“My Nostalgia” (Jan 2022 - September 2023)

My upbringing was both painful and beautiful. As an Asian-American, Jewish-raised, LGBT, transnational Vietnamese adoptee living in White suburbia, I struggled immensely with fitting in. I battled with my identity – always wishing that I was different. Strangers stared at my family but it felt like they were staring at me. When I got older, I desperately searched online for pictures of other Vietnamese children who looked like me, but I could never find any, let alone any with my story. Internal conflict lead to outward explosions as I vacillated between denial and acceptance. But through it all my family loved me all the same, sending me to good schools and teaching me the importance of social justice, charity, and service work. They included me the same way as they would a biological child and to this day I have a network of loving family and family friends that have never thought of me as anything different.

I finally broke free of my bubble at 18 and moved off to college over 500 miles away. But as I aged into my twenties and moved from city to city, following aspirations, relationships or work, I continued to struggle with repressed childhood pain. One of the outcomes of this was that in all the time since I had moved out, I made a conscious effort to spend as little time at home as possible – making short trips and finding excuses not to stay the night.

In 2021, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and cancer in the same month. I flirted with the idea of moving back to my home state but I was fearful of leaving behind the safety of familiarity that I had built around myself over the last couple of years. For 7 years, I had worked fearlessly to transform myself emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually to better myself and re-frame my perception of life up to that point. Moving back to Maryland felt like a threat to my sanity. But everything finally came to a head when I packed up and moved over 300 miles back to Maryland – settling down just an hour away from my parents.

Walking in the front door and honoring my commitment to my family was a spiritual awakening in itself. I was shocked to find that for the first time in my life, being home didn’t trigger overwhelming emotions anymore. My inner narrative was calm and I was on a new mission. I was inspired. For once, I saw beauty in places where I used to feel immense pain. I was free to be curious; every moment with my family from that point on has felt precious…. and I was going to treat it so.

There is an urgent calling inside of me to document this house and my parents because I can finally see beyond my perception and feel safe knowing that certain things don’t last forever. The word nostalgia came to my mind when I painfully started to realize, through interactions with my father, that memories were a privilege that were not indefinitely guaranteed. “My Nostalgia” works to create physical space for my process of mental and emotional healing as it pertains to memories and unrooting old beliefs.

Edit: Michael Gordon (March 28, 1941 - September 20, 2023)