a Vietnamese news publication (mostly read by her generation), that several Vietnamese artists she loved had died.
Other stars who were as big as Elvis Phuong before the Fall of Saigon, stars who were as famous and revered as pop stars in the U.S., singers who would light up the stage halls and operas and popular jazz clubs of Vietnam, had died or could no longer find work after emigrating.
Elvis Phuong remains active. After residing in France and the U.S., even starting his music studio called E.P. Productions in Cerritos, California, Phuong now resides in Vietnam and continues to host concerts. The last time I listened to his music was months after he recorded a new album in March 2023, retelling the songs that made him famous with renewed voice and maturity.
However, despite the joy I feel from my Elvis Phuong playlists, I feel the looming threat of its oblivion. I know that likely, when the generations of my grandmother and my mother pass away, so will the knowledge and love of what used to be good, the foundation of what could have built something even better.
Most of the backstories, hero’s journeys and funny anecdotes of Vietnam’s artistry rest in the hearts of the elderly, and they remain there. Though Vietnamese adults often exchange stories and words of wisdom within their homes, elderly grandparents may soon grow quiet about their prior days of vinyl records, cafes and hometown pride as they find their kids or their grandkids unresponsive. Parents and grandparents are sensitive to the insecurities of being unable to adapt to America, while children lack a sense of security in their identity and fear of never belonging.
As these generational gaps snowball over decades, the gaps become filled with mistranslations and emotional turmoils of losing our identities from both sides, turning the silent battles into a losing war. There is now no avid culture dedicated to reviving the art, purity and fun of Vietnam. It is especially so if its people don’t remember what was fun about it, only remembering the burdens of sacrifice, exile and minority insecurity it brought up. In short, few people nowadays care.
Even if Vietnamese culture expands beyond Little Saigon, or a few select cultural hubs, even if our Vietnamese-written newspapers continue to be run, or our food legacies somehow miraculously survives after past generations who held the keys to our recipes die, it won’t make a difference if the young don’t care.
I find it disheartening to be one of the only listeners today of Elvis Phuong of my generation. Not because Elvis Phuong’s music isn’t classic or has failed to withstand the test of time, but because we continue to hold ourselves back from embracing our days as outspoken, eccentric Vietnamese children once again, which becomes our downfall as a community.
