Actresses Elyse Dinh and Vivien Ngô Share Their Families’ Refugee Stories

In her approximate 30 year acting career, Elyse Dinh was usually either dressed in a lab coat playing a nurse or was seen grieving the loss of her children. As a Vietnamese-American woman, these were the roles Elyse was locked into, until she broke free, and stepped into the spotlight on Queen Sugar.

Queen Sugar is the hit drama series that airs on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Directed & executive produced by Ava Duvernay and Oprah Winfrey, the show is set in contemporary New Orleans, and chronicles the lives of estranged siblings.

In the last season that recently premiered, the mother and daughter of a Vietnamese-American family were introduced. And it is Elyse’s role, in Queen Sugar, that for the first time, she does not play a marginalized character, but a contemporary character of Vietnamese descent.

“It’s pretty realistic,” Elyse said of the way Queen Sugar represents Vietnamese-American culture. “My character owns a seafood processing plant. There is a real women who is like my character, and she is awesome. Her name is Theresa. We shot on location at her seafood plant.”

Like the character she plays, Elyse is also a Vietnamese refugee.

“I was 8. Went to school there,” Elyse recalled of her life in Vietnam on Brad Show Live. “I got to second grade there. I remember the day that we left. I remember I had to beg my grandfather to come with me, and he wouldn’t. He said I am an old man and will take my chances here.”

Having never seen her grandfather again, she escaped the Vietnam War with her mother and father, where they ended up at Camp Pendleton, a military base that was reinvented to house thousands of Vietnamese refugees.

Among Elyse and her family living at the refugee site were the relatives of Vivien Ngô, the actress who plays Elyse’s daughter in Queen Sugar.

“I know Elyse was probably at Camp Pendleton at the same time my family was,” Vivien said on Brad Show Live. “They just never crossed paths because it was so huge.”

While Vivien was born in California, her immediate relatives similarly left Vietnam, and settled in a Vietnamese community in Southern California.

“My father was one of the first ones to arrive. They [ my father and his brothers] left pretty much the week of the fall [Fall of Saigon]…. My dad talked his way onto a spot on a boat,” Vivien said. He “stayed in Guam and wound up at Camp Pendleton.”

Many Vietnamese refugees, including Vivien’s father, who stayed at Camp Pendleton, were later sponsored by American families. This allowed for her father to slowly, but surely, file and petition the rest of his family to come to the U.S.

For the refugees that were never sponsored, they remained undocumented, protected by the sheer measure that the U.S. could not deport them due to poor U.S.-Vietnamese diplomatic ties. Because of that, for decades, thousands of Vietnamese refugees lived in the U.S., where they created business and families.

“Decades later, they [the Vietnamese refugees] are law abiding wonderful citizens with families,” Vivien weighed in on the state of undocumented Vietnamese refugees.

Despite years of living in the U.S., the families that Elyse and Vivien grew up with and were surrounded by, are now being targeted by the Trump Administration’s deportation efforts.

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