My grandmother, the Vietnamese rock star and cultural icon | Opinion

Nguyễn Thi Tâm is exactly where she wants to be: on stage. It’s 1963, and the 18-year-old singer is performing to a tightly packed nightclub in the heart of Saigon. She’s wearing her usual attire — a silk Vietnamese tunic styled with long black hair and a sly smile.

Gently swaying under the club’s moody lights, she launches into a soulful rendition of Nat King Cole’s “Tenderly.”

“I loved to sing,” Tâm, now 80, says. “My wish had come true.”

I didn’t know much about my grandmother’s brief singing career growing up. Tâm, whom I know as Bà Nội (father’s mother), never spoke in detail about Saigon’s nightclubs after she immigrated to the United States. She claimed it was trivial, and our family believed her. It wasn’t until 2019, when she received a suspicious email from a movie producer, requesting to use her music in a Vietnamese drama, that the family started to pay attention.

Tâm first mentioned the email during a phone call with my aunt, Hannah Ha, a colorectal surgeon living in St. Louis. My aunt was initially dismissive.

“Mom, don’t answer that. They’re trying to scam you,” she warned Tâm.

But when Tâm brought up the movie again during a family trip, her interest piqued. Looking for answers, Hannah searched her mother’s name online.

That’s when she discovered that Tâm wasn’t the occasional nightclub singer her stories had suggested. In reality, she was a Vietnamese rock ‘n’ roll icon better known by her stage name — Phương Tâm. Even more astonishing, she had left behind recorded music. Hannah discovered a handful of low-quality tracks attributed to Phương Tâm on YouTube, which had amassed a cult-following from pre-1975 Vietnamese music enthusiasts.

Why hadn’t my grandmother mentioned this second life before? All she could say was: “You never asked.”

Over the next two years, Hannah scoured record stores and online forums to uncover Phương Tâm’s lost music.

“I just felt so compelled to find out who my mom was,” Hannah tells me. “I had looked at her for 55 years, and I had no idea who this woman was.”

In 2021, 25 of these restored songs were released on “Magical Nights: Saigon Surf, Twist & Soul,” a compilation of Phương Tâm’s recorded output from 1964 to 1966. After 60 years, the music has been reunited with its singer.

Over the phone, I ask Tâm what it’s like to hear her younger voice again. She begins to tear up. My grandmother isn’t a very talkative woman, but she’s far from stoic.

“It make me very happy and very emotional,” she says in broken English. “I never think it ever come back to my family.”

Tâm had recorded countless tracks with many of Saigon’s major labels and influential composers, but she rarely listened to the copies they gave her. When she and my grandfather moved to the Đà Nẵng Air Base in 1965 for his position as a flight surgeon, she left her singing career and the associated recordings behind.

“I don’t think I had listened to my voice since I was 18 years old,” she tells me.

And what a voice it is. When I first clicked play on “Magical Nights” in high school, I couldn’t believe the commanding, borderline sassy vocals belonged to my grandmother. Phương Tâm belts her way through a dazzling blend of electric guitars and dancing drums — American rock ‘n’ roll with a Vietnamese twist. In an instant, I was transported back to Saigon’s nightclubs.

When I mention this to Alexander Cannon, an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Birmingham, he immediately spots the universality of my experience.

“There’s a kind of intergenerational connection enabled through preserved recordings that occurs within and amongst families across national boundaries,” he says.

As I track the course of Phương Tâm’s singing career, I’m starting to see her music is still in dialogue with our present moment. I find radio shows playing her songs and producers sampling her voice for hip-hop beats. She’s part of the score for a rooftop fashion show in New York and the subject of a banner on a street pole in Santa Clara.

It makes sense that Phương Tâm’s music would resonate with my generation. Tâm herself was once the embodiment of Saigon’s restless youth. At just 16 years old, she dropped out of high school against her father’s wishes to pursue a singing career and joined Đoàn Văn Nghệ, the South Vietnamese army’s entertainment brigade. Unsatisfied with her pay, she dropped out again, running to the city’s burgeoning nightlife.

Once again, Tâm found herself at odds with convention as she brought the rebellious soundscapes of American rock ‘n’ roll to Saigon’s unsuspecting audiences. A translated magazine review of her performance from 1962 describes the crowd “screaming, clapping their hands and stomping their feet like wild animals.”

Today, Tâm is modest about her rock star status.

“I just old lady,” she says when I ask why she stopped performing. “When I marry your granddaddy, I don’t want to sing anymore.”

Despite her humility, I suspect Tâm secretly enjoys her reclaimed fame. Since the album’s release, her music has been featured in several commercials, movies and TV shows. It’s become an inside family joke: “I can’t believe Phương Tâm is cooking me pho!”

When her song “Nếu Có Xa Nhau” appeared in an HBO adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” my family gathered around the television to catch her reaction. It was a homecoming moment — Phương Tâm soundtracking a modern depiction of 1960s Vietnam. Even without her dentures, Tâm was beaming.

It’s tempting to call this renaissance period a comeback, but when Tâm left the stage, she didn’t quit singing altogether. It was still present in our family. Her voice took on a new life at house parties, karaoke nights and family gatherings. Even now, when I visit my grandmother, I can expect to be woken up by her 5 a.m. rendition of “Tenderly.” She’s always been a star.

And after 60 years, Phương Tâm is finally getting her encore.

Justin Ha is a Los Angeles-based multimedia journalist studying journalism and political science at the University of Southern California.