The Beatles of Vietnam

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/opinion/beatles-of-vietnam.html

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As so many rock ’n’ roll stories do, the CBC Band’s began with the purchase of a guitar behind the back of a disapproving father.

When he was a young child in Vietnam, Tung Linh wanted a guitar, so his mother bought one for him. His father, Phan Van Pho, was a cook for French officials in Hanoi, and he wanted his children to become doctors or engineers, not musicians. When he found the guitar, he smashed it.

But his wife, Hoang Thi Nga, nurtured Tung Linh’s interest in American music, which he shared with two of his seven siblings: Bich Loan, a singer, and Tung Van on drums. When their father died in the late 1950s, Ms. Hoang went to work as a custodian on a Republic of Vietnam naval base. The family was poor, and those years were hard, but she wanted her children to be happy, so she nurtured their desire to perform American music.

Ngoc Lan, an older brother who also played drums in South Vietnam’s Navy band, noticed the talent of three of his younger siblings, and in 1963 he created a Vietnamese “Partridge Family,” before the American version existed. They were called the CBC Band, which stood for Con Ba Cu, “Mother’s Children.” It was a way to honor their mother for her unwavering support, Bich Loan said in a recent telephone interview.

The children were so small when they started the band that no one could see the youngest, Tung Van, behind his drum set, even if he was standing. They had started with covers like “You Are My Sunshine” and Ray Charles’s “What I Say,” just for fun. None of the children spoke English, so Ngoc Lan wrote the lyrics down phonetically in Vietnamese. From 1963 to 1965, the CBC Band performed in talent shows around Saigon. Then American troops began arriving in Vietnam in earnest, and their presence turned a hobby into a career.

If the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival made stars of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding, the escalation of America’s troop presence in Vietnam did the same for the CBC Band. Ngoc Lan recognized a business opportunity in entertaining the large number of troops, and he reached out to local Vietnamese music promoters who contracted with the Army’s Special Services Agency to book acts for officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs. A sister had performed with another band in Vung Tau, where music acts were in high demand because of the coastal city’s status as an R & R spot for American servicemen. The CBC Band joined her there for several gigs, and she ended up joining the family band in 1969. By the early 1970s, the band was on the Army’s approved entertainment list and made $325 a gig.

The CBC Band traveled all over South Vietnam, wherever American troops were stationed. As the group played more gigs, they got tied in to the local rock and folk scene that included more established musicians like Khanh Ly, Trinh Cong Son and Elvis Phuong. Every Sunday, they would jam together, playing music inspired by American rock ’n’ roll, ballads and folk songs. Word of the band spread through G.I. networks, and soon the demand for CBC Band shows grew so high that sometimes the band performed seven nights a week. Soldiers sought out Ngoc Lan and gave him tapes of rock ’n’ roll songs they wanted the band to learn. Ray Charles and the Beatles were among the more popular requests that Bich Loan remembers.

“We would listen and copy them exactly like the record,” said Bich Loan, who was in her early teens when the band began touring military bases. They played their own music, too, carefully crafted to sound like American rock, like “Tien Yeu Tuyet Voi,” or “The Greatest Love.” Troops ate up those songs too. “American soldiers loved us,” Bich Loan said. “They couldn’t believe such young children could sing American music.”

Troops showed their gratitude with money. The band members walked away from most gigs with more money in tips than what the clubs paid them. They gave all their earnings to their mother and, eventually, the CBC Band made enough to allow her to quit her job on the naval base.

“She had worked hard enough for us,” Bich Loan said.

It was war that brought the CBC Band success and financial security, but Bich Loan remembers that she and her brothers were too young to understand the complexities of the conflict. They wondered why Vietnamese were fighting each other, and why Americans had joined in, but that was the extent of their thoughts about it, she said. Everyone seemed to come together and enjoy the show when the CBC Band played, so why did they go off and fight afterward? Couldn’t rock ’n’ roll music stop a war?

Perhaps not, but it could raise money for Vietnamese soldiers and war widows. In 1970, the CBC Band helped form Vietnam’s first rock ’n’ roll festival to raise money for military families. The Saigon government sanctioned the event, and Jo Marcel, a Vietnamese singer turned local nightclub owner and music producer whose given name was Vu Ngoc Tong, promoted it.

In the end, the band was a casualty of war, too. Tung Linh received his draft notice in 1973, and he entered boot camp for six months of training. But his mother did what she could to help her son play music, which was what made him happy. She paid a handsome bribe to a high-ranking officer to secure her son’s release from the army, arguing that she was old and needed him at home, and in any case, two older sons had already served in the navy.

Yet normalcy proved elusive, as Tung Linh worried that he was constantly under police surveillance. When he drove his Honda to the market or around town and had to pass through security checkpoints, the guards always asked him why, given his young age, he wasn’t in the army. Military officers began harassing Hoang Thi Nga because they suspected she had bought his release. Worried that the army might call for him again, his mother enlisted the help of some American and Canadian concert tour managers to organize a CBC Band world tour to get the band out of Vietnam. The promoters planned an 18-month tour, and the siblings figured they’d return home after it ended. Hoang Thi Nga cried when she said goodbye to her children.

While the band was on the road, Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Bich Loan and the other band members were asleep in Tibet when it happened; when they woke up and heard the news, they cried. They took refuge in a monastery and tried to figure out what to do. Their mother was still in Saigon.

“We thought we’d just be on a world tour for a year or so,” Bich Loan said. “We didn’t think we’d never go back.”

They were afraid to go back. There was a picture of the band members in downtown Saigon wearing American clothing and T-shirts with the American flag emblazoned on them. The new government branded the band members criminals and placed them on a most-wanted list because they had worked with Americans. The Phan siblings would later learn that their mother burned all their tapes and pictures of them with American troops, fearing retribution by the new government. They had been rock stars, but now they were refugees. In October 1975, the CBC Band entered the United States, thanks in part to a Vietnam veteran named Frank Ford, who worked in refugee resettlement after the fall of Saigon.

Two or three years passed before band members could reach family in Vietnam. In the meantime, the band had hooked up with American and Canadian concert promoters and booked some shows. After a concert in Montreal, a friend helped them call Vietnam. Over the next two decades, band members became American citizens; sponsored relatives, including their mother, to relocate to the United States; and returned to Vietnam to perform. They still do, giving charity shows after which they donate all concert earnings to orphanages, nursing homes and other places that serve the poor. Young Vietnamese, for whom 1975 is a foreign world, are interested in the CBC Band and other singers and musicians from the era, Bich Loan said. It reflects a broader curiosity among the young about the history of South Vietnam, especially the people and the stories that the government has erased from official histories.

The CBC Band has a following in the United States, too. Bich Loan and the other members who remained in America live in Houston, and the band performs for the city’s large Vietnamese-American community. Ngoc Lan, who founded the band back in 1963, has moved back to Vietnam permanently.

When Bich Loan reflects on the band’s history, she feels grateful for Americans — for American music, for the American troops who supported the band and for Frank Ford the American vet who helped the band resettle in the United States. Yet the band members also lamented the war’s destruction of Vietnamese life and land — a contradiction, like so much about the war was. Destroying a village in order to save it. Fighting while negotiating. Promises of liberation and freedom uttered by oppressive governments. Some Vietnamese kids brought joy to American G.I.s by performing rock concerts in the middle of a war that killed young people on all sides.