“I’m not Chinese. If I were Chinese I’d look a lot like this but less Vietnamese. . . My last name is “Nguyen” and not New Yen. Vietnamese is a tonal language. You need a special muscle to hit that “Ng” sound and that muscle is called “tolerance”.

With this bit of gentle confrontation, actor and comedian Franco Nguyen opens Good Morning, Viet Mom, playing now at Toronto’s Aki Studio in Daniels Spectrum. It is a very clever show, Nguyen holding his audience in his affectionate grip with a script he wrote himself.

First produced at the 2017 Toronto Fringe and the 2018 Next Stage Festival, Viet Mom is freshly mounted by Cahoots Theatre with a bigger production team. Director Byron Abalos has sharpened the edges of the show with choreographed movement by Andrea Mapili and Kevin Matthew Wong’s video and still projections, some displayed in a monitor shaped like a suitcase.

Good Morning Viet Mom is a love story. It came into being on a trip Nguyen, a Second City alumni and sketch comedy artist, made with his mother Dieu to Vietnam around 2012. It was his first time there, his mother’s return after 28 years, and the purpose was to visit Nguyen’s elderly grandmother.

Nguyen saw for the first time how much his mother had sacrificed for him after bringing her son, a babe in arms, to Canada. She worked in a factory in Toronto, generously sending money back home, even as her Winnipeg-born teenager – whose Vietnamese is too basic to really converse in a deep way with his mother – would be demanding a flashy pair of the newest Nikes. And getting them.

Viet Mom is Nguyen’s response to his loving, generous mother, saying in a poignant piece of theatre what he could not say in her language. The actor deploys his stand-up chops to describe frequent visits to Honest Ed’s, one-stop shopping for his mother, an emporium that looked like “a clown had sex with Dollarama.”

With self-deprecating humour, Nguyen tells of his coming of age as the son of an Asian immigrant, giving himself the hip-hop handle of Nip Dog. The laughs fall away as the performer segues to a tearful memory of profound gratitude when, as we see in his videos, Nguyen takes a journey of the heart to find out who his mother and his Vietnamese family really is.

This mom, just back from a visit with her journalist daughter in Hanoi, is grateful to have witnessed, through Canadian-Vietnamese eyes, all that a cross-cultural family can mean.

Good Morning Viet Mom

Written and performed by Franco Nguyen

A Cahoots Theatre Production

At Aki Studio, Daniels Spectrum, Toronto, until March 3, 2019

Photo of Franco Nguyen by Dahlia Katz