Politics

Land as Memory, Body as Subject: To Call Oneself a Vietnamese Settler

As a settler, and someone whose familial and ancestral history is also tied to histories of displacement, understanding and living on Indigenous land is a political commitment that is just as important as understanding my fractured relationship to my family’s homeland of Vietnam.

To Find a Tribe: What the Census Meant to My Father & Means to Me

Engaging his people in the Census was a natural extension of my dad’s advocacy – to ensure Vietnamese representation in America’s self-portrait. He went all-in, knocking door to door, making speeches, strewing Census infomaterials over various neighborhoods from boxes of the stuff in his bedroom and basement.

On Solidarity: Asian Americans & Black Lives Matter

To be further useful in movements for Black liberation, we must look into the specific ways we ourselves are functioning under state violence and white supremacy. We can do way better than attempting to organize around a myth.

Untitled: A Reflection from a Vietnamese American in Minneapolis

The protest is on 38th and Chicago, at the site where a white cop murdered a black man, George Floyd. I am very familiar with this intersection: I grew up not far away, in Phillips, and currently live even closer.

A Statement From DVAN for Black Lives

The Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network stands in solidarity with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, as well as their grieving families and communities. It is important to recognize that the recent constellation of police brutality is by no means novel, but deeply rooted in the United States’ long genealogy of anti-Black violence and white supremacist logics.

Hustling in Art & Work: Bao Phi and Jane Kim in Conversation

Bao: My parents loved Vietnamese arts and poetry but knew they lived in a culture that doesn’t value that. And yet here they had a son who was going into art in the English language, and they feared for my survival, which is a pressure a lot of people don’t understand.