Tender portraits of Vietnamese youth in Berlin

When the Vietnam War resulted in 1975 and Saigon fell to the North, one of many first issues Tracy Dong’s father did was to burn his images. Recruited by the US army whereas in highschool in Vietnam, he had served as a second lieutenant within the South Vietnamese military towards the communist Viet Cong. Destroying the pictures did little to spare him years spent in a re-education and labour camp, but it surely did shield him from additional persecution tied to his rank. Dong solely just lately realized concerning the destroyed images, however rising up in Canada – the place her household settled within the Nineteen Nineties – she had lengthy felt their absence.

“There was such an upheaval of events before my birth in Vancouver that I didn’t have any documentation or visual archive of,” she tells Dazed. “It left this big hole of understanding as to how I even got to Canada.” That void grew to become the inspiration of her photographic observe – a continuing strategy of query and reply that shapes her newest sequence, Reassemblage. Tracing her personal journey from Canada to the US and on to Berlin, the place she has just lately made a house amongst one among Europe’s largest Vietnamese diasporas, the undertaking captures moments of care and expression amongst her new pals within the German capital, and explores what it means to rebuild an archive, a group, and a self within the wake of displacement and migration.

After escaping Vietnam by boat in 1989, Dong’s mother and father spent 3 years in refugee camps in Malaysia and Indonesia, the place her father had his sights set firmly on America. “He fought for them and, in turn, they promised him the dream – if you have to leave your homeland, come to America and live a better life.” But the waitlist for asylum was lengthy and dwelling circumstances within the camps had been robust, so the household accepted sponsorship to Canada when the chance arose. Even so, her father’s dedication to America loomed massive over her upbringing. “He always told me that America is the end goal – not just for me but for the whole family.”

For 12 years, Dong tried to make that dream a actuality, attending faculty within the US on a tennis scholarship earlier than transferring to New York and juggling a tech job with pictures research. “But the pressure became too much to bear,” she admits. “The longer I stayed in America, the more burnt out and disillusioned I became.”

Returning to New York after spending the summer season of 2024 in Berlin, Dong retreated into the darkroom. “Watching the portraits rise up in the darkness was this realisation of how precious these friendships had become, and the weight of the story being told,” she says. Echoing the fragmented construction of Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T Minh-Ha’s 1982 documentary Reassemblage – the undertaking’s namesake – she collaged the pictures with postcards, letters, journal entries and visas gathered over that interval. It additionally felt mandatory to show the digicam inward, making self-portraits in her New York house to course of the rising sense that “one life was starting to shed and another was beginning to take shape.”

Around the identical time, Dong discovered herself travelling to Berlin extra ceaselessly for work, the place she fashioned friendships in a Vietnamese diaspora formed by its personal advanced historical past of division. During the Cold War, Berlin’s Vietnamese inhabitants emerged by means of two distinct migration routes: South Vietnamese refugees settled in West Germany after the autumn of Saigon in 1975, whereas North Vietnamese contract employees had been recruited to East Germany beneath labour agreements within the Eighties. Long after the reunification of each nations, these geographical and ideological fault strains – between North and South, East and West – continued to affect group networks. Among youthful generations, nevertheless, the boundaries are starting to melt.

“It was my first time meeting people whose families came from North Vietnam – once positioned as the ‘enemy’,” Dong remembers. “Here we were, gathered around the same tables, choosing connection, without the ideological binaries and imperial entanglements that defined our parents’ lives.” Recognising that she had stepped right into a second of burgeoning cultural expression, as many within the diaspora embraced their hyphenated identities with newfound confidence, she started photographing her pals and studying extra about their tales. “I asked, ‘How do I photograph you in a way that makes you feel most connected to Vietnam?’ We spent a lot of time cooking in kitchens, or sitting in their studios while they made art.” 

Shortly after Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024, Dong obtained information that her US inexperienced card software had been authorized, a second she’d as soon as dreamed of. She responded by declining the applying and starting the method of transferring to Berlin.

The solely member of her household born in Canada after their migration, Dong had at all times felt like “the black sheep” – not Vietnamese sufficient at house, however not westernised sufficient amongst English-speaking friends. Now, surrounded by Vietnamese eating places, practising the language, and attending month-to-month potlucks like Cơm Together – the place members set the world to rights over steaming dishes earlier than ending the evening with karaoke – Berlin has helped to heal these wounds. “Berlin has brought me closer to just about everything: my heritage, my community, my queerness, my identity as a Việt kiều,” she says. “It’s a place where people come to find their people.”

The distance has been tough for her household, who’re nonetheless coming to phrases with the transfer. Yet the undertaking has additionally dropped at the floor matters and reminiscences that had been as soon as buried deep. On a latest journey again to Vancouver, Dong’s father shared beforehand unseen images from the household’s years in refugee camps. “It’s been shock after shock learning more about what they endured after the war,” she says. “But it’s also affirmed why this work matters.”

What started with the absence left by her father’s burned images has turn into a deeply loving act of reconstruction: a photographic file she hopes will go a way in the direction of repairing the gaps in her personal historical past – and stopping comparable absences in future.

Follow Tracy on Instagram to maintain up along with her work, and take a look at her website. Reassemblage can be proven at FotoBali throughout a projector slideshow program curated by Worlds Through Minds.