Tram Le

Tram at the Vietnamese Table at Oldenborg during her time as the Interim Director of CAPAs at Pitzer where she was instrumental to the founding of the 5-Claremont Vietnamese Student Association (VSA). She is currently the Associate Director of the Vietnamese American Oral History Project at UC Irvine.

“My family come over in 1975 at the fall of Saigon so there wasn’t a huge Vietnamese community at the time. I was very young so I practically grew up in the U.S...I didn’t know anything about Vietnam.”

“She looked at my name and goes ‘Oh, you’re Tram’ and I had never heard that name ever in my life because you know my mom always calls me Trâm. So that  was my first introduction to how the rest of your life was going to be. People are going to just assume things and butcher your name and butcher your culture and all of that.”

“Where our family found community was through the Buddhist Temple and that’s where a lot of other Vietnamese refugee families went to.Every weekend we would go to the temple and that’s where other people who I thought, oh, these are people who get me.”

Tram Le

2013: Associate Director - UC Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History Project (VAOHP)

2012: Interim Director - Pitzer’s Center for Asian Pacific American Students (CAPAs)

2010: Community Bridges Program Manager - Ford Theatres/Ford Theatre Foundation

2009: Curator and Project Director  of F.O.B. II:  Art  Speaks-  T he Intersection o f arts, politics, and community

2007: Asian Pacific Islander Arts Coordinator

2003: Founding Co-Director of the Viet Film Festival

2003: Curator and Project Director of  F.O.B: A MultiArt Show

“I always think a hundred years from now when someone’s doing research about 1st or 2nd generation of Viet refugees what are they going to find out? And all they’re going to find out is what they’re going to find out is what is written in the newspapers and what is or is not written about in the textbooks. And so it might just be a very dichotomized or polarized community where you’re either for or against Communism and that’s the only the two choices.And the misunderstand of the people who came over in 1975 as if they had it much easier.”

Launched in 2011, the Vietnamese American Oral History Project (VAOHP), housed in the Department of Asian American Studies in the School of Humanities at UC Irvine, assembles, preserves, digitizes, and disseminates the life stories of Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. The project contributes to the expanding archives on Vietnamese Americans with the urgent goal of capturing first generation stories while this group remains.

ViFF’s mission is to support, celebrate, and project a diversity of visions and voices from filmmakers of Vietnamese descent and films by, for, and about the Vietnamese people and culture. Since 2003, Viet Film Fest has been widely known as the largest Vietnamese film festival outside of Vietnam. In the past decade, the festival has attracted thousands of national and international attendees and showcased hundreds of shorts and features that have been submitted from many corners of the world, including the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Poland, United Kingdom, Norway, Cambodia and Vietnam.  Through the universal language of film, Viet Film Fest continues to celebrate the diversity of our communities by bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives and voices.  Committed to expanding the horizons of Vietnamese cinema, Viet Film Fest provides a nurturing environment for its artists to engage in a broadening dialogue with an international community.  As a result, it has become a unique and important platform for filmmakers of Vietnamese descent globally. Going beyond Vietnam, Viet Film Fest also serves as an important educational tool for learning about the historical and contemporary experiences of Vietnamese in the United States and other countries around the world. Awards presented at Viet Film Fest include the Grand-Jury Trống Đồng Awards for Best Feature Film and Best Short Film, Best Cinematography, and awards for Best Actor and Best Actress. Audience members will also have a chance to vote for the Audience Choice Award for feature and short films.  

(http://www.vietfilmfest.com/festival-info.html)

"Viet Film Fest has been around for 10 years, and this year we're starting to make it annual since filmmakers have been making so many films. This is a chance to not only watch the latest films made by Vietnamese filmmakers before they are released (or never released in the US), but you would be able to meet them and ask them questions! There are also lots of parties and events to meet other film industry and community folk"

“It exploded. It was a record number of people who expected a reshow of that segment. But there was also a bunch of other people who wrote who were totally against, you know who wrote all these articles saying how we were Muc Giai...that we’re not taught well and that we’re disobedient.”

“And to be able to tell the stories of the community as a whole, all of the different experiences and for  us to be able to create our own myths instead having people create it for us. The myths out there is that we’re a group that needs rescuing, that those poor things that are victims of the war. And maybe some are, but not everybody is. And a lot of us are strong and made our own life, and some of us might be working two or three jobs. And maybe they didn’t have to. But I know a lot of doctors in Vietnam who came over here and begin as janitors and had to work their way back to being doctors. I want to capture all of those stories.”

Tram Le

In college, Tram Le discovered that she was good at performing and found that putting on a show and acting as a comedian came natural to her. Her friend Hung Nguyen approached her about making a career out of their performances; that was how Club O’ Noodles began.

“We always kind of struggled with that. What language to use. And who was our audience. But then we did Laughter From the Children of War we did it all in English.”