To watch Cải Lương is to figure out what the actors are singing about while half-asleep and thinking about whether your parents’ decision to meet each other and give birth to you in this country was the right call — that was the adult version. The under-18 version would just be half-asleep. The audience could sit in one place for three or four hours, listening to voices jumping around the scales and watching actors in glittery historical clothing swinging their arms and feet in the air — to be immersed in Vietnamese Southern culture as they’d described on the travel brochures at the hotel lobbies — while wondering what the backstory and context for this performance is, and give up after five minutes of trying to figure out the answer. Cải Lương is an art, although at my school, it was referred to as a workshop. The wording surprised me as a 3-month-in TA: “A workshop?” I asked Ms. Hân, whose desk was next to mine. “It happened every year,” she replied. I volunteered as TA support. My job was to make sure that no more than one student used the restroom at the same time.

I was looking for reasons to justify why an expensive private school didn’t build a backstage for actors  — “Everything good?” someone from Facility yelled and knocked on the folding screen. There was upbeat music in the background: Bruno Mars played as students poured from the door, and I could only hear half of their joke about somebody’s mom before they turned to me, asking how long they would need to be there. People talked. One or two listened.

The love for Cải Lương, from what I gauged from talking to people of my generation, was sincere though slanted. We đidn’t love it because we understand that it was a defiance against the French colonizers — we loved the memes. The exaggerated expressions, theatrical fashion, and low resolution (Cải Lương used to be popular on multiple national TV channels), which, when taken out of context, fit every relatable microinconvenience — a formula for laughter and shares. I had to let out a giggle when the tune “Bạn tình ơi/ Dẫu gì cũng xa nhau rồi” rang, but halfway through the workshop, I was crying. What was happening was that I couldn’t figure out how I was feeling about Cải Lương. Perhaps because I was so naive. I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to be so invested at all.

Other TAs hovered around the auditorium door watching the actors sing in front of an AI-generated background of a battlefield, as students turned around and looked at Naeva, a student in my Math class. Naeva was sleeping, and I let her. But one of my bosses tapped my shoulder and told me not to let her sleep. So I sat next to her (people looked, of course) and said to ehr, “It’s fun. Don’t sleep.” On the other side of the room, another student was about to drop his head. Glitter still sparkled on the stage. Shu, another student, asked to use the bathroom, but the TA turned him down, so he went back to his seat and turned his eyes towards the actors sitting on the sofa on the stage, mumbling, “Why do we have to be here?” The stage now resembled a film premiere — NSUT Tú Sương, one of the actors, shared that she was a fifth-generation member of a Cải Lương family, and how that was an honor. I looked over at Naeva, who was drawing. By the time the actors performed the next piece, the other teachers were filming.

The reason that I wasn’t supposed to cry, as I later found out when my boss gave me a warning, was that I would become distracted: While I was watching the performance, two students had left for the restroom at the same time. It was imperative that only one student used the bathroom at a time. The workshop ended as people gathered on the stage to take photos with the actors. “Not your vibe?” Emma, one of my students, asked me as she walked past me on her way out of the auditorium. “Did you like it?” I asked her. “So boring,” she said. On my way back to the office, I wondered if I should’ve taken a photo with one of the actors or should’ve stayed in the office.