I grew up inside a home where personal harm and historical trauma were inseparable. Far from abstract, they first became known as felt, lived experiences, entangled like muscle and memory, in voices, gestures, absences and ways I learned to move through the world. Very early on, I learned what it felt like to live without a language that could name or hold all of my experiences at once. There are few mirrors for those who live between histories, cultures, races, and wounds. My life was continually forced into simplified narratives that could not contain its full complexity. And so, out of necessity, I turned toward stories that could hold and validate what the world could only see in parts—and it was there that I first encountered myth, long before I understood why.

My mother is Vietnamese and grew up under French colonization, Communist rule, and later American military occupation in her hometown of Phát Diệm and across Vietnam. She carries the imprint of a colonized land, of war endured in childhood, of a life shaped by survival under immense historical force. My father, by contrast, is a German-Irish American, raised in a poor, rural small town in the heart of the United States, shaped by economic hardship, yet inseparable from the force of a nation whose reach altered the lives of others far from home. So on a geo-political level, their marriage and relationship took on all the unequal dynamics that such a racial, cultural and national pairing carries, forces already in motion before either of them chose each other.

But that is not the whole story. There is also the more personal. My mother carried unhealed wounds from her own early life, and within our family those wounds expressed themselves through control, volatility, and deep relational harm. I grew up prematurely attuned to the emotional needs of the household. My father, carrying his own unhealed history, became increasingly compliant and self-effacing. Despite his racial and gendered position of power in the wider world, he was the more submissive and compliant in the relationship as my mother’s dominant presence intensified over time.

But inspite of all that, my childhood was not just shaped by violence and fracture. There were moments of real beauty: poetry, dance, the discipline of learning to paint, the solace of putting words on paper. These were not escapes from my life; they were happening alongside everything else, braided into the same days and rooms. Beauty and harm did not arrive separately. They coexisted, and that coexistence is what makes my story so difficult to tell.

As I moved through the world, I noticed how rarely my story fit existing narratives. People seemed to choose one lens or the other. Some could see only colonial violence and racialized trauma and, in doing so, erased the emotional abuse I experienced as a child. Others could only see the individual pathology and denied the impact of war, colonization, and larger historical violence. In my experience these truths do not cancel each other out but manifest in a complex interweaving of wounding and power, larger historical circumstance and personal choice. But I continued to feel the pressure to collapse the complexity of my story into moral binaries: Who is the victim? Who is the villain? The truth is my life has always quietly shown me that these questions cannot hold the whole truth.

In the course of my life of 50 years, I have learned anti-colonial and anti-racist frameworks are essential, but they can become dehumanizing when they erase accountability at the interpersonal level. Cultural explanations for behavior are essential to avoid ethnocentrism, yet there is also a point at which culture can be invoked to excuse harm or perpetuate patterns of wounding. Intersectionality, as vital and necessary as it is, still only maps how forces intensify, and where harm concentrates, but not how love, fear, jealousy, loyalty, and silence move through a single room. All of these approaches to understanding and making sense of behaviors struggle to describe what happens when binaries themselves begin to dissolve, cross and manifest into an altogether different dynamic that isn’t seen because it hasn’t been named. For years, I did not know this. I lived deeply inside justice-oriented discourse, intersectionality, cultural arguments, and decolonial frameworks, believing that taking the moral side of the oppressed was the most ethical way to move through the world. What I couldn’t see at the time was how this moral clarity also kept me trapped in my own abuse. In my loyalty to decolonized history, I learned to doubt my own perception. I excused my mother’s manipulation and control as her historical trauma I had to have compassion for at the cost of knowing my own. I remained blind to my father’s suffering because he occupied the role of “the White man,” and saw him only in his connection to his privilege and power within the larger socio-racial-economic framework. The lense through which I depended upon to make sense of the world allowed me to see the injustice within my family dynamics as it reflected forces of race, gender and politics on a larger scale, but this came at the sacrifice of recognizing a co-existing reality of interpersonal domestic abuse hidden in plain sight, tragically unnamed and unseen for years. It took me years to understand that structural privilege does not immunize someone from interpersonal abuse—and that a framework which is politically necessary for justice can become erasing and oppressive too when it’s asked to explain beyond its limits.

In the process of crafting my story I was not hoping to tell a “clean” story; I was attempting to find a way to tell the true one. I realized that my story is demanding. It asks for a narrative framework that can hold: structural oppression and personal responsibility; racialized trauma and emotional abuse; geopolitical power and interpersonal power dynamics that can and do contradict each other; compassion without erasure; accountability without demonization. This requires a willingness to let go of ideological and moral certainty and clear cut heroes and villains. My mother’s suffering does not negate the harm she caused. My father’s wounds do not absolve him of his enabling, nor of his agency within a relationship that wounded both him and me. And I, too, had agency—even though I was a child at the time, and later an adult navigating the continuing dynamics of that family, I participated in sustaining the household patterns, even as I was being shaped and scarred by them. My story needs to be allowed to exist as it is: paradoxical, perpetually in tension, multivalent—a whole expansive enough to contain its full complexity, rather than a partial truth crafted to satisfy a limiting sense of “justice”.

But there is more. My story does not merely resist existing frameworks; my very being unsettles the moral clarity that sustains them. I was born to parents who came together through shared humanitarian work—my mother, a social worker educated in Vietnam, and my father, an American who came to serve in post-war recovery. And yet, the same military and political forces I can name as violent shaped the world into which I was born. I was born of a war I cannot justify, yet cannot deny without erasing myself. This contradiction does not live only in history or theory—it lives in my body, in how I move through the world. Over time, I have learned how conditional and fragile my sense of belonging can be. My story is often received only when it confirms familiar narratives and moral arguments, and becomes suspect when it complicates them. I am welcomed as evidence of historical trauma, but less easily received as a witness to harm that does not resolve cleanly along expected lines. In this way, my life exposes a structural blind spot in how belonging and recognition are culturally policed. Within this blind spot, I am placed in an impossible bind. To claim my Vietnamese inheritance, I am expected to hold compassion for my mother at the cost of my own story of pain. To name my experience fully is to risk estrangement—not only from my heritage, but from the very movements and communities meant to confront oppression. I live with the exhausting demand to justify the coherence of my full story, a story whose complexity is often more than the collective can hold. And so the legitimacy of my lived experience is repeatedly called into question. For many years, what I had not fully named or realized was the cost of all this to me. Living this way has meant inhabiting a conditional form of recognition, asked again and again to make myself smaller so others do not have to question the limits of their moral clarity. The loneliness that follows is particular and enduring—not only the loneliness of being misunderstood, but of being asked, quietly and repeatedly, to edit my own existence in order to belong.

The search for a narrative capable of holding the whole of my life became an act of survival—a way of staying intact, of not losing myself. In the silence where my story met the limits of what others could see, I learned to seek another kind of compassionate witness. Long before I could articulate why, I was drawn to stories that could hold contradiction without forcing resolution. As a child, this began not with theory, but with fairytales—stories where unloving parents existed, where danger lived alongside beauty, and where survival did not require moral purity. Later, I would recognize this same capacity in mythic figures like Selkie, Fox Woman, Raven, and La Loba—threshold beings who refuse singular identities and carry tenderness and danger, human and animal, loss and continuity at once. Across cultures and forms, myth offered something the contemporary world often could not: a way to exist whole, without defense; a language sturdy enough to make contradiction inhabitable rather than erased.

Perhaps this is why, even as a child, I felt intuitively drawn to the Vietnamese Creation myth of the Dragon and Crane. At the heart of this story, a Dragon of the sea and a Crane of the mountains marry and give birth to one hundred eggs. I recognize myself there—not as a reconciliation of opposites, but as their living outcome. The myth does not ask the Dragon to become less ocean, nor the Crane less sky. It does not require one lineage to redeem or cancel the other. Instead, it imagines a beginning in which the meeting of opposites is generative, and where what is born is not asked to justify the conditions of its making in order to belong. Paradox is not left outside as a problem to be solved, but gathered inside, warmed and protected within the heart of the narrative nest.

Here in this project I am not using myth to smooth over war, violence, or their long repercussions, nor to escape them. I am turning to myth in order to survive a world that could not see me. Reaching across eons, arms warmed by feathers, and covered in scales, extend from the distant past to gather me into a warm nest that welcomes me. In myth’s embrace, I am not left behind. I find a sense of belonging that does not require explanation or proof.

I do not imagine this as a single story that contains everyone, nor as a framework meant to replace others. Rather, I offer it as a neighboring narrative possibility that can exist alongside, welcomed among many others. It is a place where those who feel their lives slipping through the cracks of existing stories might pause, rest, or recognize something of themselves without being asked to conform. It feels, at times, through myth that ancestral voices and hearts are bearing witness—not only to my story, but to countless untold ones that have struggled to remain intact within their times. The great nest of myth is not neutral; it is intentional, protective, and will - in the end - outlive us all. Within it, my story is allowed to breathe. And in that breathing, I come to sense—not as certainty, but as quiet reassurance—that I have always been imaginable, alongside my relatives, long before I arrived and long after this world, in its present form, has passed.