Vu M. Nguyen

A night veil slowly succumbs to the seemingly eternal cotton candy sky. Sunrays gradually grow more lateral in their approach angles, and like the shutter in the stage’s spotlight, they slowly enclose onto themselves, sinking the light into the vastness of the night closely nighing on oblivion. The lush warm golden-hour light that was bathing the scene now soon crosses into the Chungking Express-esque pink cyan glow from the exposed fluorescent tubes on the nearby street vendors. The color palette changes ever so imperceptibly under our own nose; the bright blue sky grows weary, giving into the dark blue shade of twilight infusing a cold tone to the shadow. The even light fill in the late afternoon scene is now, instead, lit in a stark noir-esque look rooted in a much more defined shadows. At this hour, light doesn’t wrap and surround the scene evenly so much now that it only exists in a small, deliberate, and directional pattern.

The landscape plunges into darkness, just as the sodium vapor lamps stretch themselves to compensate for the light lost, but they can only go so far as the curtain of night comes along. Long down the vastness of the sidewalk by the watering hole strung a whole stretch of these plastic chairs in disarray, mirroring the structural chaos by design that is our world - the chaos that encapsulates every aspect of urban life.

Layer by layer, history slowly interweaves with the concrete pavements over the stretch of decades, creating this disgustingly visceral fabric by sense and smell. The cigarette buds by the chalk loads slowly sinking into the crevices of the unglazed porous ceramic tiles, buried under one after another, but ascending their current states as an object of permanence in history, if not archival eternity. Just as how the rings on a tree show its age, this belly of a city life seemingly maps out a clear chronology of both the time that’s long gone and the time image that is currently still working itself into our contemporary image. If all these excrement stains on the street are the city’s scar, then perhaps the veins of the city are all these electrical lines strung haphazardly across from over our heads threading through the thoroughly sparse negative space left by the street-side tree line, running interminably from one concrete pole to another.

These microdynamics in the tiniest of details of the cityscape seemingly fall by the wayside - and into our peripheral vision, yearning for a sense of grounding in a singular reality, where one is at peace in their existence with no regards to where they might be. 

at a brewery in LIC, Queens, 2022

/reminiscing about beers in Hàng Bún, Hanoi, 2017

A whiff of sandalwood carrying you back to a simpler time, where the world of spirituality seemingly coalesced with the reality it tried so hard to rid itself of. It’s funny how one singular flavor note is so evocative it came to represent a significant portion of my life in Vietnam. This thick, full-bodied, and round high note of incense in the wake of Lunar New Years permeates the thick and garbled periphery of the national television program that mom would only allowed on the family TV in the first couple days of the new year. Even though no one’s attention, including her own, would come anywhere near it. 

The calm and wavering smell slowly transition to a more bold and all encompassing aroma of the dark and viscous Vietnamese coffee note that dad is most certainly not drinking in whole. Sometimes, not too often, he would put on some CDs on his stereo. Khanh Ly’s vocal is still one of the more iconic ones that is proving incomparable even in our contemporary scene. The lush and smooth rendition of her high notes together with the almost ephemeral reverb in the vocal mic back then creates this phenomenal body of sound that almost come to exemplify a whole genre of Trinh music composed by the great Trinh Cong Son. The senses permeate the house the same way that the evanescence feeling of Tet (Vietnamese New Year) still exists in our psyches collectively. 

This was perhaps way back when I was a kid, way back in a time, and further than I can even remember. For now my memory is slowly fading away, home is beginning to look ever so less clear at a distance, and with everything changing and moving, home is almost, not, home any more.

Riverside Park, New York, 2022.