What a strange trip 'Mai's America' is

It's hard to know where to begin with "Mai's America," the astonishing film appearing this week as part of the PBS documentary series "P.O.V." (10 p.m. Sunday, Channel 19). This most unlikely story about a Vietnamese exchange student in the Deep South is by turns hilarious, voyeuristic, wise, bizarre and sadly ironic. The film starts out odd and gets odder. Having been something of a spoiled child in Vietnam, Mai flies halfway across the world to board with an unemployed couple who live - and smoke - in a single-wide trailer in Mississippi with their depressive daughter. Inevitably, there are whimsical cross-cultural encounters, the kind that undoubtedly happen to every exchange student but never seem to make it onto the home video. Like the time an African-American friend reads to Mai from a joke book titled You Know You're Black When ... and then has to explain the joke. At first Mai is so good-natured, she doesn't have to be told to laugh. Yet around her host family, she reveals to us, "sometimes I just laugh because I don't know what to say." The family's unhappiness may be magnified by the bright and optimistic child in their midst. Mai says, "I pretend to be happy," in hopes they will cheer up, but she adds, "It doesn't work." Happiness is the leitmotif of "Mai's America." Her new country is founded on the pusuit of happiness, yet Mai sees so little of it - including in herself. Pressures start to weigh her down. She expresses discomfort with her gender. She visits gay bars with a cross-dresser and experiments with crewcuts and unisex clothing. "I don't think I'll ever be a traditional Vietnamese woman," she says. Her lifelong tension with her mother actually gets worse once she leaves home, as Mom expects her daughter to get a college degree in the United States and start sending money home. "In Vietnam it takes so much time to make one dollar," Mai says ruefully, "and in America it takes so little time to spend it." Filmmaker Marlo Poras followed Mai for two years, and her film overflows with telling observations. Some are caught by her astute photographic eye, but most spring from the mind of Mai, a young woman with amazingly grown-up insights into herself and those around her. I read a fellow television scribe complaining recently that he thought there were "too many" reality shows on NBC this summer. Funny, but no one ever complains that there are too many sports programs on ESPN. Viewers have a different agenda: They've turned such reality fare as "Crime & Punishment" and "Dog Eat Dog" into modest hits for NBC. Perhaps that's why the genre seems so pervasive - nothing's getting canceled. But NBC's success and that of "American Idol" on Fox have unfortunately overshadowed some compelling summer fare over on ABC, which has aired an intense courtroom series in "State v.," a worthy follow to "Nightline" in "Up Close," and a gripping real-life drama, "Houston Medical." Now comes "ICU: Arkansas Children's Hospital," a top-flight successor to "Houston Medical" and produced, like the rest of ABC's reality shows, by its news division. The opening hour, which airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Channel 9, is more than just another unscripted display of raw medical muscle by dedicated professionals. "ICU" is a model for the news documentary of the future, a fine-tuning of the familiar Discovery channel format that extracts an even greater emotional wallop from its inherently dramatic stories. Voiceovers are used sparingly in favor of screen text that interferes less with the story while moving things along more quickly. At the outset we watch as an infant receives a new heart, a procedure that seems to draw out in agonizing detail yet is over by the first commercial break. And so it goes for surgeon Jonathan Drummond-Webb and his hard-driving staff at Arkansas Children's Hospital, half of whom seem to race in triathlons on their off hours. Drummond-Webb, a bleary-eyed native South African, is a competitor who expects to save every child he operates on. "The (kids) that make it fade into obscurity," he says. "The ones that don't (make it) come back to haunt you. ... It keeps you humble and it keeps you honest." You can reach Aaron Barnhart through the TV Barn Web site at www.tvbarn.com. RECOMMENDED SHOWS "Our Town: Parkville," 7 and 8 p.m. Thursday, KCPT. What a great idea: Give camcorders to two dozen people and let them tell the story of the place where they live. Here's hoping this is just the first of many such specials on towns to come. "P.O.V.," 10 p.m. Sunday, KCPT. Reviewed in today's column. "ICU," 9 p.m. Wednesday, ABC (Channel 9). Reviewed in today's column.