Would That

As women/womxn of the Vietnamese diaspora, our bodies hold many would thats: hungers, silences, absences, wonder(ings)s, and wound(er) ings. There are many things we might wonder would that be, would that have been, would we be—other/not Other(ed) than we are or have been? However, in the Vietnamese language—which we stem from but here do not write in—there is no such thing as the subjunctive mood, which, if it is to be conveyed in Vietnamese must rely on the context—the environment— of its adjoining words; what surrounds the action or description places it in or out of time. Which may be to say, what surrounds us is what places us in relation to: history, inheritance, the present, possible futures. We have migrated through time and across geographies, and time and contexts in varying ways have migrated with and within us. As bodies, we know ourselves to be repositories of no-longer-present actions and events, of many layers of witness and memory, of inheritances both evident and abstract, of potential futures too—desires, fears, unknowns. But what if we dis-place our (kn)own bodies from the seeable backgrounds, and what if we re-make those bodies? What if we absent our enfigured selves and ask you instead to (learn to) read anew the spaces left behind? This exhibit explores those spaces of the self, and self-conception/s, and challenges how you will read us, how you will see us, as a cohesive yet collective, diasporic, multi-voiced, Vietnamese-feminine descended entity