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. That itself is an art, although at my school, Cải Lương was often referred to as a workshop. The wording surprised me as a 3-month-in TA: “A workshop?” I asked Ms. Han, 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’s bottom 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 was inherited — not because anyone understands that legalizing singing troupes was the French strategy to distract the colonized from upheavals, according to Vương Hồng Sển, but because of the abundant Instagram memes made out of it. The exaggerated expressions, theatrical fashion, and low resolution, which, when taken out of context, fit every relatable microinconvenience. 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 almost cried. What was happening was that I couldn’t figure out how I was feeling about Cải Lương. I told myself I was becoming — and I was. And the reaction of someone in a position of authority for this workshop had been decided by the unspoken rules of institutions.

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 and said, “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 shared that she was a fifth generation 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 TAs were filming.

I left wondering why I didn’t take a photo with one of the actors; he was tall and handsome. But I wanted to take a photo with NSUT Tú Sương, a fat actress whose voice carried the accent of the Mekong region. The workshop had just ended, and everyone took a group photo on the stage. At some point, I asked if we could turn off all the lights besides the ones on stage for a more cinematic experience, and Facility turned me down, as that would be a safety concern. I left thinking if that was more bizarre or the fact that I was scolded for letting two students (two girl best friends) use the restroom at the same time.