We recently connected with Flora Le and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Flora thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I certainly didn’t start my creative journey early. I grew up playing the violin and performing in various music ensembles, but I wouldn’t call classical music particularly creative. It did give me relevant experience performing on stage, but it would take me another 20+ years to start thinking about myself as a creative person.

I went to law school and started my career as a lawyer in Canada. On the outside, I had all the traditional metrics of success: a prestigious job and nice things, but my life felt devoid of meaning. I got weary of spending all my waking hours furthering other people’s dreams. Deep down, I knew that if I worked as hard as I did for my legal career for my own dreams, I would be successful.

Sometime in my early thirties, I started looking for more purpose in my life. It will take many more years to transition from a performance-oriented life and career, to a creativity-oriented one.

It finally all came together during the pandemic. I made the decision to write my story as a solo storytelling show. I’m not trained in theater, and although I write a lot as a lawyer, I had never written creatively, let alone writing something as personal as a storytelling show. But I committed to the goal and in the last 18 months, my life has changed dramatically. I now have a one-woman show entitled “Sadec 1965: A Love Story,” a true story about my solo motorcycle trip across Vietnam where I try to make sense of my difficult relationship with my Vietnamese father. I’ve been touring with the show for two years, performing in over 15 cities across the US and Canada.

So yes, it took me ten years to write this story and to become the performing artist that I am today. But some things cannot be rushed. Now in retrospect, I know that I needed the last decade to create a mature storytelling show.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Flora Le, I am a storyteller based in Washington DC. I am currently touring in the US and Canada with my solo storytelling show entitled ‘Sadec 1965: A Love Story.’

My one-woman show tells the story of my 6-week solo motorcycle journey through Vietnam, during which I attempt to make sense of my difficult relationship with my father. Sadec is about the road trip of a lifetime, but also about my inner journey to heal my relationship with my estranged father.

Think of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild but on a motorcycle on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The story I tell in my show is entirely true. In 2013, I motorcycled solo across Vietnam with my father’s ashes. I was on a quest to realize his last wish of bringing his ashes back to his hometown of Sadec in the Mekong Delta.

I’ve been wanting to tell the story ever since I completed the motorcycle trip in 2013, but I didn’t know how. For the longest time, I thought I would write a book, but that never happened. Then in 2016, I discovered the art form of storytelling in Washington, DC, where I now live. I trained in the genre and performed short stories at various events in DC. But it soon became clear that Sadec would need to become its own one-hour storytelling show.

One piece was missing: my father’s old love letters. After my father passed away, I found the love correspondence he exchanged with his high school sweetheart, a woman named Hien, whom he left behind in Vietnam during the war. This woman turned out to be an important piece of the mystery my father was, and reading their correspondence promised to provide many answers.

However, I couldn’t read Vietnamese, since my father never spoke his language with me growing up. It took me five years and a team of thirteen Vietnamese to translate the voluminous correspondence the couple exchanged between 1965 and 1971. I was finally able to complete this translation project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is an poignant excerpts from those love letters I share in the show:

Letter dated May 15, 1968
My love, today is our anniversary. If it were not for the Viet Cong making chaos in Saigon, I would have received your letter by now. I don’t believe you didn’t write to me. The road to Saigon is difficult to travel so mail delivery is interrupted. The situation hasn’t died down here since the Tet offensive. We hear gunshots and bombshells day and night, and it’s the same everywhere so there’s nowhere to escape. One can only live for today and accept what will come tomorrow.

Of course, I cannot tell the whole story of the letters in the show – that’s for a future book. But I do read some excerpts from the letters, all written by Hien, in my show. Their content tells a heartbreaking story of love and longing.

‘Sadec 1965’ is a raw and vulnerable show. While most artists make people laugh, I make them cry. Every night after the performance, people come to see me with tears in their eyes, visibly moved by the story. We hug and they tell me their stories about Vietnam, or about their difficult parents. The show is not for everyone, but when it does resonate with people’s own story, it seems to touch them deeply.

You can find out more about the show on my website (www.sadec1965.com) or Instagram (www.instagram.com/sadec1965).

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

On the surface, my show is an adventure story, telling the trials and tribulations of my road-trip across Vietnam. But it doesn’t take long for audience members to realize that the show is also about universal themes such as love, loss and family.

Above all, Sadec 1965 is a story of healing and resilience.

My creative process is about turning my own painful life experiences into beautiful stories of resilience, forgiveness, personal transcendence, and love. If I can inspire just one audience member to do the same – to find beauty, to make something beautiful out of their own trauma – I feel like the effort I’ve put into the show has paid off.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the greatest life lessons I’ve learned through my own creative works is that ‘we are the stories we tell ourselves.’

Every one of us holds a number of stories about themselves. Stories that we are enough, or not. That we are successful, or not. That we are attractive enough, tall enough, thin enough, extroverted enough, social enough, and so on.

Some of the stories we tell ourselves help us feel good and in control of our life. But too many of those stories make us feel unworthy, depressed, angry, or powerless. A lot of the suffering we see in the world is self-created. People hold on to stories that do not serve them without realizing that they (or their environment) created them.

The good news is that the power to change these stories lives solely within ourselves.
To me, personal growth is closely linked to rewriting the stories we tell ourselves, which can be done through a variety of outlets, such as therapy, journaling, introspection and creative expression. The medium doesn’t matter.

Every victim story can be re-written into one of resilience. It is within everyone’s reach to see that their low self-esteem is the story their father/mother/caregiver made up about them based on their egotistical expectations of them. That the trauma they suffered made them the strong, empathetic, emotionally intelligent person that they are today. Every sad story can be re-written into a better one – it’s just a matter of perspective and self-awareness.

Let me give you a personal example.

Three years ago, I did a story on a big stage in Washington DC about the sexual abuse I experienced when I was 11 years old. I had obliterated the experience from my memory and never talked about it to anyone. But 25 years later, it resurfaced. From one day to another, I found myself thrown into a whirlwind of police investigations and a criminal trial.

This otherwise terrifying experience culminated a year later in a public performance. In March 2018, I stood on a stage in Washington, DC to tell my #metoo story in front of 400 people and receive a full room standing ovation. It was one of the most exhilarating moments of my life.
But the story that I told on stage that day was not a story of abuse. It was a story about friendship and truth. It was the story of two women, now in their late thirties, deciding to side together and reclaim the truth of what happened to them when they were just little girls. It also was a story of courage in the face of a heartless justice system and our shaming media.

The day I performed, Julie, my co-victim who went to the police with our story after 25 years of silence, was in the room, right in front of me, sitting in the third row. It didn’t matter that there were 400 people around us. This was our moment, our chance to break the silence and finally say: this is our truth.

With this performance, Julie and I were able to rewrite our story from one of victims, to one of victors. And this is what I hope people take away from my show Sadec: a roadmap to healing.

#fromvictimtovictor

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sadec1965.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/sadec1965
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/sadec1965
• Other: Show trailer: https://vimeo.com/707490967/2e020e914d

Image Credits
Photo credit: Sasha Dylan Bell Photography