Past to Present

In the United States, the discourse surrounding the Vietnam War is often conceptualized in terms of time and space: spatially bounded by Vietnam’s borders and temporally bounded by America’s (dis)engagement with the conflict. And Vietnamese refugees and their families often find themselves trapped by this framing, forever seen as perpetual, otherized victims as part of a broader American project of creating militarized refugees: pitiable, dehumanized subjects which can serve as the recipients of American benevolence.

This artwork serves as a counter to this hegemonic narrative. One of my main intentions with this art piece was to recontextualize Vietnamese refugees and their families, not just as victims perpetually frozen in a specific time and place, but as fluid, living beings who experience joy, whimsy, and growth in a wide variety of environments in their daily lives. Towards this end, the collage contains many images of places from my and my parents’ childhoods. And while my parents did go through many trials and tribulations (depicted through the clipped news headlines), I chose to use the pictures mainly to depict environments of joy: the beachside city where they grew up (Nha Trang), the colleges they went to, the places they lived on their way to become homeowners in the U.S., the temple that they (and eventually I) attended, etc. And with the news clippings that I did include, I included articles tackling issues which acknowledge both the uniqueness of the Vietnamese refugee experience while also showing the solidarity of Vietnamese refugees with other working class communities in the U.S. Another intention I had with the piece was to display the conflicts and contradictions within the Vietnamese-American experience: the conflict between the benevolent image the U.S. attempts to project and the lived reality of how Vietnamese refugees are treated, the conflict between first-generation Vietnamese refugees’ attitudes towards the U.S. and successive generations of Vietnamese-Americans rejecting the American savior complex, etc.

To construct the piece, I used Affinity Photo (a photo-editing program similar to Photoshop) and placed images over each other to build the collage. I then combined these images with a picture of a bàn thờ (altar) from my home, which features images of my maternal and paternal grandfathers. The images are ordered in order of past-to-present, from top-to-bottom. The interpretation of this ordering and the inclusion of the bàn thờ is left as an exercise for the observer.