My stister, Linh Tiểu Ngô, and I just translated a text of my mother, Phương Mai Ngô, for publication in the special edition of Art in Translation, Chuba Lagi—Practices, (Texts), and Feminisms in Southeast Asia, edited by Yvonne Low of University of Sydney & Roger Nelson of Nanyang Technological University.
Chiến tranh/War
This fragmented personal narrative is a living archive of war, displacement, and survival, salvaged by the translators from the scraps of their mother’s notebooks. In this memoir, Phương Mai Ngô (born 1942) describes her experience between approximately 1949 and 1972, living through a series of wars in Vietnam. Her account offers a rare glimpse into the life of civilians and, in particular, the perspective of a woman, in the northern region: fleeing warfare on foot, the relatively peaceful interwar period, enduring US bombing in the North, and grieving lost loved ones. The text offers insight into the power dynamics of family life in Vietnam and the author’s experience as an aspiring writer during this critical period of language formalization and promotion of literacy across the country. Through the process of translation and annotation, this text attends to the gaps, ambiguities, and affective registers that exceed official historical accounts. In doing so, the project challenges archival practices that privilege state-sanctioned narratives, instead foregrounding an intimate, intergenerational record that resists consolidation into a singular national story. By centering a civilian, gendered perspective, this work complicates tidy narratives of wartime victory, revealing the uneven, ongoing costs of survival that persist beyond the frame of triumph. Furthermore, by reframing this writing within the space of contemporary art, the project enacts a feminist archival gesture of care and repair: a means of seeing the past anew and reconstituting subjectivity from the fragments that survive.