11.  2019 | Filmed in Death Valley, California, in December, and exhibited at East Las Vegas Library, "One Day I’ll Have Vietnam Again is a performance-based video work in which poetry accompanies footage of two women dressed in traditional Vietnamese áo dài walking through the desert, eventually cracking open a durian. I wrote the script and the poem—which I also recite—and performed both in the film and in subsequent live iterations. The footage was shot and edited by collaborators. This project synthesizes my interdisciplinary practice as an artist working across genres. Through performance, I seek to connect my work in prose, poetry, and visual art—mediums that often remain siloed. In this piece, I explore intermedial translation, such as using poetry as a form of narrative voiceover, alongside questions of cultural translation. Rooted in the Vietnamese diasporic experience, the work reflects the dissonance of inhabiting foreign landscapes and the ongoing process of making home in unfamiliar terrain. It is the first in a series that investigates both the abundance and scarcity embedded in diasporic life. With the use of drone footage, we aimed to create a contrast between the high-tech American landscape and the small, vulnerable figures moving through it. These two women traverse an environment that alienates them both in scale and ecology, confronting the challenge of learning to inhabit it. Their eventual response is affective rather than pragmatic—arriving at a mode of emotional survival. The act of eating durian becomes the emotional heart of the piece; the fruit functions as a vessel for memory and home, however tenuous. In live performances, I invite audiences to split durians themselves, echoing the gesture in the film and physically entering the sensory world of the fruit.