Thank you all for being here tonight.
I'm Sarah Newman, the James Dicke curator of
Contemporary Art here at SAAM, and I am delighted to welcome you to our annual James Dicke lecture,
or in this case,
it's something slightly different. It's a lecture performance by Tiffany Chung.
It's very exciting to have Tiffany here on the occasion of her first solo museum exhibition in the United States.
She's shown her work on global conflicts and migrations at museums and biennials around the world,
including at the
2015 Venice Biennale, the 2018 Sydney and Gwangju Biennials, and
exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, SF MoMA, and the MFA Houston, among many others.
But "Vietnam, Past is Prologue," her exhibition here,
is her most sustained look at the events that defined her home country, and we're incredibly proud to have worked with her to realize it.
Bringing artists like Tiffany to present and speak about their work is one of the most important things we do at the Museum.
I know I'm probably biased as the contemporary curator,
but showing the art of today is something that we can do in a pretty unique way.
In exploring the history of this country through art,
we have the opportunity to tell complex stories about America in the world, and to show the way that events and artistic conversations
ripple across continents and across generations.
In this case, the subject is the war in Vietnam, and the
way that that singular event continues to have political, social and emotional
consequences, forty-five years after it ended.
We all know the war well through art and movies and the way it continues to serve as a touchstone in our culture.
Yet even within such familiar territory,
Tiffany Chung's work shows us how much more there is to know.
Her exhibition opens our eyes to a history hidden in plain sight,
showing us the war and it's aftermath from the perspective of those who lived through it in Vietnam,
and giving voice to the mostly untold stories of the South Vietnamese, on whose behalf the US entered the war.
Through intricate maps and emotional interviews,
she documents their experiences, starting with the intimate and telescoping out to the global.
She begins with a fine-grained excavation of her own father's experience as a military pilot and a prisoner of war.
Then she widens out to document the first-hand accounts of former Vietnamese refugees to this country,
and then she pulls out further still to show the worldwide effects of their collective migration in the war's wake.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition shows how the
contemporary world was reshaped by this migration, and how the diversity of our own country's culture is one of its legacies.
For Chung, this project is personal, and stems from her own history as a refugee to this country after the war.
The exhibition is a remarkable feat of empathy, of historical research, and of artistic imagination.
Please join me in welcoming her tonight for a very special lecture performance. Thank you.
- applause -
♪ cello music ♪
April, 2009. I recently asked my mother about her trips to this one river many years ago,
where she stood quietly for hours by the riverbank.
Walls of fog surrounded her tiny frame,
waiting and hoping for my father to appear
from the other side, through thick clouds of mist, or so she had hoped. And there she kept waiting.
Seventeen parallel.
The river is a poignant reminder of her youth; the fog, her faithful friend.
My mom was the prettiest girl in her school.
Her thick, black, flowing hair, her silky light skin, her not-so-lucky life.
I wish I could have known her back then.
I wish I could have been her friend.
I'm mesmerized by the beauty of her youth,
the strength of her hope, the river where she stood
with its walls of fog and a passing of time.
July 9th to 11th, 1971.
Kissinger and Zhou Enlai conducted secret meetings in Beijing,
a result of Nixon's effort in making contact with Beijing during 1970 and '71.
February 22nd, 1971.
20 kilometers southeast of Tchepone, Laos.
Fire supporting base 31, a Kingbee of the legendary 219th Helicopter
Squadron, aka, Kingbee had his wings broken.
April 2003.
200 hours. Somewhere off national route 9. I stepped down from the bus into the bitterly cold and dark,
deep in the night,
mountainous jungle.
February 1972. Nixon's Beijing visit marked the first U.S. Presidential trip to China.
Post-1975, Vietnam. In school, we learned the war rhetoric.
We are taught that our fathers were traitors.
Traitors' children deserve hard labor just like their father.
University is only for members of a young Communist Union, but all youths
must volunteer to pick up garbage in the canals and burn deviant books anyway. It's mandatory.
Today, I came home from kindergarten and saw soldiers with metal detectors searching my grandparents' house.
I've learned many new words in school:
"anti-comparative bourgeoisie," "new economic zone,"
"re-education camp," and "cross the border."
Our friends and neighbors keep disappearing.
I wonder when it would be our turn, and whether I would ever meet my dad.
April 1964. On the way to Saigon from Can Tho, a communist guerrilla
threw a homemade bomb to the land rover that his father was driving,
which had a yellow triangular sign to indicate the civilian vehicle.
My father's family was heavily injured.
His one month old brother landed across a hole on the car's floor due to the explosion and was badly burned.
His oldest sister's knees got destroyed.
My father was 18 years old at the time.
♪ cello music ♪
April 2003.
230 hours.
Abandoned gas station,
middle of nowhere,
freezing concrete ground. Half asleep, I think about my 24 year old dad.
Did you sleep at all during the nights on hill 31?
Early 1970.
He used to fly special missions and stay at a military base in the highlands.
His firstborn daughter was just a few months old then. Every day,
he would submit an update report to an officer in the U.S. Special Forces, and they became good friends.
One evening, he was singing at an officer's clubhouse. His American friend sat there and began to cry.
They went outside to a dark place with no one around, and his friend cried even more.
I am a patriotic soldier, and I took an oath to be loyal to my country, the U.S.
Therefore I cannot reveal to you what my superiors have planned against you and your country.
But I'm crying for you.
I have several sons, and now I don't know if I would teach them to be
patriotic when they grow up.
Post-1975, the United States of America.
In college, we learn about the Vietnam War from books written by American writers.
We watch Hollywood movies that tell the American narrative of this war.
We watch us being seen as those without a voice and a choice.
We've been taught to be grateful, and we are.
But we also wonder how we would ever know about the lives of people like my father.
The young man growing up in the war, who also had dreams, hopes, and fears.
April 2003.
1100 hours.
Looking for the Mekong River, the bus continues to move west,
leaving my father's past behind
in the bare planes of a battlefield that no longer existed, although ingrained in his existence and my imagination.
February 1971 to October 1984.
During the 14 years in captivity, he was transferred from prison to prison.
He was put to hard labor in one reeducation camp to another.
There were times, they put him in dark solitary confinement,
where he sat and came up with creative activities. He thought of jazz moves. He found ways to escape.
His brain drafted
blueprints of big multi-story houses. His thoughts engineer tanks, ships, and submarines.
March 10, 2015.
45 years later,
abandoned Quan Loi airfield is covered in red dirt and rubber trees.
Pretending to taxi on the very airstrip of my father's youth, I could hardly see the asphalt.
It's just another red dirt road.
It took him nearly ten minutes to fly between Quan Loi and Loc Ninh airfields.
It took me 45 minutes in a Toyota 4Runner.
Fragmented stories of how the war took a toll on our families were the lullabies that transcended our
childhood and thrust us into adulthood.
Vietnam is one of the most impactful words.
In my own dictionary of life, this word brings back a familiar sense that transports us home.
It also has the power to bring back the most ominous chapter of our memories.
There are wounds that don't heal.
In and outside of our tortured homeland,
Vietnam became one of the most calamitous frontlines of the Cold War.
The return period in 1970s was a political strategy for the U.S.
to counterweight the Soviet Union by linking arms with China, and
economically tapping into its market of almost a billion people.
The endgame was a collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975.
The Vietnam experience has shaped a new and complex Cold War,
with Syria currently being the 2nd major theater after Ukraine,
age-old hostile enemies are raised from the dead, first with heavy weaponry, then boots on the ground.
Following the Ukrainian
crisis starting in February 2014, and Russia's annex
of the Crimea region, NATO stepped up,
"exercises and rotations of forces through NATO allies in Eastern
Europe, as well as storing hardware there for use in an emergency."
Announcing the deployment of 250 tanks, artillery pieces, and fighting vehicles to countries in Central and Eastern Europe
in June 2015, the U.S. returned to Europe
with a scheduled rotational nine-month deployment of armored brigade combat teams.
The first one, consisting of 4,000 troops and 90 tanks, started in January 2017.
An aviation brigade of 2,200 soldiers and 86
aircraft were deployed in February 2017.
In response, Putin threatened that he would deploy, "40 new intercontinental ballistic
missiles to its nuclear arsenal."
Since 2015, Russia has in fact deployed his combat formations and ground forces near the Ukrainian border.
Towards its northeastern side and the Baltic, "the air assault division,
separate motorized rifle brigades, and heavy presence near the Baltic States; these forces pose a significant
conventional threat to Ukraine disposed 
under multiple operational level headquarters."
Constructing a transnational rhetoric of breaking the border of Sykes and Pikot, ISIS destroyed Syria and Iraq.
And that was part of its money-making strategy.
"Exploiting natural resources and looting antiquities, as well as collecting ransoms for kidnappings."
Control territories in the Middle East also means control the rich oil
of the region.
The U.S. has led an international coalition air campaign since September 2014
to cut off the terrorist group's second-largest funding source.
Russian airstrikes have also targeted ISIS oil
infrastructure. The two resurrected Cold War enemies are competing with each other for the vast oil supply
in this part of the Middle East,
championing the imperialistic ambitions of Britain and France.
However,
the new Cold War is not just between two opposite ideologies, but mixed with complex sectarian conflicts and terrorism.
Mirroring Vietnam, we continue to witness the war in Syria
crushes and grinds the country.
This conflict sees no national or regional boundaries.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria reported that
brutality and extreme violence that ISIS imposed on people in its areas of control,
"executions, amputation
lashing in public spaces, and the display of mutilated bodies." The UN war crimes investigator
documented 33 chemical weapons attacks in Syria, citing four cases that
Syrian government forces used chemical weapons against insurgents in eastern Ghouta,
including chlorine three times in July and in Harasta on the western edge of the zone in November of 2018.
They also reported that Russian forces
indiscriminately launch, "attacks resulting in death and injury to civilians,"
instead of hitting ISIS positions.
And, "three US-led collision strikes on a school near Raqqa in March 2017
killed 150 residents, which violated international law by failing in its duty to protect displaced civilians
known to be sheltered there since 2012."
According to Syria Situation Report by the Institute for the Study of War between April 2nd to 16th,
2019, insurgent and Islamic groups
continue to reassert their presence with attacks and car bombs in Damascus and eastern Hamas.
As Israel conducted airstrikes
targeting a weapon warehouse and missile factory of the
Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in western Hamas on April 13,
Russia and Turkey will reportedly use them in our air base in northern Aleppo as a staging area for
joint patrols near the contested town of Tel Rifaat.
The proxy war in Syria with multiple actors
reaffirms the old Arab nationalist doctrine: the need of wiping out vestiges of colonialism,
rhetoric that has enabled ISIS as well as a strongman of the global south, to employ an
ancient method of ruling and maintaining their grip on power,
playing different trite sects off one another and bringing them together when needed by focusing on an external enemy
Western powers have also been known for their divide-and-conquer approach in the colonization of the Sub-Saharan
Africa and in the den called Indochina.
With the complex tapestries of tribes, clans,
sects, and regions of the Arab world, this approach has been, "pitting these groups against one another,
bestowing favors -- weapons or food or sinecures -- to one faction in return for fighting another."
Tracing back this very approach during the war in Vietnam, a retired Vietnamese professor told me in an interview,
"the young generation back then was influenced by the 20th century's philosophy of existentialism.
Through the writings of Camus and Sartre, therefore, it was easy for the Communist North to seduce us with their
propaganda of fighting for independence, freedom, and democracy.
Although we knew it would be held in North Vietnam,
but we convinced ourselves with this daring thought:
we would rather live in a real hell than with an illusional paradise," which refers to the Communist North and the
US respectively.
With the CIA-backed coup d'etat and assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem by General Duong Van Minh in
1963, we were fed up with our so-called friend and ally, who changed horses in midstream as they wished."
However, he added that since 1975,
reunified Vietnam has turned out to be ten levels of hell.
After 40 years of the war's official end,
can both sides raison d'être in fighting the war of opposite ideologies be laid to rest?
In most of my interviews with an older generation of Vietnamese Americans,
grief, resentment, and even anger towards the Communist Government or the U.S. are still present.
"The war hath never ended for us. After the war came retribution.
All of those concentration camps of re-education and new economic zones were all tuned to eliminate, to kill."
The North Vietnamese writer in exile Pham Thi Hoai argued,
"the war was the mother's milk, the school, and the testing ground of Vietnamese communism. It provides historical
justification for the indispensable leadership of the Communist Party, endowing it with the mandate from Heaven.
War-era heroes continue to monopolize peacetime authority. War-era military leadership is reborn as totalitarian control."
How can the war be consigned to history when a mandate derived from that war endures?
Encapsulating the war from a different angle, Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in "Nothing Ever Dies,"
"this is the most important reason for Americans to remember what they call the Vietnam War.
The fact that it was one conflict in a long line of horrific wars that came before it and after it.
This war's identity and indeed any war's identity
cannot be extricated from the identity of war itself."
August 2014.
How many shelling bombardments are needed to erase a city?
Life accumulated from thousands and thousands of years can only be contained in
Victorian keepsake boxes now,
collecting dust for many thousands of years to come.
Cultural heirlooms in ruins and rubble all lit up.
The city resurrects momentarily from its death when the first sunray hit its debris.
Lovers walk around hand in hand before realizing they can't find their own shadows.
Children ride their bicycles up and down little hills they don't remember being there.
Eyes wide open. Before nightfall,
before all disappears behind distorted walls and into dark bullet holes.
♪ cello music ♪
The building of a nation equates destruction. Cities and lives are reduced merely to dots, numbers
increasingly, day by day.
Internally displaced persons, refugees, and refugee camps-- they too have become abstraction,
vaguely understood in one's imagination.
History repeats itself.
History that marked the beginning of televised conflicts, media downpours, of human catastrophes in exotic and distant
devastated topographies.
History I wanted to forget,
even deny.
In the grand shadow of the war in Vietnam, we often try to unpack the politics,
but not the micro human stories that made up the 2,115,000 deaths between 1965 and 1975.
The stories of my mother, of all the Vietnamese men and women of her generation.
Not intending to conduct my research based on a victim-centered approach,
I have interviewed a number of former South Vietnamese military men to understand how each and every one enacted their own
politics and articulated their ideology.
Fighting kills both flies and mosquitoes.
This Vietnamese proverb speaks volumes of the bloody battlefields in Vietnam.
The war took its toll on people from all sides, north and south Vietnam,
as well as the U.S.
My personal quest of piecing together my family's turbulent time
became an entryway into south Vietnam's collective remembrance of the war.
Their memories constitute a history that is vital in comprehending and filling up the lacunae of the war's legacies,
which is often ignored in the American narrative of it and omitted from Vietnam's official record.
The rights to one's history, memory and truth are pivotal, and should not be constrained by ideology or political alignments.
Walter Benjamin wrote, "to articulate what has passed does
not mean to recognize how it really was.
It means to take control of a memory as it flashes in a moment of dangers."
September 29, 2018. Today, I interview Ms. Son, whose accent reminded me of my mom.
Women from the imperial city of Hue like my mom and Ms. Son don't forget the 1968 Tet Offensive massacre.
But a communist provision authorities during their short occupation of Hue City.
While some
American Historians disputed the mass executions reported at the time with eyewitness account,
a number of communist materials emerged and confirmed a massacre.
The statement of the former regional Communist Party Secretary and Commander of the
Military Region stated, "the number of puppet troops and governmental personnel killed, captured, or dispersed
was greater than the total number of our armed forces."
The 2002 memoir of Bui Tin, a former North Vietnamese Army Colonel,
"acknowledged that executions of civilians did occur in Hue."
We may continue to debate this event, but Ms. Son recounted her experience as lived.
Watching her father and husband being taken away by the communists on
January 31st,
1968, during the New Year celebration.
In a journey with her mother in 1969 to look for their remains among about
2,800 bodies recovered from between 18 to 27 mass graves.
With Syria,
from an inspiring revolution in 2011 to a convoluted and protracted war.
Estimated statistics cannot reflect the actual numbers of casualties.
As the conflict seems to drag on indefinitely,
the Syria Campaign noted, "we know from conflicts around the world that we can't have any sustainable
peace if we don't have accountability."
The death toll after seven years of the conflict is
estimated to be at least 511,000 by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in their June 8th 2018 report.
Counting all these civilian deaths, the Syrian Network for Human Rights has estimated that 217,764
civilians had been killed between March 2011 and March 2018.
1979.
Everyone is trying to scoop the water out of the sinking boat.
My sister's face is turning blue.
She was almost drowned in the Mekong River during the 1978 historic flood.
Many more hours.
Gunshots and screams.
People push one another in panic towards the boat's bottom compartment.
I hear my sister pleading for people to get off her chest.
Dawn of the day.
Prison transfer. Shoes, bags, clothes, and bodies are thoroughly searched. More jewelry to be swallowed.
May 2017.
On the train going back to Copenhagen, you, a 16 year old Muslim girl from Syria.
I'm your big sister and mentor.
Out of nowhere, you say, we took a boat here.
60 people packed in a dinghy for 15.
A gun would be put at our forehead if we resisted getting on the boat.
Some people took our smartphones to check the GPS in the middle of the dark sea.
We fought and almost killed each other in the middle of the Mediterranean.
But when the boat sank, the same people dragged my mom, my little sister, and myself to shore.
Otherwise, we would have been drowned and dead.
We both look outside a train window. You chew your fingernails. I swallow down memory.
Two young boys wearing fake KKK headdresses made from white plastic bags,
parading back and forth in the train carriage
where we sit facing each other in silence.
I periodically volunteer to work with refugee students in a program called Traveling with Art,
a collaboration between Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and a Danish Red Cross school,
which has been running for over 13 years. I am not a screamer, but a dreamer.
I believe in inspiring and mentoring these young people,
whose eyes beam with hope when knowing I was a refugee, just like they are now.
♪ cello music ♪
In an essay on the politics of memory,
cultural historian Andreas Huyssen argues that NATO's humanitarian intervention of the Kosovo conflict is,
"largely dependent on Holocaust memory," and that Kosovo's atrocities,
"mobilized a politics of guilt in Europe and the United States
associated with non-interventions in the 1930s and 1940s
and the failure to intervene in the Bosnian war of 1992."
In the early months of the Arab Spring,
NATO-led coalition began a military intervention in Libya on March 19, 2011
with airstrikes after the UN Security Council adopted resolution 173.
Whether such intervention nullified resolution
173 or exacerbated the situation in Libya and the region would be another discussion. The question is
whether the EU and US considered serious repercussions that would follow such intervention and therefore make
contingency plans accordingly.
It's apparent that ethnic cleansing or conflict-induced
displacement would bring political and economic flotsam and jetsam to the doorsteps of first world countries.
In response, Europe fumbled
in revising asylum policies to deter the refugee waves crossing the Mediterranean from the Middle East and Africa,
and the US hardened immigration policies,
especially to prevent refugees and migrants from Latin America to enter,
erecting walls or fences and whipping up
anti-immigrant rhetoric or our answers to the same people that many of such military
involvement or resolution vowed to protect.
In fact, let's examine where refugee crises actually take place.
The number of registered Syrian refugees in neighboring countries has reached 5,648,002 as of April 11th, 2019.
With 3,621,330 in Turkey and 944,613 in Lebanon.
With the Palestinian refugees who have been there since 1948 and the unregistered Syrians,
almost 20% of Lebanon's population are refugees.
In Africa, the Diffa region of Niger alone is home to more than 200,000 Nigerians fleeing
Boko Haram and still scattering there, with more than
130,000 people amassing along National Route 1, the desert paved highway just outside of Diffa.
Refugees' makeshift camps stand in stark contrast with their desire to seek social and legal conditions
that enable them to regain dignity and, "the confidence that they are of some use in this world,"
Hannah Arendt wrote in her essay, "We Refugees."
IDMC reports that there were 30.6 million new
internal displacements caused by conflict, violence, and disaster in 2017.
Among the displacements induced by disaster, South Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific continues to be the regions most affected.
While I was working on the dance performance videos on the social uprising over
1918 kome sodo, or rice riots, in Japan, the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East and North Africa in late 2010.
What excited me was that these two events,
set a century apart, were similar to one another through ways in which they were organized.
That, "mobilizations were decentralized and spontaneous. They were neither led by political parties, nor defined by the
traditional narratives of socialism or nationalism."
As the war in Syria erupted and escalated in 2012,
I have started the Syria project by tracking statistics,
infographics, and reports of the conflicts and its humanitarian crisis.
I traced the colonial petitioning of the Middle East with politically constructed borders, as seen in the
1916 Skyes-Picot Agreement.
I map area of conflicts and influence, sites of the internally displaced Syrians and regional refugee camps,
and charged the numbers of deaths, refugees, and IDPs.
The intersection of my artistic practice and academic discourse is situated between
aesthetics and archives.
Poetry and statistics, scholarly studies and media reports, lived experiences and top-down policies,
national narratives and micro-histories,
political imagination and participation.
As the boundaries of countries and cities are continuously being challenged or erased,
I conduct intensive studies on the impacts of geographical shifts and imposed political borders on
different groups of human populations.
My work often excavates layers of history and cultural memory, while unpacking issues of conflict,
displacement, migration, urban progress, and transformation,
and the slippage is between past colonial rhetoric with the present neoliberal reforms
into traumatized continents of the global south.
Tracking the Syrian crisis has led me back to the Vietnamese Exodus history.
As the international community's compassion fatigue kicked in,
western countries stopped accepting Vietnamese refugees for resettlement.
The 1989 UN adopted comprehensive plan of action came into effect
in Southeast Asia, which had already introduced in Hong Kong in 1988, forming the legal basis for forced deportation.
Diplomatic cables, corresponded between the UNHCR and governments worldwide
after the fall of Saigon and during the refugee crisis,
revealed that for the most part, we were an unwanted population,
surfacing from the destructions of war and the aftermath.
Exploring the complexities of immigrants' condition,
Amitava Kumar wrote, "a certain weight of experience, a
stubborn density, a life to what we encounter in newspaper columns as abstract, often faceless, figures without histories."
It is imperative to reclaim the lived narratives of the former Vietnamese refugees
whose names and identities were reduced to ID numbers in detention centers and camps.
In the Vietnamese Exodus project, I examine intergovernmental negotiations and
unpack various asylum policies imposed on Vietnamese refugees in the past.
Closed camp,
prolonged detention, refugee status determination,
resettlement, and deportation.
The project gives insight into the constant shift
in asylum policies and the impact on already traumatized and distressed people.
It also analyzes and remaps the Vietnamese refugees' migration trajectories beyond the Western sphere,
disseminated into the most unexpected regions of the global south.
This remapping decenters the typical narrative of refugees resettling in the US and Europe,
eventually becoming regular immigrants and citizens.
The refugee experience is often as complex as the escape routes.
With the Global Refugee Migration Project, I also mapped the key migration routes through Africa to Europe,
and the search and rescue zones in the Mediterranean.
I tracked the dead and missing numbers through these routes, and the arrival in Europe.
Currently, I'm studying
Guatemala's colonial history, civil war, and continuous human rights violations as a case study on migration from Central America.
For the Hong Kong chapter of the Vietnam Exodus Project, I spent three years doing research and ethnographic fieldwork
between the UNHCR archives in Geneva, and with the Vietnamese community in Hong Kong.
The research formed a conceptual framework for several visual presentations and panel discussions.
These panels discuss a number of key policies embodied in the lived
experiences of the former Vietnamese refugees through their own testimonies.
The work of Hong Kong's NGOs, such as Art in Kam, and offer a team of human rights lawyers
assisting Vietnamese asylum seekers in the past in gaining refugee status, and the work of two Danish
organizations in their efforts of helping current asylum seekers in Denmark.
Being the most catastrophic
refugee crisis in the second half of the 20th century, yet the post-1975
mass exodus of almost two million Vietnamese, about one third of whom died at sea,
is not recognized as part of Vietnam's official history, but instead erased into oblivion.
Launching a project called Vietnam Exodus History Learning,
I worked with a group of young Vietnamese painters in Saigon to study this part of our history by rendering
archival photographs of the period into watercolors.
Through the process, they learn to ask questions about such hidden histories.
For me, reconstructing counter-narratives is a way to protest against what I call
"politically driven historical amnesia,"
as well as to create intervention into the spatial and political narratives produced through stagecraft.
September 2017.
But all you got was a life sentence under a bridge of a transit point in a backwater village of a first-world country,
in a wheelchair of a flooded trailer park, in limbo of a language and a legal system all foreign to you.
Eyes bewildered. Memories fuzzy.
Your white head bent down in perplexity and despair until the day you departed this world,
carrying with your soul the burden of a history that was silenced in our homeland,
of poverty, oppression, violence,
imprisonment, or forced disappearance,
of justice that has never arrived,
of a life that has been half lived, of a home that is no longer here.
All we can do for us now is to write a lullaby
to sing to our children and children's children
about a gangster, a smuggler, a waiter, a laborer, a street vendor, and a sleeper that we all see ourselves in,
about a life that was lived frozen in flashbacks, about a youth that never returned,
about us, the unwanted population.
Thank you for your patience.
- applause -
I think we have time for one or two questions. If anyone has any, just raise their hand I can come over.
Well first, thank you so much for everything you do, you
transcend multiple disciplines and it is
astounding, the breadth of your work.
Something that captured my attention,
and something that, being from the inner city, I'm pretty obsessed with, is food from hard times,
the desperate foods that
over generations oftentimes become comfort foods, and I saw your
recipes, the video on the recipes and I just wanted to hear a little bit more about that experience,
and eating and talking with those elders,
because I think that the food of survival is often the grace of
humanity kind of, it kind of carries you on and leaves a legacy.
Thank you.
Thanks for the questions, and also comment. Thank you.
With that project, I started out
remembering the subsidized period in Vietnam during 1976 and 1986.
I started out with very simple questions. I simply asked people
about the recipes that they had to come up during that period when we didn't have enough food or rice,
especially rice, and most people had to eat cassava roots,
so all I wanted to know was the kind of recipes that they use for cassava roots and
I ended up collecting the recipes and asked a friend of mine to cook a meal for them after interviewing them
separately, and in the end we sat together
and these people never knew each other before, and so we just sat together and we started eating dinner, and
the next thing you knew, people started talking about their
past, about their history, about their memories, and they could get really political as well,
and sometimes starting now with such a simple idea would bring back
certain memories that that you didn't know that they were there,
and bringing these people together after so many years was quite an experience, because people didn't want to leave
the dinner, after two hours and they still wanted to sit in and eat and talk about the past,
so for me, it was the first time to do that, and I thought
that helped a lot too for me to understand and to learn about the past and also be reminded
of what it means to bring people together,
and how food plays such an important
role in our culture and also in surviving.
You're welcome.
Can I have one more question?
Hello, thank you so much for your work.
I'm an ethnomusicologist and I do research on hat tuong, the Vietnamese performing arts genre,
and I'm also very interested in memory and
how performing arts can contest kind of official written histories, and I was so fascinated by your pairing of
your lecture/performance with the cellist playing.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the choices that you made there.
Well, you know there's a tradition of
cellist suites being played at events, really a historical event, Yo-Yo Ma played--
what did he play? He played the Saraband?
I think he also played that in suite one at the 10th anniversary of September 11,
and at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 a Russian
cellist and human rights activist also played the suite as a way to welcome people from East Berlin,
and also before that, Pablo Casals,
he was the first one to record a suite, and while he was recording the suite for the first time,
his home country got attacked by Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War,
so there's this tradition of these suites being played, and I thought,
I'm not just talking about Vietnam, although my show at the Smithsonian is about Vietnam,
"History," and "Past is Prologue,"
but my work is beyond that and I'm interested in worldwide conflict and how that
has impacted our culture and our society, so I thought by using the cello suite, would really bring out that kind of feelings.
All right, I think that's all we have time for today, but thank you so much, Tiffany Chung, one more time. Thank you.
- applause -
