The photos show white sand beaches, children on bicycles, farmers, fishermen, and gardens, and the emotions captured include modesty, playfulness, sadness, and pain.
Family photographs, yes, but also a vivid reminder of a childhood spent in a country whose name can still evoke haunting memories.
The country is Vietnam and the photos were taken by Khang Vodinh, a twenty-six-year-old senior who spent his first nineteen years in Nha Trang, a picturesque coastal community in south central Vietnam. A grant from the College's Internal Education Fund enabled him to return to his homeland last fall and recapture his childhood in photographs that were on exhibit in the Arts Building this spring.
It was a poignant homecoming for Khang, whose grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins still live in Nha Trang. Khang doesn't remember the war, but he does remember his family's two failed escape attempts — one in 1978, after which he and his mother, uncle, and four siblings were held for four months, and another a decade later when he and his brother were intercepted by soldiers who shot and killed a number of their fellow boat passengers. This time, the two-month imprisonment included torture, beatings, and solitary confinement.
Khang, his parents, and his four siblings arrived in the United States eight years ago after a long emigration process and settled in Albany. Khang came to Union intending to become a doctor, studying biology so that he might be able to diagnose the headaches that had plagued him since his torture. The countless doctors he had visited could offer no explanation, so “I wanted to be a doctor to find out what was wrong with me,” he explains.
But those very headaches prevented Khang from excelling in biology. He eventually met with Walter Hatke, chair of visual arts, to discuss his love of taking pictures and drawing, and Hatke, who saw talent in Khang, encouraged him to study visual arts.
Khang admits that he did a “lousy job at first” as a photographer, but he thrived when given the opportunity to choose his own projects. Although his memories of Vietnam never left him, he hadn't seriously considered returning to the country until Sandy Wimer, artist in residence, suggested it. A conversation with an elderly woman in an Albany nursing home where he volunteered planted the seed for his project. “We talked about life and the idea that you can preserve the memories of happier times. It touched my heart,” he recalls. “I do this in the hope that my American friends can learn about the people and culture of Vietnam.”
The journey back to Vietnam was both exciting and frightening. While Khang welcomed the reunion with his family and friends, he feared that he might never be able to complete his photography project because he was unsure of what to expect in Vietnam. Twelve years after he had been imprisoned, he still feared people in uniforms — police officers, customs officials, airport guards. When a police officer at the airport in Ho Chi Minh City approached him, he froze in terror. The policeman pointed at his suitcases. “They look pretty heavy,” he said. “Why don't you take a cart?”
“At that moment, I felt a little alleviated from all the fear of people in uniform,” Khang says. ” 'They have changed,' I thought.”
Khang worked closely with Professor of Photography Martin Benjamin to prepare for the project, completing a similar study of his life before returning to Vietnam. At first Khang was uncomfortable taking self-portraits and photos of his family. But Benjamin and a friend of his, photographer Thomas Roma, taught Khang to make everything possible. They explained to him that he had to overcome his modesty (or fear). “Thomas Roma talked to me about his experience as a photographer. Essentially he did everything he could just to take the picture he wanted,” Khang says.
The lesson paid off, and Khang began to take self-portraits and photograph his family in America — and enjoyed it. “It's not like you're taking a picture anymore,” he says. “It's an adventure — it's trying to do something impossible. You have to make things possible and not just say 'I cannot do it' and then not do it.”
In his first two weeks in Vietnam, Khang traveled throughout Nha Trang, snapping pictures and speaking Vietnamese, explaining his project. But he was often taken for a spy, and he was yelled at, threatened, and chased away.
Khang was crushed, fearing that he wouldn't be able to complete his project. He tried Roma's tip of hiding his camera, but says he simply wasn't comfortable that way. One day, though, he found a way to “make everything possible” — become a tourist. He noticed that all tourists were able take pictures of whatever and whomever they wanted. “I decided to start my new day of photo-shooting as a foreigner,” he says. “I would speak English from that day on. Then I went out and became a tourist. I became what they wanted me to be.” When Vietnamese citizens asked him where he was from, he asked them where they thought he was from. If they suggested China, he assumed the role of a Chinese tourist. If they said America, he agreed.
Khang finds it ironic, and saddening, that he had to rely on the guise of a tourist to capture the Nha Trang of his childhood. “How could I talk to my people in a different language and pretend to be a different person?” he asks. “But that's what I had to do.”
Still, he is proud of the resulting photographs of smiling children, a shy grandmother, disabled people selling lottery tickets, arts students at the beach. “They are all my favorites,” he says of the thousands of photographs. “Every single one of them is different. I took each one with my heart and soul.”
Khang Vodinh's photographs are included on his Web site: http://www.vu.union.edu/~vodinhk/.