Texture Poems

I didn't expect to be challenged by a history I had long preferred not to think about: that so many people we eventually lived alongside in Australia had initially celebrated our demise.

Through my parents’ repeated retellings of their stories, with the same tones, rhythms, inflections, and unreconcilable non-endings, I realized that beyond being a ubiquitous source for survival, water, or nước, was also personally symbolic for my parents.

Dear Mom, I’m writing to apologize that 24 years passed before we hosted a Đám Giỗ for you. Although it took me so long to invite you home, that ceremony shifted my relationship with you, your life and your death.

And yet: I encounter discomfiting truths here, within and outside of myself. How I have for years longed to come back, felt some piece of me missing for not reckoning with the Vietnam that was left behind, and then to come back and have to admit the ways I still feel I do not belong.

A submission call for "texture poems" from the Vietnamese diaspora, in commemoration of the 44th anniversary of April 30, 1975. This year on diaCRITICS, we wish to reflect on this day in terms of both the past and the present. We would like to consider “textures” of diasporic experience that have since been gathered, created, collected and re-collected, imagined and re-imagined, since that historic day in 1975.

A photo project exploring "the stories we carry". The focus of this project is to highlight the experiences of second generation immigrants, third generation immigrants, and beyond. It is about acknowledging the roots of our ancestors and our parents planted and finding spaces to let our own stories “branch” and take shape.