We're Just Here For The Bad Guys

My father, who had been incarcerated during my childhood for embezzlement, left our family behind in 2010 to return to Vietnam in pursuit of a new life, a land he initially escaped from during the war by falsifying his birth records.

Nearly a decade later from his absence in my life, I travelled to Saigon after his sudden stroke, and learned of his unexpected brain cancer diagnosis, the severity of which would greatly limit his mobility and lifespan in the coming months. As his health began to wane drastically, and my feelings of deepened alienation and betrayal resurfaced, my father in an attempt to mend our relationship made a proposition to collaborate upon a series of photographs documenting what was ultimately an unsuccessful journey to recovery. While the pictures gravitate towards him as the express main character of this story, I would argue that they are about the tensions on both of our ends being unresolved; on his, the protective responsibilities of trying to remain as my impregnable father despite his declining health, and on mines, a criticality and anger tinged towards him, one he knows which cannot possibly be resolved. 

 In the wake of his passing, our brief collaboration unveiled the irremediable complexities and tensions left between us. An allegory inverted, my Prodigal’s Father voyaging outwards for success and phantasmal glory at the abandonment of his son, now confronted by the evidence of his own shame; myself, and the camera between us recording it. As he raised me amidst the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, the anxieties he held during and prior to his time in prison only amplified; fearing the home we had would be relinquished, the ground under him sinking, the notion of ownership now barred by constriction and a web of financial insolvency.

In the years after his death, I’ve returned to his mother’s home in Hawaii, and uncovered a briefcase of letters he had kept since my childhood, archival images of his youth, letters sent between my father, myself, and the justice system. The irony of our story revealing the pitfalls of immigration as a Vietnamese diaspora, as well as my personal paradox as his son: caught between obligation and forgiveness, handling the evidence of a man trying to erase himself.