1956 Biên Hòa, Việt Nam

Lê Kim Hoàng

1941

Biên Hòa, Việt Nam

Interviewed on February 3, 2022

by Teddy Hoang

(Translated from Vietnamese)

The earliest movie experience I remember was watching Phạm Công Cúc Hoa with Tăng Thị Hiệp, a childhood friend of mine who lived a couple of houses down the street. I grew up in Biên Hòa, the largest city in Đồng Nai province. I lived pretty close to the marketplace, so the movie theater, Rạp Hát Bóng Nam Hà, was at most a mile from my house. The theater isn’t around anymore; they demolished it long ago. We didn’t have a television at home, so I had to go to the theater to watch movies.

We must’ve been around fifteen or sixteen at the time, so we weren’t allowed to go out at night to watch movies. School often let out by 11, so we’d go to the movies around 2 or 3. There was no way of checking showtimes like you can now on the internet. You’d either have to coincidentally walk by the theater or hear it from a friend to find out what times a movie was being shown. A kid in the neighborhood would go, “Hey, there’s this movie at 2 today. Do you guys want to go?” This made trips to the movie theater pretty spontaenous. It didn’t really matter what month or day of the week it was. We just went whenever if someone brought it up. We rarely went with any adults.

I don’t remember the movie too well, but it was in black-and-white and had sound. Phạm Công Cúc Hoa was about two siblings—a boy and a girl—whose father went off to the military. Their birth mother passed away, so they were left in their stepmom’s care. The stepmom was an extremely evil woman who treated the kids terribly, so the kids ran away to find their dad. I can’t remember how the movie ended, but I remember it being good. Everyone felt sorry for the children. They were adorable.

There wasn’t really a high standard for cleanliness at these places, so I would call the theater far from “clean.” It was pretty disgusting honestly. The walls and floor were made of cement and there weren’t any carpets. Only one movie would be showing for about a week or two until it was replaced by the next one so there was only one screening room with rows of folding chairs. Every chair had a number written on the back that corresponded with the tickets and they weren’t as comfortable as the cushioned chairs in theaters today. There were two ushers in the theater, one in each aisle, to help seat people. Movie theaters didn’t have air conditioning at the time, so a majority of them had ceiling fans. You were lucky if the theater had an electric-powered fan, but they were pretty much useless because the walls were so high. Pretty much everyone brought their own paper fans from home to fan themselves and stay cool during the movie.

The theater didn’t sell any snacks or drinks, so there wasn’t a concession stand—just a ticket booth. There would be five to seven vendors outside of the theater selling snacks and drinks for us. The vendors would have plastic tables and chairs set up along the street where you could eat the snacks. They sold things like dried squid, beef jerky, sugarcane juice, soda, iced tea, fried bananas, popcorn, and roasted peanuts. Biên Hòa is a big corn producer, so there was of course grilled and steamed corn as well. My favorite thing to get were the roasted peanuts. All these things were pretty expensive, especially for children, so a lot of kids liked to get shaved ice—it was the cheapest option. You would hold the cup under the ice block while the vendor shaved the ice and packed it into your cup before adding color and flavor syrup. Kids would just suck on and lick the ice; they loved it.

You would be able to take snacks into the theater with you. There weren’t really disposable cups at the time, so if you wanted to take your drinks with you, you’d have to pour the drink into a plastic bag and return the glass. We would drink our iced teas and waters in the theater from straws in plastic bags.

I only went to the movies throughout my childhood and teenage years mostly. I stopped going to the theaters by the time I was 25. Life just got in the way. As I grew older, my friends and I all moved on with our own lives and we had fewer and fewer chances to spontaneously go to the theaters like we used to. I wasn’t that huge a fan of movies, so it wasn’t a big loss to me, but having the experience with friends was nice.