Paris by Night

My mother didn’t quite get the memo about Mozart. She filled our home with the ambient din of Paris by Night, a Vietnamese variety show filmed neither in Paris nor at night but on an afternoon soundstage in Southern California. For a production void of any French bohemian flair, the romantic grandeur of Paris (Pa-ree, as we pronounced it) is invoked only in name. But Vietnamese audiences, I suspect, delight in this misleading misnomer. They buy into the show’s biannual dose of cheesy glamour, wherein wartime trauma, homeland nostalgia, and refugee identity are encased in a pastiche sheen of pride.

Paris by Night is like MTV for the Vietnamese diaspora, if MTV was a direct-to-video live concert series with an eclectic line-up of folk singers, ballad crooners, slapstick comedians, back-up dancers, and pop performers, whose acts loosely cohere around a misty, maudlin theme. Its aesthetic sensibility is sentimental kitsch, a blend of the traditional and the theatrical. Think Shen Yun meets Jingle Ball with a cabaret twist. There are hardly any original songs, mostly covers. In addition to classic folk melodies, artists and musicians incorporate Western music styles into their acts, fusing genres like rock ‘n’ roll or disco with Vietnamese lyrics. Yet for decades, Paris by Night made for blasé background television, supplying a multi-hour, family-friendly soundtrack suitable for Vietnamese homes and businesses alike.

For years, PBN’s songs lay dormant in my mind, switching on in sporadic spurts like a broken radio. During the pandemic, one particular melody clung insistently to my inner ear. The ballad was a plangent duet, sung at a reverberant, rueful register. I couldn’t recall any of the lyrics, just the melody, which I hummed off-key into the Shazam app. I scavenged for leads on Vietnamese music forums. I asked my mom, stopping short of singing it aloud over the phone. The earworm eventually ran its course, quietly slinking out the mind’s back door. Before then, I had sunk hours into “research,” knee-deep in a YouTube rabbit hole of old Paris by Night episodes, committing the names and faces of its performers to memory, determined to identify the elusive melody at long last. The song turned out to be “Xin Lỗi Anh” (I’m Sorry) by singers Minh Tuyet and Bang Kieu, and was one of Paris by Night’s most popular YouTube videos with 16 million views.

Like its target audience, Paris by Night is a product of wartime displacement, of the reminiscent listlessness of transnational migration. Its creator Tô Văn Lai (1937-2022) was a Saigon schoolteacher, who bought a record store in the 1970s with his wife Thúy. He began producing, recording, and distributing the albums of two Vietnamese “New Wave” musicians, Thái Thanh and Thanh Tuyền, under the label Thúy Nga. About a year after the Northern occupation of South Vietnam, Tô and his family immigrated to Paris with their entire music collection in tow. There, they worked odd jobs to sustain Tô’s vision of bringing Vietnamese music to the Western market.

In 1983, Tô invited exiled musicians to perform at the first Paris by Night production, which was staged with the help of French producer Jean Pierre Barry, who directed and financed some of the early shows. These early releases were centered on homeland exile, with titles like Farewell Saigon, A Teardrop for Vietnam, and Which Spring Shall I Return that primarily catered to the “first wave” of Vietnamese refugees — military personnel and urban, educated professionals with links to the South Vietnamese or American government. Paris by Night wasn’t filmed on a soundstage until the seventh show, and Tô soon realized the production’s potential for expansion, specifically to the US, where more of the Vietnamese diaspora were settling. With limited Vietnamese-language entertainment abroad, new immigrants became devoted viewers of the show. Demand was high. Paris by Night went international in the 1990s, taping in Las Vegas, Houston and across Southern California. (Paris remained the show’s home base until 2003, when Tô had relocated the company to Orange County, California, a populous hub for Vietnamese immigrants). By the mid-1990s, four new tapes were released per year, with each production costing nearly half a million dollars to produce. Tickets to live shows, ranging from $300 to $1,500 apiece, quickly sold out. This rising influence coincided with the influx of Vietnamese immigrants in the US, where the population grew fivefold from 1980 (253,000) to 2010 (1.6 million), more viewers and more video sales. Production budgets, too, rose to $1-2 million per show in the 2010s.

During this so-called heyday of Paris by Night, the production came to define and dominate Vietnamese American entertainment. Its success spurred competing productions, like Asia Entertainment, which sought to replicate PBN’s format with different performers. But Paris by Night remained the marquee brand, capable of establishing and elevating the careers of Vietnamese entertainers. “[Paris by Night] totally changed my career, and helped me build my name in the US,” according to the native Vietnamese pop-star Tóc Tiên. As the Vietnamese diaspora grew in size and affluence, Paris by Night emboldened and endorsed certain cultural shifts through thematic selections, emcee commentary, and even comedy sketches. A sketch from Paris by Night 96 featured the singer Bằng Kiều as a gay teenager whose family eventually comes to terms with his sexuality.

According to the scholar Nhi T. Lieu, Paris by Night was once an essential means of “envisioning Vietnamese culture in exile.” Its presence was vital to the formation of “a new diasporic Vietnamese subjectivity,” allowing the community to “[shed] an ‘impoverished refugee’ image for a … hybrid, bourgeois, ethnic identity.” It set the standard for Vietnamese acculturation in America by promoting an idealized, prosperous image of diasporic identity, with one foot staunchly in the past. Lieu states that the show “construct[s] a trajectory of [economic] upward mobility,” even while disrupting traditional representations of “Vietnamese-ness” in certain musical acts. Singers like Lynda Trang Đài (who has been called “the Vietnamese Madonna”) and Tommy Ngô are branded as more “Americanized,” singing covers of hits like “I Need A Hero” or “China Girl” and performing sultry, Bond-inspired choreography in “Không.” Indeed, these changes have alienated some older audiences, who’ve criticized the production for straying from its traditional roots. My late grandfather, a former South Vietnamese military commander, preferred Asia Entertainment to PBN for its commitment to commemorative themes; our family went to see Asia’s production on the 55th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.

With 137 (and counting) installments, there is a Paris by Night tape for every season and occasion: Tết, Valentine’s Day, the Fall of Saigon, Mother’s Day, Christmas, and more. After 41 years, the thematic cyclicality inevitably grows repetitive. To older audiences, this only affirms the show’s old-fashioned charm. If memory is a souvenir of a bygone season, reminiscence needs its ritual calendar. And twice every year (if not more), like clockwork, a new Paris by Night tape is released to remind us of our shared culture of memory, even if that reminder is an uninspired simulacrum of a rapidly receding past.

And yet Paris by Night has long had to contend with tensions between Westernized modernity and Vietnamese tradition. The greatest threat to PBN was its direct-to-video (or DVD, in later years) business model. DVDs became defunct with online streaming services. With the internet, PBN had to also contend with bootleg downloads of its tapes, which sell for about $25 a piece. According to PBN’s parent company Thúy Nga, DVD sales plummeted from 85,000 in 2005 to 30,000 in 2015. Production is barely profitable, according to Marie Tô, Tô Văn Lai’s daughter and CEO of Thúy Nga Entertainment, and revenue has declined over the past decade. Since 2010, the shows have been staged for free at various Southern California or Las Vegas casinos. This offsets exorbitant rental costs at theater venues, as Thúy Nga has negotiated a deal with casino managers for bringing customers to their doors. Thúy Nga’s latest venture into public broadcasting has yielded some optimistic results, but these stopgap solutions won’t be able to stave off the inevitable. PBN’s target audience is aging, and younger Vietnamese Americans aren’t interested in the live shows. Perhaps the greatest sign of a sea change was the 2022 retirement of Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn, PBN’s distinguished master of ceremonies, who eloquently presided over the production and penned many of its skits for thirty years. Nguyễn’s departure marks a new chapter for the show. Even my parents no longer keep up with Paris by Night. Native Vietnamese entertainment and Vietnamese-dubbed shows are now accessible on-demand, thanks to globalized streaming services. The Western pop culture landscape, too, has changed to be more inclusive, and younger Vietnamese American viewers can look to TikTok or YouTube for their representational role models. As the Vietnamese diaspora matures, the sense of exilic community cultivated by Paris by Night now seems superfluous to its children, fully assimilated consumers of American culture.

I’ve never seen anyone sit down to intently watch Paris by Night from start to end. Our attention spans are too short now. In my family, snippets of the show were consumed seemingly via osmosis, a dance number here and a comedy sketch there, in restaurants, auto repair shops, doctor’s waiting rooms, and nail salons. We played it at home, sometimes as a substitute for dinner conversation. But with the television on, there was a rare synchronicity of feeling, like a current of electricity running between us. We simulated the subtle emotive cue of a laugh track or a tearful close-up, tapped our feet to the rhythm of a rumba or a tango. During gatherings with our extended family, it occurred to me that Paris by Night was crucial in imparting a mood of general merriment upon the event, mediating a casual joviality that my relatives otherwise struggled to maintain. My mother kept it playing on mute long after the guests went home.