Free Birds
Free Birds, 2024. Rice sack and fabric inherited from Ba Ngoại (Grandmother), cotton harvested from the farms in which my husband and his family labored, textile, rice, found wire egg carrier
A prayer for the ones who long to be free
After they escaped the war in Việt Nam in 1982, my husband and his family arrived in San Francisco. They soon moved to Bakersfield where land and work were plenty. At a very young age, Hiền spent his days toiling in the fields with them, alongside neighboring migrant farmers.
They were granted little assistance and scraped for sustenance, a common refugee experience. Earth provided for them; the surplus from the day’s good harvest found its way into their bellies. The song birds did too. During that era, farmers trapped birds in giant cages to keep them from away from their crops. Hiền’s family would collect them as food; Hiền’s mother sewed rice sacks into a drawstring bags to keep them. At the age of five or six, Hiền asked if he could help catch birds. His mother let him into the cage, and after some time, he caught a little brown bird in his small hands. He was instantly alarmed by its body heat and its rapid heartbeat, which caused him to immediately let go of the bird. When his father asked Hiền why he let it go, the young boy responded,
It was afraid, and I didn’t want to see it afraid.
His father—a surviving prisoner of war—honored his son’s compassion, and asked him if he wanted to free the other birds. Hiền replied with a convicting yes before his father told him,
If you want them to be free, then you must be the one to set them free.
His father helped him unknot the sack, and that day, they let all of the birds go.
I was deeply moved by this young child’s compassion. My heart expanded at the manner in which Hiền’s father honored his son’s heart—one that was tender toward the living.
Free Birds began in 2019 with a need to relive Hiền’s memory by holding this bird in my hand. With Ba Ngoại’s (Grandmother) gingham fabric, I crafted the first bird, stuffing it with cotton harvested from those same fields that provided for Hiền’s family. The second bird was made from Ba Ngoại’s rice sack, hearkening to her memory of sewing rice sacks and military rucksacks into little backpacks for her ten children as they prepared for the escape from the motherland. This project dovetails memories lived and inherited from both of our lineages, composed in a shared longing for freedom for others and for ourselves.
Years later, Hiền took me to an abandoned carrot factory that remembers his family’s early history as working Americans. Here, we found a mysterious metal crate that we later learned was an egg carrier from the 1950s. After sitting in the corner of the studio for months, it began looking like a cage—one that obstructs free movement and free thought.
The Vietnamese greenfinches grew into a robust flock in commemorating these historical moments—eighty-two of them were made, signifying 1982, the year that Hiền and his family arrived in the United States. As time passes, the birds have been freed from their immediate surroundings; they've migrated into the homes of the ones who have stood with us—these ones who share in our heart for the least, the lost, and the last, the lonely, and the forgotten.
The function of freedom is to free someone else. -Toni Morrison