On Belonging: In Conversation with Ngoc-Tran Vu

This past July, artist and 2021 Collective Futures Fund grantee Ngoc-Tran Vu celebrated thirty years in the United States with her family. Just weeks later, she was in Vietnam again, on a group pilgrimage through the country’s sites of loss and suffering, tracing the timeline of the Vietnam War. For Vu, each visit to Vietnam is different, because each time she is different. “Certain information is only available to me depending on the growth in my life,” she shares.

During the pilgrimage, Vu and other Vietnamese travelers, some of the US and some based in Vietnam, visited ten sites to share the collective prayer and healing. With so many narratives lost or erased by war and colonialism, those on this journey were attempting to reconcile with each site’s violent history. Collective healing and shared memory across borders, generations, and cultures are common themes in Vu’s work. From multimedia storytelling to live events to collaborative community murals, Vu is constantly working and reworking through the communal experience of time and place.

In August, Vu’s Garden of Healing opened at the Fenway in partnership with the Jewish Arts Collaborative. Inspired by the concept of peace and healing gardens, Vu created a sculpture of roses that light up at night, providing passersby with a moment to pause and linger with the flowerscape. In a time so fraught for mental health and wellbeing, the sculpture speaks to an urgent need for renewal and care with its blooms rising from face-shaped pots, reaching toward the sky. 

Most recently, “Who Belongs Here? Who Doesn’t?” took place in Dorchester at Town and Field Park. The multimedia event included live storytelling and community art installation tying together stories around home, deportation, and displacement. Vu and artist collaborator Sam Lê Shave shaped the event as an open space for people to connect across generations, languages, and experiences. On a bright September afternoon, community members gathered to share, listen, and learn against a backdrop of art panels that braided portraiture with interview narratives of migration. 

Now Vu is setting her intentions toward early planning for a potential memorial in Dorchester to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. I caught up with Vu to talk about the impact of the Collective Futures grant and her pilgrimage in Vietnam, and how both have influenced her creative practice today. 

Words by An Uong.

An Uong: The pilgrimage has certainly made an impact on your recent works around collective healing and shared memory. Could you name the specific impressions that have stuck with you?

Ngoc-Tran Vu: One of the biggest takeaways from the journey would be the collective prayers and rituals that we shared at each site. The core question within the group was: "How do we pray?" People never really think about it. How do you know what to talk about? What do you ask for?

Opening that up was really powerful. At each site, we introduced ourselves our names, where we're coming from, addressing directly the people who have passed on and creating a framework of why we were there, what our hopes were, and what our relationships were to the spirits there. There's still a lot more we need to learn but it was a start in acknowledging where we're coming from.

AU: Yes, that acknowledgement is so important. All these people were lost and no one ever said anything after that. Time just moved on. Looking back at your experience there and then coming back here, suddenly back in the context of Boston and the US, how has that been for you?

NTV: It's a conversation I actually had earlier on in our journey around where we're all coming from. Half of us were coming from the US, perhaps identifying as Vietnamese-American, yet when we're in Vietnam, we're all like Vietnamese people. Of course, our language around that is varied, but when thinking about our roots, being Vietnamese, and being of the land and connected to it, it made me reframe how I think about being Vietnamese and being American and all the different dynamics that come with that. This shift has been happening in the past few years, but after this trip, I'm reconsidering my identity as a Vietnamese-American artist. Now that feels so redundant. Do I really need to proclaim that? Vietnamese-American? I've lately started to identify myself as a Vietnamese artist. I'm based in Boston. I grew up in the US but I'm a Vietnamese artist. I don't need to state that I'm a Vietnamese-American artist.

When thinking about sites of memory and sites of connection, I'm working toward a permanent memorial healing project for the Vietnamese community in Dorchester. I was thinking about that project before the pilgrimage, but being part of it really solidified the importance and need to have shared sites of memory and healing -physical sites that people can visit. Somewhere they can go to and honor the memory of their loved ones.

There's something about the actual travel. Going to each site during the pilgrimage, lighting up incense, and being in the actual space is critical. The author Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote, "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." The trauma continues to be fought and passed down. It continues to haunt people and families across borders and boundaries.

AU: We inherit a lot of that haunting from our parents and their parents. There's a lineage to all of this, whether good, bad, or complicated. How does intergenerational memory and experience play into your work?

NTV: There are so many stories and narratives that stay hidden, rarely even acknowledged between family members. Pathways are closed off within families, too. There's such a barrier. We keep things inside for so many different reasons, whether it's reputation or not wanting to acknowledge our own wounds. We simply don't know how to engage with it or talk about it, but when I talk to Vietnamese families or my own family, there's such a collective narrative. There are so many parallels, especially regarding survival. During the pilgrimage, there was such a need to keep on going, not knowing when to even rest. That's something that's so passed on within Vietnamese culture, something other cultures can resonate with too. That's part of being such a poor country with such a legacy of war.

AU: As you just mentioned, this is something that resonates with other cultures and other peoples as well. Especially in Dorchester, where there are so many different cultures living side by side. How do you approach that in your practice or, in collaborations, bring that to your engagements in the community?

NTV: Mindfulness is key. Understanding and knowing that the Dorchester community is a working-class community is also critical. | often ask: How do people spend their time? Do they have their own systems of support? Staying grounded and engaging with people on a deeper level helps reveal how people interact and engage with one another.

AU: Thinking about the Vietnam War fiftieth anniversary commemoration project that you're starting to plan, it'll be very much part of the Vietnamese community's healing process, but it will also be part of the greater Dorchester greater community. So often people think about collective healing in terms of a specific group of people, but your work really brings different perspectives together towards an even bigger collective healing. This is important for a place like Dorchester, where so many people have called it home over different waves of immigration or migration.

NTV: Definitely. It's a balance of both being specific, having something to really reference, but at the same time making it accessible because so many communities and cultures can resonate with those themes. In the stories of how people enter this country and this land, there are a lot of parallels, and it's not a coincidence. There are a lot of stories that are legacies.

An Uong is a writer orbiting themes of pop culture, food, and shared memory. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eater, Catapult Magazine, Roads and Kingdoms, Taste, Bon Appétit, Serious Eats, and else-where. Find her online: @anuonganuong