About five years ago, I watched Susan Lieu perform her one-woman show, 140LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother as part of the Center for Asian American Media’s CAAMFest in San Francisco. The show captured Susan’s journey as she tried to piece together portraits of her mother in search of answers to about 100 questions she had, a reasonable amount for any child who unexpectedly lost their mother at 11. I left the show emotionally shattered and distraught, deeply feeling the pain and grief that Susan lay bare on stage.

I've always had this story in my heart. I left the refugee camp when I was five years old, and I just remember glimpses of things that happened at the camp that stayed with me. And one of those memories that stayed with me was when we left the camp on departure day. I witnessed how much my siblings struggled with leaving camp because of the relationships and friendships that they built, how loved they were loved by their friends, and how that love was reciprocated

I have been trying to think about the ways in which the everyday engagements with these objects—and in many ways we think of them as feminized and thus degraded objects, right?—actually open us up into these kind of really big questions about our economic life, our world-making, as you mentioned earlier, the ways in which we understand ourselves in relationship to our world and our history. I think I was always interested in that project of trying to think about how people engage with these everyday banal objects—a lipstick, a scarf—to give themselves a way to articulate these questions that are maybe really hard to even talk about. I think that's what this book sits on: that kind of long trajectory of “thinking about” that is a kind of methodological and also phenomenological project. 

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Our special issue, Southeast Asia Now, aims to highlight current art and stories from the region.

Among unconventional themes, the expression of pain in Lynh Bacardi’s work—the greatest depth of despair in lives of the social margins manifested—sheds light on what otherwise can be invisible to Vietnamese society.

Tiếng Việt chấm tôi: mi là người Việt.

The Vietnamese language punctuates me: you are a Viet person.

It’s true, you can’t block the path of a bulldozer. My father said it’s because a bulldozer doesn’t have feelings.

A curse crashed into the town’s shores.