Immigrant of the Day: Kieu Chinh (Vietnam)

Kieu Chinh (born 1939 in Vietnam) is a legendary actress best known for her role in The Joy Luck Club.

Kieu Chinh began her acting career in Vietnam with a starring role in 1957. She soon became one of Vietnam’s best-known personalities. In the 1960s, in addition to Vietnamese films, she also appeared in several American productions. Kieu Chinh also produced a war epic Nguoi Tinh Khong Chan Dung (Faceless Lover) (1970), which later would be remastered and shown in the U.S. at the 2003 Vietnamese International Film Festival.

In 1975, while Kieu Chinh was on the set in Singapore, the North Vietnamese army overran Saigon. Kieu Chinh left for the U.S. where she resumed her acting career in a 1977 episode of the television show M*A*S*H loosely based on her life story.

Kieu Chinh subsequently acted in feature films as well as TV-movies. Her best known role was as Suyuan, one of the women in Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993). In 2005, Kieu Chinh starred in Journey from the Fall, an epic feature film tracing a Vietnamese family through the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, the re-education camp, the boat people experience, and thel difficulties of settling in the U.S.

Together with journalist Terry Anderson, Kieu Chinh co-founded the Vietnam Children’s Fund, which has built schools in Vietnam attended by more than 12,000 students.

In 1996, a documentary based on her life, Kieu Chinh: A Journey Home by Patrick Perez, won an Emmy.

Chinh is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

KJ