Việt Kiều

Việt Kiều (Vietnamese living outside Vietnam) is my search for home through the Vietnamese diaspora, following families and people displaced over fifty years ago to all corners of the planet.

Việt Kiều, “Vietnamese living outside Vietnam,” is a term that emerged for those who fled during and after the Vietnam War. It is often used inside Vietnam more than by the diaspora it describe, a name given from an original home to the people who left it. In 2026, the Vietnamese government formally declared its 6.5 million Việt Kiều “an inseparable part of the Vietnamese nation” and a strategic resource to be brought home. 

I am a Việt Kiều twice removed. My parents fled Vietnam as refugees and resettled in Australia, where I was born. I have since moved to New York. This project began as a search for where home might be for people like me, tracing the similarities and differences that arise when your people were displaced to all corners of the world.

Việt Kiều photographs the people, homes and businesses of the Vietnamese diaspora [to date: across Australia, Vietnam, Europe and America]. It records a late stage of conflict-driven migration: long-term assimilation, and the emergence of a third culture that belongs fully to neither the old country or the new one. 

Vietnamese people have endured colonization, war and economic hardship, and we have learned to bloom where we are planted. I see it in the informal economies that run through our communities. My father breeds quails in our backyard and sells their eggs from the trunk of his car after work. That instinct feels distinctly Vietnamese, but it echoes every displaced community’s need to survive somewhere new.

A visual language of its own has emerged: neon, camp, and a shared love of luxury. It has bred new cultures, from the Cajun-Vietnamese kitchens of the Gulf Coast to the women’s gambling circles around Las Vegas casinos, and a new generation of younger Vietnamese creatives both at home and abroad. 

The war ended in 1975. As memory fades, the descendants of its refugees disappear further into Western culture, while new wars create new diasporas. Through Việt Kiều, I want to understand what it means to be Vietnamese outside Vietnam, and how refugees and their children negotiate identity long after a conflict ends. Very little photography of Vietnamese people has been made by Vietnamese people, and when one side holds the cultural power, it decides what is remembered. This project is my attempt to add a Vietnamese voice to that record, and to find my own place within it.