Tiếng Việt 🇻🇳 / English
Sunshine (2022 - ongoing)
More often than not, Vietnamese diasporas in Australia live under a state of loss. After the American War ended, the Vietnamese Communist Party won against the South and reunified the nation. In opposition to this regime, millions of Vietnamese fled the country to America, Canada or Australia most commonly through boats. With the influx of Vietnamese immigrants to Sunshine in the late 1970s, the suburb is now superimposed by the Vietnamese community to resemble a faux representation of their home nation, one they could not return to. Their lives on this foreign land that once aided in invading their homeland are re-lived through scenic photographs of Vietnam hung in dimly lit restaurants and burning incense as they pray to their ancestors for a better fortune.
Through browsing the local news, internet archives, and volunteering as a photographer for community events, I discover deconstructed stories without a beginning nor an end. Invited into people’s homes and entrusted with their stories, I witness how intergenerational tensions within the transnational Vietnamese identity gradually surface. The more I learn about the Vietnamese diaspora in Sunshine, the more I feel compelled to confront my own position as a new migrant in so-called ‘Australia.’ This dual insider-outsider perspective informs the work, which seeks to create a dialogical space for unlearning my previous nationalist understandings of this diasporic community.