How ‘Paris by Night’ Became the Spirit of Vietnamese American Life

Updated 10:26 a.m. Tuesday

In the days before smartphones and personalized feeds, every family had their regular shows they watched on the living room TV.

Some sat down to watch the nightly news, others tuned in to a game show or rooted for the winning basketball team. However, if your family is Vietnamese, one show has always played for everyone in practically every household: Paris By Night.

Growing up in East San José, my grandma’s house was the center for all family functions. My extended family would show up in droves, bringing platters of egg rolls, roasted pork, fried rice and more.

While the aunts and uncles gleefully hollered over food and gossip, Paris by Night consistently permeated through the clamor. And that’s a common experience.

“Oh my God, that was the soundtrack of my life; it still is,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong said. “As a kid, it was the only time that you saw cool Asians on TV,” adding that there was excitement in her entire family about getting the latest episode. “It was, like, religious. Any time the newest Paris by Night came out, when the VHS tape dropped, that was a day that was marked on the calendar.”

What did we see?

A Vietnamese folk singer belting out a ballad with gravitas or a euro-dance pop number booming through the big living room TV speakers.

Occasionally, the “grown-ups” would pause their conversation to listen in and reminisce.

Elders, like my grandma, would have a front-row seat, tuning out the buzz and tuning into this larger-than-life display of Vietnamese culture.

Paris By Night is a flashy variety show with musical acts, dance numbers, interviews and vaudeville-style comedy skits. For many decades, it was the cultural anchor for “Viet Kieu,” or Vietnamese people who had fled their homeland.

And that’s the purpose of Paris By Night: to reconnect the Vietnamese diaspora, like my grandma, to the culture that was left behind.

Fleeing to Paris, recreating Vietnam in California

The show’s beginnings can be traced back to Tô Văn Lai, who sold cassette tapes in their Saigon record shop of local singers, like Thaí Thanh.

When he and his wife Thuy fled to Paris in 1976, they brought their collection of tapes and records to remind them of Vietnam.

Under the Paris night skies, Tô, who deeply missed his homeland, dreamt of recapturing the melodies that would bring him the warmth of Vietnam. And so, Paris By Night was conceived.

Nearly 22 episodes of the show were produced for the Vietnamese community in France before expanding internationally and relocating to Orange County, California. Tô and Thuy’s daughter, Marie Tô Ngoc Thuy, now serves as the executive producer with her husband, Paul Huynh, at Thuy Nga Productions, the company that owns Paris By Night.

“In Paris by Night, we have 138 volumes. And then beside that, we produce comedies, live concerts, so anything related to Vietnamese music,” Marie Tô said, not to mention the 600 CDs they have produced.

Back when videotapes and DVDs were a hot commodity, Paris By Night flourished. The shift from France to Southern California also proved to be the right business move since there was a pool of Hollywood producers, designers and choreographers next door. As a result, production levels soared and became more sophisticated.

Shanda Sawyer was one of those Hollywood choreographers who came into Paris By Night. Sawyer is an L.A.-based creative director and choreographer and works closely with Marie Tô to come up with set pieces and musical numbers.

“It’s such a long creative relationship, but we really create well together,” said Sawyer, who has been with Paris By Night for over 20 years.

Before every show is filmed, Sawyer has two weeks to work with the Vietnamese artists and backup dancers to rehearse their numbers. She said, “I was able to really connect with the Vietnamese artists in a way that I could help them not only realize their individual songs, but recreate a lot of the culture that had been lost.”

In addition to creating videos, the company performed live in multiple cities, including San José in 2003, and cemented the household name it is today.

My parents attended that show, and when I asked my mom about it, she paused in a daze, trying to remember those long-ago memories. She said watching it live was so much better than viewing it at home on DVDs. She also recalled the music, dancing, choreography, the banners and even her favorite singers, Ý Lan and Khánh Ly.

Duong told KQED that her mother would wait in line at the Lion Plaza in San José to get the newest videotapes and her whole family would excitedly sit down to watch them on repeat.

“On Saturdays and Sundays, it would just play in the background nonstop,” she said. “For my parents, the more classical songs would give them a sense of home.”

A contrast to representation in American media

For the Vietnamese diaspora, Paris By Night was a welcome contrast to how we were represented in Western visual media. Most depictions of Vietnam have centered around the war, typically from the perspective of American soldiers, like Platoon, The Deer Hunter and Casualties of War.

Rarely has there been a piece of visual media about the Vietnam War (also known in Vietnam as the American War) that has centered on the Vietnamese perspective. That is, until last year’s HBO mini-series, The Sympathizer, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who fled Vietnam when he was 4 years old.

“It’s a war that continues to need to be grappled with, but it’s also exhausting that everything is concentrated so much around this horrific experience of colonialism and war,” explained Nguyen. “It’s something that we should remember, but we shouldn’t pass on. How do we do that? That’s a balancing act.”

For a lot of the Vietnamese diaspora, we wanted to find a representation of home that didn’t just depict graphic violence or Asian stereotypes of a war-torn country, but rather showcased our joy, resilience, nostalgia, music, performing arts, comedy, etc. Paris By Night was able to fill that tall order — weaving this complicated tapestry of emotions and politics into an at-home experience.

Nguyen explained that his parents were culturally conservative, but still found Paris by Night entertaining. He called it the Hollywood of the Vietnamese diaspora.

“I wasn’t particularly infatuated with Paris by Night, but I knew it. I knew who they were,” he remarked. “I knew the music that they were singing and somehow that rubbed off on me.”

Which meant that even if you weren’t into the show, it still influenced the burgeoning Vietnamese American culture in unexpected ways, such as knowing how to do outdated dances from the late 1980s.

“When I went to college, I learned how to do the cha-cha,” he told me. “You could do the cha-cha if you’re a Vietnamese American,” Nguyen said. “This was all wrapped up with the idea of Paris by Night that we had a distinct Vietnamese American youth culture, pop culture and subculture.”

Full circle to Vietnam

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, counterfeit DVDs and videotapes helped Paris by Night reach a wider audience, including viewers in Vietnam, but the illegal copies also undermined the show’s ability to make a profit. Bootlegs were sold in the thousands at video stores. 

In Vietnam, official merchandise of Paris By Night is banned due to its occasional political messaging; however, the underground piracy market allowed locals to access the show, and they have expressed gratitude and excitement for its cultural impact. In a full-circle moment, Paris by Night still manages to reach Vietnamese audiences not only internationally, but also in the homeland — the longing for which inspired the show.

One time, when Tô was traveling in Da Nang, a taxi driver recognized her as “chị Thuy” (sister Thuy) and expressed his gratitude. “They thank us for preserving the culture, preserving the song, that all those Paris by Night would be the success,” Tô added about the people she met in Vietnam. “That was the happiest moment for them, watching with their family.”

Through music and performing, the Vietnamese diaspora felt more united. “There’s this beautiful connection of all of the artists who left Vietnam paying homage to their culture and then that culture returning to Vietnam,” Sawyer said.

Some of the piracy troubles nearly put the company out of business in 2010, but community support and new business strategies managed to salvage it. However, operating the company is still a struggle, and Tô has to find a way to reach a new generation of audiences.

“Because this is the digital era, the income from all the digital platforms are not enough for you to produce a quality show,” Marie Tô said. “Our talented singers, now they’re getting older … I think if we want to continue Paris by Night, we have to renew our blood, like do a talent show, looking for new singers. So we have to start a new road again.”

In an effort to fight piracy and achieve a larger digital reach, Thuy Nga archived many of Paris By Night’s older episodes on its official YouTube channel. While I was watching Paris By Night episodes on YouTube, I noticed that most, if not all, of the comments are in Vietnamese.

The comments under the Têt-themed episode ranged from nostalgic, like, “I miss my family, I miss my hometown, I miss my grandparents, I miss old memories when my family was still full,” to curious, “I’m 10 years old, but I really like Vietnamese Tet. I’m trying to learn Vietnamese and preserve Vietnamese culture.”

It appears that the older generation is still seeking out cultural comfort, while some in the younger generation feel connected to the show.

Even Marie Tô gets nostalgic for Paris By Night, thinking about the opening song in the 40th Anniversary of the “Fall of Saigon” episode (#114) in 2015. “I watched that performance the other day, and I had tears in my eyes,” she said. “That’s the sweetest memory for me. Because that, I think, tells what Paris By Night wants to achieve.”

Paris by Night for the next generations

For Vietnamese Americans like me who grew up primarily in the U.S., language barriers still exist.

I have a basic understanding of the language — I can ask grandma what she ate that morning and if she slept well the previous night — but going deeper and asking about her childhood is a challenge.

Watching Paris By Night, there was a lot I didn’t quite grasp. Like, why did this MC make a joke that had my family falling out of their seats, while I was sitting there feeling left out? Or, when a musical performance would make references to an old folktale, I’d have to ask my aunt for a full backstory.

In my mind, this show has been something for the “grown-ups.” This was made for my parents’ generation, by my parents’ generation.

Older generations are still tuning in as new episodes become available on DVD or drop on the Thuy Nga YouTube channel. My mom and aunts will gossip about which singer on the show recently got divorced with the same fervor as when my friends and I talk about the latest The White Lotus episode. As our parents’ generation ages, so does the show, but Paris By Night isn’t something that could be passed down the same way an heirloom might when a relative dies.

These days, I find myself wondering how I will continue to engage in my own culture. It might be the food I make, the Viet pop songs I listen to every now and then or the phrases I’d say when my cat is stinky (con mèo thúi). I think a lot of us are still trying to reconnect with what was left behind — or, in my case, something I’ve never fully known.

Paris By Night was built on memories over many decades and continues to be a cultural throughline for a lot of the Vietnamese diaspora.

No matter where we live, my whole family still gravitates to my grandma’s house every year during Têt. Of course, Paris By Night still plays on the big living room TV, as if to remind us that this is home, in so many ways. And that’s when I feel the same warmth that Tô yearned for way back when in Paris, right here in my grandma’s home in San José.