An intimate portrait of Vietnam half a century after the war

After the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, North Viet­nam emerged vic­to­ri­ous in a bru­tal war that dec­i­mat­ed the coun­try. After Amer­i­can armed forces fled in dis­grace, mem­bers of the Army of the Repub­lic of Viet­nam (ARVN) in the South were incar­cer­at­ed in deten­tion camps for years on end, forced to per­form heavy labor to help rebuild the shat­tered nation.

Among them was pho­tog­ra­ph­er Tra­cy Dong​’s father, a for­mer sec­ond lieu­tenant in the ARVN. After his release in 1978, he lived under heavy restric­tions until he was able to escape Viet­nam by boat in 1989 with his wife, Dong’s old­er sis­ter, and 135 oth­er refugees.

The fam­i­ly set­tled in Sur­rey, British Colum­bia, where Dong was born in 1995. Grow­ing up, she heard lit­tle of their lives in Viet­nam. The gaps in her fam­i­ly his­to­ry cre­at­ed a sense of dis­con­nec­tion for she as she came of age.

“It was very dif­fi­cult for my par­ents to talk about that with me as a young child. I knew my father was a sol­dier but he nev­er real­ly gave me the full sto­ry until I came back home in 2021,” Dong says. ​“I sat him down and said, ​“Dad, I want to hear the whole sto­ry in depth.’”

As her father coura­geous­ly recount­ed the family’s har­row­ing escape from their home­land, Dong began to piece togeth­er a deep­er under­stand­ing of the ways in which inter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma requires a col­lec­tive approach to heal­ing. Seek­ing kin­ship with her extend­ed fam­i­ly, home­land, and ances­tral roots, she returned to Viet­nam in 2022 for the first time since she was 9 years old — this time with cam­era in hand, using it as a tool of con­nec­tion to tran­scend the lan­guage barrier.

“Pho­tog­ra­phy was a way for me to show my fam­i­ly mem­bers that I’m com­mit­ted to get to know them on a deep­er lev­el. It was also a way to move for­ward from pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences and notions that I had of Viet­nam,” she says.

With cam­era as her com­pass, Dong charts her jour­ney in the new book, Tell Me About Saigon (Kris Graves Projects), a poignant sto­ry of self-dis­cov­ery, com­mu­ni­ty, and con­nec­tion. Weav­ing togeth­er pho­tographs of her fam­i­ly with land­scapes, street scenes, beach trips, and work on the farm with hand­writ­ten jour­nal entries made dur­ing her sojourn, Dong explores the exis­ten­tial nature of our deep­est needs: iden­ti­ty, com­mu­ni­ty, and belonging.

“The trip was the start of a rekin­dling, redemp­tion, and recon­nec­tion. I met my cousin and to my sur­prise, they expressed love to me uncon­di­tion­al love to me, because they knew that we were from the same blood­line. That was an over­whelm­ing feel­ing,” says Dong.

“It was always just the four of us, in Cana­da; to be sur­round­ed by like 20, 30 peo­ple – I have nev­er been around that much fam­i­ly in which we all express love to each oth­er. It was a real­i­sa­tion that this is home and they’re accept­ing of me. This is a place that I can con­tin­ue com­ing back to.”

Inter­view with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Tra­cy Dong in con­junc­tion with the April 25^th pub­li­ca­tion of ​“Tell Me About Saigon” (Kris Graves Projects).

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