Eighteen year-old Trung and Anh are identical twin Vietnamese-American brothers who live in San Jose. One night, they head out to a twenty-first birthday party. For fun, they dress the same, as they often used to be when they were little. Unless you really know them, the brothers are almost impossible to tell apart. Unfortunately, that fact causes no end of trouble for the brothers that evening, and for years to come.
It all starts off as an enjoyably lively night, but then news spreads that several women, including Trung’s girlfriend, are being hit by a drunk reveller. An uproar begins and various men start fighting. A knife is pulled. There’s blood. Soon, a dead body. Quickly after that, the wrong brother — Anh — is sitting in prison. And the one who actually did the killing, Trung? He’s in no hurry to turn himself in.
This true story is like the plot of a movie — or as Blood Will Tell repeatedly insists, something that Shakespeare might have written.
There is a reason for this literary framing device. When host and writer Jen Miller first met Trung, she was in California reporting a piece for The Washington Post about “Shakespeare as therapy,” where amateur actors use the dramatic power of Shakespeare plays as a way of working through their emotions. Toxic masculinity and the widespread damage it causes is one of the main themes of the podcast; the men Miller interviews admit to tears far less readily than they admit to violence. The merits of using the bard as catharsis is certainly a worthwhile angle.
But it’s an angle that can sometimes become smothering. All the episodes are named after Shakespeare quotes (the second is “Star Crossed Brothers.”) We’re told quickly and excitedly how Shakespeare himself had twins, that his plays were obsessed with stories about siblings and mistaken identities, and how the story of Trung and Anh is like something he might have dreamed up. Although none of these pronouncements are wrong exactly, the device quickly feels overstretched.
This is all the more frustrating because a tale as cinematic as this one doesn’t need gilding. Miller says, early in the first episode that when Trung first recounted it, that she couldn’t believe their story was real. It’s easy to understand why.
It’s not just the central premise of one twin serving the jail sentence of the other while the culpable one refuses to turn himself in that makes this show such an interesting listen (though the episodes most concerned with that central dilemma are by far the strongest.) There’s also the story of how Trung and Anh acclimatised to America after a childhood in Vietnam, as well as their separate experiences with “the lifestyle”: gangs. At one point, Trung has “the greenlight” put on him, marking him for death amongst gang members all over the city; and because he and his brother essentially share the same face, it put Anh in jeopardy too. Thanks to tangents like this, the podcast often plays more like Scorsese or a John Wick movie than Shakespeare.
With so much to work with, Blood Will Tell can sometimes feel a bit busy — six episodes of around forty minutes doesn’t seem enough to contain this decade-spanning tale of violence, vengeance, diaspora, and the complexities of fraternal love.
Even with all those rich thematic elements, there’s still a glaring hole when it comes to the man that Trung killed. Miller does mention having contacted his family and them having denied her requests for an interview; it’s likely his near complete absence from the storytelling here is out of respect to them. It’s hard to begrudge that. Nevertheless, when the whole narrative revolves around the killing of a man, and yet the man who was killed has no substantial presence in the story, the silence where his voice should be is deafening.
Blood Will Tell is an unwieldy podcast. It should have dropped the framing device and incorporated the victim more. It could have done with either a few more episodes or a narrowing of focus to the events most closely surrounding the twins’ time in prison.
Regardless of how imperfectly it’s told, however, the fact that there is so much to this story is what makes it well worth listening to.
¤
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.