new york city

It’s official. I signed my life away this afternoon, and now we are proud owners of a very small (but hopefully very cosy) apartment in Brooklyn. Next adventure: the renovation. I’m meeting with a contractor tomorrow.

Ryan McGinley is the hottest young photographer at the moment. He is the youngest to have a solo show at the Whitney. He is shooting for the hippest fashion magazines, like POP. Sigur Ros’s video for Gobbledigook is inspired by his work, particularly the series “I Know Where Summer Goes,” which is a great title, but McGinley borrowed it from a Belle & Sebastian song.  His work has been likened to those of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, and Wolfgang Tillmans. In fact, McGinley’s work does bring to mind Tillmans’s, without all the rawness that makes the latter’s images so compelling. For his “I Know Where the Summer Goes” series, McGinley took 16 models, 3 assistants and some fog machines across the US and shot 4,000 rolls of film, giving him 150,000 pictures, from which 50 were selected. I find whole construct so hollow and cynical. Tillmans, Goldin, and Clark never had to rely on models. Their work is their life, which is what makes them far more interesting.

A few years ago, I asked my father to write down as much as he could remember of his life. He had lived through so much, being involved in his youth with the Vietnamese  Nationalist movement to gain independence from France, then fighting the war against the North Vietnamese for 25 years, escaping the country at the very last minute before the Communist takeover, and starting life all over again the United States in middle age. By asking him to write his memoir I was trying to hold on to him for as long as I could. He didn’t succeed in writing as much as I would have liked, but he did leave me with a small stack of paper detailing some major events in his life, written in his careful handwriting. I couldn’t really read this until now, when I have the space and time to do it properly. Through all his stories, what I gathered most is his immense love for his family and his country. He remembered the dress my mother wore the first time they met. He cried when he was asked to choose which 3 of his 7 children (one of my brothers was already studying in the States at the time) to be put on the evacuation list on the last days of the war. He described so vividly the landscape of the country in which he had grown up, which brought me back to his choice of tie on his last day, green “comme des rizières.” I dug out the journal I had kept on my last visit to Vietnam in 1995. My words seemed to echo my father’s. “Yesterday on my way to Cu Chi I couldn’t stop admiring the lush landscape fo the rice fields. It had rained all morning and when the sun came out, the green - beautiful warm green - stood out brilliantly against the sky. I was moved by the quiet splendor of it all.”

I realize that so much of my father is a part of me. He made it possible for me to be who I am and to have lived as I have. When I was twenty-one, I had my heart broken, and I thought I would never again feel such pain. Nothing compares to the pain I feel now from the loss of my father.