I II III IIIV V VI VII VIII IX X

This thesis is an archive of family history, memories, materials, and projects that document and reflect on lives and legacies within diaspora and displacement.

Table of Contents

  1. Beginnings
  2. Ba
  3. Ma
  4. Home
  5. Epigenetics
  6. All immigrants are artists
  7. Cutting my teeth on
  8. Betting on losing dogs
  9. Fragments
  10. A love letter
Passport photos I took for my parents.

I.

Beginnings

A long shot | ˈā ˈlȯŋ-ˌshät |
noun
1: a venture involving great risk but promising a great reward if successful
2: an entry (as in a horse race) given little chance of winning *

This thesis attempts to archive my parents’ displacement as Vietnamese refugees and the new lives they built in America, lives rooted in fracture and evidenced in incompleteness. By taking stock of these fragments—in memories, reflections, and materials—this document seeks to challenge the dominant narrative of refugee as agentless victim by highlighting the creativity, resourcefulness, and resilience of displaced persons, and the legacies they bring into this space.

Drawing on family history and lived experiences, my work contends with home and belonging, displacement and intimacy, and lives measured in invisibility. I look for transient and unstable mediums—seeds from my mother’s garden, sharp edges of glass, your eyes locking mine from across the room—and ask them to translate for me these stories, these sentiments. In documenting my parents, I begin to document myself, breathing reason and weight into the fixations I fall asleep to and the body I wake up in.

After their separate escapes and respective journeys to America, my parents met in 1979 in Boston, Massachusetts, half a world away from a crumbling motherland, and together built a home from nothing. I was raised in this mythology of a mother and father who fought off sea monsters and pirates, rode waves as tall as mountains, cheated death too many times to count, and still lived to tell the tale.

My parents have measured their success in the quality of life they could provide their daughters, giving up everything they had, gambling their own lives, to afford us ours. They gave me the luxury not only to dream, but to pursue these dreams.

A long shot.

chi hien and ba

II.

Ba / Some days are two cuts and a burn on the same hand, and some days are my hands becoming my father’s

catching glances

My father was born in the bustling city of Hanoi, Vietnam. In the wake of the Vietnam War, he paid 6,000 Vietnamese Dong, equivalent to ten times an engineer’s salary in Vietnam at the time, plus his European imported bicycle, to flee his country by fishing boat. He told no one in his family of his plans until the day before the boat’s departure, at which point, he asked his older sister to deliver a handwritten letter to my grandfather. My father can’t recall much of what was written, but he was told later of how my grandfather’s hands shook violently as he clutched that thin sheet. My father was only 20 years old.

With the risk of death high and no means of communication, no one in my father’s family knew whether or not he was alive as the boat made its treacherous two-month journey to refugee camps in Hong Kong. In their waiting, they prepared for his body-less funeral. I asked my father if he’d been scared to escape. He told me he was too young to fear much, but the thought of staying in a starving, war-torn homeland seemed worse than dying. He remembers wanting to reach America so badly, he was ready to die if it meant having just a single day on American soil.

I grew up alongside my father’s business, Floorsanding of Mass. During school vacations, he would often take me to work with him in his electric blue truck, the shiny paint job glittering in my memory. We would go from appointment to appointment, home to home, picking up Dunkin’ Donuts along the way for each of his employees stationed at different job sites. I remember the houses of his wealthy clients feeling like mansions relative to my 8-year-old size, and feeling different from ours—never better, but different. I remember the pride I felt in riding shotgun in that flashy blue truck, and in knowing I was the boss’ daughter, the one who always bought coffee for his team.

process

When I was 17, two friends and I were in a car accident that totaled both vehicles. It was summer, and we had hiked to a higher point through the hills of Dedham to chase a sunset. We were on our way home when I watched through my backseat window, confused, as two girls our age in another car accelerated towards us at an intersection. There is no memory of the sound of impact, or screaming, or really much noise at all. The rest of the event is a poorly spliced montage with no audio. All five of us involved left walking, with concussions at worst and whiplash at best. My friends rode in an ambulance with their mother to the hospital, and my father arrived to take me home.

I asked my father recently, for the first time, about this night. I asked him what he remembered, how he had learned I was in an accident. He recalled it being broad daylight when he received a call, but the police reports I requested state the accident occurred at 8:52pm. “Con called Ba,” he said. “Con called and sounded very calm, told Ba what had happened, where, and told Ba many times not to worry, that con was okay. Con sounded so calm, Ba believed con was okay.” But I do not remember this—not the call, not the calm. I remember crawling out of that crushed vehicle into an intersection slick with gasoline, feeling so fucking scared of living. I remember not sleeping, not crying, and watching dawn color my room.

I drove myself to work the morning after, to an art therapy studio for adults with developmental disabilities, where one of my clients was a man in his thirties named George. At the age of two, he suffered extensive brain injury after a speeding car hit him, and was since wheelchair bound. George enjoyed filming his days with his camcorder and stitching the footage together on the studio PC. He always wore his helmet covered in stickers, and he always smiled—the sweetest human.

I spent the day drawing and chatting with George; it was a calm day. When it was over, I walked back to my car, sat there in the parking lot, and sobbed, wishing so fucking badly George could just run.