It all started with Auntie J when she said: "One day, I will cook a big meal of very nice noodles and invite all my sons and daughters to gather at my place”.
Auntie J works at an Asian grocery store in town. She migrated to Australia when she was eight and was one of the first Vietnamese people to settle in Wollongong. And yet, I am not her daughter. Nor are the others she calls her sons and daughters. We are strangers who, whether by accident or intention, encountered her at the grocery store, some as staff, some as regular customers. Over time, we became her extended family. That small Vietnamese grocery shop suddenly becomes a site where unexpected encounters occur, a place where one can find a sense of belonging, a vessel that holds memories, nostalgia, and love.
In Australia, immigrant women have limited avenues for economic survival beyond hair salons, restaurants, or tailor shops. Besides, running a grocery store required more than it seems to be on the surface; it demands a deep understanding and empathy for customers, who were often fellow immigrants, experiencing the same longing for home. Selecting the right cultural products to stock was not just a commercial decision but an act of care.
This project is an effort to understand one’s decision and courage to leave one's homeland and start over, how they adapt to their new lives, and more importantly, to honour the endless care for others of those immigrant women, even to strangers like me. By placing these quieter symbolic images alongside more formal representations of immigrant women, I ask: What would be different if they decided otherwise?*
what would be
different if they
decided otherwise?
*This ongoing project is part of a long-term research that tries to explore and understand how the subjectivity of Vietnamese women is constituted and negotiated at the intersection of Confucian gender norms, socialist ideology, and Vietnam’s free-market economic transformation.