About

My research will examine how postcolonial Asian diasporic multimodal literature re-imagines an archive for Asian stories that have been lost, destroyed, or unwritten. I will examine how multiple forms, genres, and languages are necessary acts of imagination against diasporic disconnection. Recently, I discovered photos preserved by my mother that survived her refugee journey from Vietnam in the 1970s and Hurricane Katrina in the 2000s. My mother struggles to remember her childhood. Being able to see these childhood photos brought back memories, but also demonstrated what trauma had erased. As a second-generation Vietnamese-American unable to speak my mother-tongue, I want to experiment with how to preserve familial and cultural narratives when we have to scavenge from the fragments from memories and stories that are inaccessible. As this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, during a persistent global refugee crisis, and decreasing priority and funding for the arts, my research will critically research how imagining through multiple forms is necessary to curate an accessible archive for the Asian diasporic collective memory. 

This research project is a palimpsest: Exploring the tool of imagination to resurrect histories, using the critical methodologies of Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” (2008), Susan Howe’s “spectral archive” (2019), and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “elsewhere” (2011) through multimodal archivist-writers such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mai Der Vang, and Diana Khoi Nguyen, the creative portion of this project will collage this archival research with fiction and visual art to find new ways to preserve diasporic memory that have been lost. Through this research project, I will postulate and create from these gaps in the Asian diasporic experience to pedagogically imagine methods for the Asian diaspora in the US and UK to connect and create (through workshops, exhibitions, and shared meals) across diverse personal histories, languages and modes.