I left the movie thankful that I didn’t have a figure in my life as controlling as Neil’s father. Even if my choices were limited at home, it was better to have a small set of options than to have a future I wanted and other people got to have, but that I somehow couldn’t pursue. I would make an excellent doctor, and my family would be proud of my success. In my country, that felt enough.

—

Maybe this was just how the mind worked, that as soon as you decide something is out of reach, then you notice everything that brings it tantalizingly within sight. That year I turned fourteen was also the year when Lea Salonga was cast to play the lead role of Kim in the London production of Miss Saigon, which would eventually go to Broadway. This was a route to the West I hadn’t envisioned; Lea was so talented that powerful men searched the whole world to find her, then brought her to their land as a star.

I bought the recording when it was released in early 1990, which was when I learned the full scope of the plot, how Miss Saigon was not just about a talented singer from my country fulfilling her dream of becoming a star on Broadway; the musical itself was about a similar dream, of women from our neighboring country of Vietnam hoping to come to America through the power of love.

The show begins when Kim enters a Saigon bar for the first time, forced to sell her body after her village is burned and her parents killed. A shy American soldier named Chris becomes enamored of her, and one of Chris’s marine buddies purchases Kim for his friend. When Kim realizes that she will join a man for the first time, she sings of her inner dreams, the fragments of fantasies she’s created from her limited knowledge of America. She believes it’s a land of wealth and that not all soldiers are evil, as she longs for “a man who will not kill / who’ll fight for me instead.”

Chris is the perfect representation of Kim’s dreams, a rugged and kind man who falls in love with her innocence and pledges to protect her at all costs as she sings of him being the sunlight to her moon, the force of blazing energy in contrast to her mystery. Even as the war ultimately wrenches the two lovers apart, there is never any doubt that the American soldier only has the best intentions and that their fate is the fault of circumstance rather than his character.