A Willing Sacrifice
A Willing Sacrifice, 2023, copies of Application for Family Reunification and supporting documents as inherited from my Ba (Father), graphite, hand embroidery, ink, my late cousin Ngọc Anh’s threads, photos from family archive, and vintage buttons, encased in handmade vellum envelopes
Throughout childhood, I collected memories of my parents working very hard, coming home late from work, and sometimes from multiple jobs. There were times when my father worked graveyard shifts, and several days would pass before we’d have time together. In my younger years, I did not recognize this as a willing sacrifice that he had made for his family—one made in love and in joy because he was afforded the opportunity to be the first of his clan to arrive in the Americas. I now appreciate this as a worthy and necessary sacrifice.
These papers—some of which were filled out together by my parents—bear witness to his heart, his dedication to the family whom he was forced to leave behind after the Fall of Sài Gòn, and his delight in hard work because his eye line was set upon the fruit that he believed would sprout forth to feed the many.
When I discovered these documents, completed in his beautiful manuscript, my heart at once filled with only forgiveness and love for him. This project serves as an act of prayer for Ba, a blessing upon him, and both a beseeching and offering of forgiveness to him—forgiveness, perhaps, being among the greatest and most difficult forms of love.
The sheer envelopes reveal these personal histories, while the thread gently conceals private information. The soft, white linear cross stitching—a craft that was taught to me by my youngest auntie, Cô Hoài—contrasts the characteristics of the dense, black bands of ink that can be used to redact pertinent data in legal documents, further illustrating how our personal information and stories can be utilized and hidden in our fight for the ones we love.