24 08/2019
IF YOU’D WANDERED DOWN ANY
random street in Vietnam during the
early 2000s and glanced into the lounge
room window of any home, you would
most likely have seen a TV set lit up with
Vietnam’s first musical/movie concept
album Life With You (Trọn Đời Bên Em), a
popular DVD release that was so original
it catapulted its creator—then waning pop
star Ly Hai—to immediate success.
Perfectly timed for an era when
DVD piracy had yet to gut the industry,
the album was a dramatic 60-minute
presentation with a romantic narrative
that included six original songs. No other
Vietnamese artist before Ly Hai had
released such a work, and Vietnamese
music fans were so intrigued by the idea
that the album had an immediate and
profound cultural impact.
“The first Trọn Đời Bên Em fell into the
pop ballad genre, which met the taste of
the market at that time,” says Ly Hai, now
in his early 50s and still very much the
shy country lad from My Tho he started
out as. “I found that my voice suited this
genre quite well, which I hadn’t realized
before. With some success in both pop/
dance styles and now ballad music—as
well as the fact that I also composed the
songs, wrote the lyrics, and wrote the
script, those factors really helped me to
impress the audiences at that time.”
Following the original Life With You
album in 2000, Ly Hai went on to put
out one album in the series per year,
each lasting for around 90 minutes and
featuring 7–10 songs. The narrative
formats for each release had their
own unique dramatic plots in varying
cinematic styles—action, romance, and
(most popular with audiences) comedy.
Between 2000–2010, Ly Hai released
a total of 10 Life With You albums,
featuring a range of musical genres that
included pop, ballads, hip hop, R&B,
country and dance, among others.
Ly Hai seems an unlikely character
for the kind of pioneering work in music,
filmmaking and dramatic performance
that typifies his career. He both was
and was not destined for a life as a
performer—the first giveaway was how,
as a very small boy who suffered from
a speech impediment that affected his
way of talking but not his singing voice,
he tended to communicate in song.
This drew so much derision from his
classmates that he studiously avoided any
interest in the arts for the remainder of
his school career, turning instead towards
sports. He was drawn to volleyball, but
was almost too short to be on the school
team and absolutely too short to enrol at
a sports university—so when a recruiter
for Saigon’s School of Art and Theater II
(now the School of Theatre and Cinema
of Ho Chi Minh City) came to scout for
talent, he joined the examination for fun
and ended up being among the 20 out of
1000 regional applicants to be awarded a
scholarship.
In those austere times, however,
musicians were even less likely to eke
out a living by performing than they are
in regular times. Ly Hai toughed out
the entertainment circuit, hitting all the
venues he could until he tired of the rude
wealthy patrons, and then toured the
entire country with arts troupes—but was
only able to string together a moderate
success based on his pop numbers and
distinctly Michael Jackson-influenced
dancing. Things improved significantly
when he was invited to perform on
HCMC TV and became a regular feature
as “the star with the golden legs”—but by
the time the 90s closed, ballads were the
dominant popular musical form of choice,
and Hai rapidly found his style falling out
of favor with local audiences.
Life With You changed everything.
The man who’d once owned just two
changes of clothes and a bicycle became
one of the first ten Vietnamese singers
to own his own car. Hai is pointedly
reluctant to talk about his materialsuccesses, however, focusing solely on his
passion for his work and family—good,
old-fashioned country values.
According to Hai, what changed his
life most wasn’t success, but romance.
In 2002 he made the acquaintance of a
bright, engaging model and law graduate
named Minh Ha (Ha went on to graduate
with a master’s degree in law in the
UK), somehow bumbling his way into
a relationship with her after a couple of
years’ friendship while the pair worked on
his fifth sequel to Life With You. They’ve
had a singularly successful marriage and
are now counting four kids.
“My life totally changed since I got
married,” admits Hai. “Before I usually
stayed up late for work, went out with
friends afterwards, and woke up at noon
every day. After I got married—especially
when we had kids—my life changed; now
all I want to do is come back home early
to be with my family, to have dinner with
my wife.
“Now my life is more stable; my
house is fully equipped for work without
the need to go anywhere. We have
all the in-house facilities we need—a
gym, a swimming pool, a cinema, and
everything. Lately, almost every meeting,
including with magazines, seeing friends,
working meets, castings etc. take place at
home. We barely go out.”
For her part, Minh Ha is as manifestly
devoted to the family as her husband,
and has been instrumental in building
the next phase of Ly Hai’s career as a
filmmaker, working as his co-producer.
“From 2010, he wanted to be a
director and produce movies,” explains
Ha. “From that time, he reviewed all the
lessons he’d studied at university and
taught himself how to be a director and
a script writer, as well as how to produce
a movie. I researched all the materials
for him online and I translated it for him
from English.Text by Michael Arnold
Image Provided by Ly Hai ProductionMeet Ly Hai, Vietnam’s entertainment mogul and creator of the hit
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