She worked that job for three days before she realized that her grief would only intensify if she couldn’t return to performing. She took her earnings, and the $75 provided to her by a charity, and put it toward making a series of long-distance calls to Hollywood.
Her first was to Burt Reynolds. He didn’t pick up. Next, she tried William Holden, whom she had met a number of times at Asian film festivals. He was out of the country on a hunting trip. With the last of her money, she reached out to Tippi Hedren. It was a long shot—they had met in 1965, when Hedren visited the troops on a USO tour. “Tippi,” Chinh asked tentatively. “Do you remember me?” She did. Three days later, Chinh received an airline ticket to California. Hedren had sponsored her visa and invited her to stay at her home until she got back on her feet.
Chinh is the first to acknowledge that she was one of the lucky ones. “I was able to go back to my career,” she says. “So many doctors, lawyers, teachers and artists could not.” But it was hard, even though Holden did eventually help her get an agent and register with the Screen Actors Guild. She was famous in Asia, where she had her own movie production company and hosted a talk show. But few knew who she was in Hollywood. She had to start again from scratch, during a time when roles for Asian actors were few and far between.
“When I first arrived here, it was very much like The Sympathizer,” Chinh says. “I felt lonely, lost, homesick. I missed my past life when I had a name. I came here and lost everything, even my own identity.” She landed some great roles—she played Alan Alda’s love interest in an episode of M.A.S.H. and misunderstood mother Suyuan Woo in blockbuster The Joy Luck Club—but she was also forced to play characters like unnamed “Chinese woman” and unnamed “Asian woman.”
“I had to accept whatever came, even the very tiny parts—one line here, one line there, one scene here, another there,” Chinh says. “I took everything. I had to work.”
That’s why now, even at the age of 86, Chinh has no plans to slow down. She recently wrapped filming an upcoming Apple TV miniseries, Sinking Spring, and has a role in Shal Ngo’s upcoming thriller, Control Freak. “I love what I’m doing. I love my career,” she says. “I have lost so much, and it hurt my career for so long. Now, like my life, I want to rebuild my career.”
While The Sympathizer required a lot of the actress, asking her to emote in both Vietnamese and French, Chinh adored her time on set. She gushes over how Robert Downey Jr., an executive producer, went out of his way to make sure she felt welcomed. Before shooting began, Downey, who delivers an unforgettable performance as four different characters, hosted a cast lunch during which he sought her out, pulling out a chair for her at a place of honor at the table. At the premiere, as photographers shouted for his attention, he held her hand, making sure she was in the photos as well. “He’s a great gentleman,” Chinh said.
Over the past few years, Chinh has thrilled in seeing Asian representation grow in Hollywood, with films like Past Lives and Everything Everywhere All at Once giving Asian creatives and actors the opportunity to tell Asian stories. After working with so many impressive Vietnamese actors in The Sympathizer, she is hopeful not only for their future—“This generation will go far,” she says—but also for more opportunities to tell stories about her homeland.
“During the Vietnam War, more than one million soldiers were in and out of Vietnam. For 15 years daily, Americans saw Vietnam on their televisions, in the headlines, in print media,” Chinh says. But they only knew Vietnam in relation to conflict and bloodshed. “For me, I do not look at Vietnam as only a war country. There was life there. There were people, there was culture, there was art. I hope that someday there will be different kinds of stories told about Vietnam.”