A Reflection Across Time on Home, Loss, and Temperament
Preface
It’s taken me years to recognize a third domain of artistic orientation — not performative, not rooted in disciplined craft, but arising from an internal current. A creative force that doesn’t seek visibility or validation, and isn’t structured by mastery. It’s a coherence that doesn’t need to be justified — only witnessed, and carefully midwifed into form.
When I was twenty-six, I co-edited the Journal of the Asian American Renaissance: Roots East/Roots West with Joanna Kadi. The theme was home. We each wrote an editor’s note to introduce the issue. Joanna’s note moved through displacement, ancestry, and elemental belonging.
My own note was shaped by something else—something quieter. Not where is home? Not how do I find my way back? But something less nameable.
At the time, I didn’t know how to frame the difference. The dominant language was one of visibility and return — multiculturalism framed through identity, recovery, and collective story. I thought I was supposed to feel ‘the call’ — that inner summons to seek my identity, to make meaning from absence, to speak not just for myself, but for something I could represent. But that call never came. And over time, I came to understand: what was missing wasn’t a flaw. It was a shape. The absence itself was a form — quiet, whole, and self-contained. Not a failure to respond, but a life unfolding without needing to be summoned.
Even now, I remain outside — not in defiance, but in orientation. The discourse has moved. So have I. But not toward each other. Just closer to a shared edge.
The reflection that follows isn’t a counterpoint to Joanna’s. It’s not even in dialogue with hers. It’s just what came through me then — and what comes through me now.
❧
Original Editor’s Note (1997)
Published in The Journal of the Asian American Renaissance, Vol. 2, Fall 1997
We began work on this journal at the beginning of summer, some weeks after my brother had died of a heart attack. I thought about home. Later, Joanna and I sat together to talk about topics for the journal — Joanna had been thinking about "home" as well. As she talked about it, and proposed writers who would touch on the theme by way of cultural and political dislocation, by way of their personal search for ancestral homes, by way of essays and poetry, I began to internalize the topic and see it through the prism of my emotions in that moment. What was home, now? Where was my home?
When my brother died, we buried him here, the first one of my family to be buried in America. Was this home, finally — permanence? We placed my father's ashes beside him, ashes we had kept with us when we moved from place to place in Oregon, California, Minnesota. My mother had kept them these long years, hopeful that she would return him to ancestral lands in Vietnam until, finally, she relented and buried him as deep as she could. Was my father home?
As I watched my Vietnamese friends one by one take pilgrimages back to Vietnam, I envied their confidence of the need to go. Why didn't I go back to Vietnam, a friend had asked me. Was it something I feared? I answered, no, that if it were fear, then I would understand that behind that was some latent desire. And then, it wasn't so much that I had no desire to go back, there was nothing that attached me to that place. There was no "home" there. I realized once more, that this "home" was something I searched for within — the journey of my spirit — my family; and it was the mystery of their existence which drew me to this world of Vietnam. If I went back, it would not be on a pilgrimage of verification, but because there was something new to discover.
I was glad there would be no going home.
In northeast Minneapolis, on a hill overlooking downtown, my brother and father are buried. I go up there to write sometimes. I feel at home.
We search for many things when we search for home — meaning, identity, a place in the world. The search for a past and a possible future. It is not the sum of places from which we come, nor places to which we've been, nor the places in which we sometimes reluctantly find ourselves settling. We inhabit our obsessions, our memories, and the meanings that inspired the writers of this journal.
In this journal, a home is written.
— Luu Pham, co-editor
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Roots Embracing Stone (2025)
A reflection written nearly thirty years later.
In the summer of 1997, not long after my brother died, I began work on this journal. I was 26. He was 43. His death hollowed a quiet space in me, and into that space came the question of home — not as a political idea, not as a cultural longing, but as something less nameable.
Joanna had been thinking about home through ancestry and displacement, and her vision was vivid, grounded, necessary for many. I listened carefully. But what moved in me took a different shape.
I did not feel dislocated. I did not feel called back to Vietnam. And if I was unrooted, it wasn’t by exile or historical displacement — it was by temperament.
We had buried my brother in a cemetery overlooking Minneapolis. My mother had just lost her eldest child. Beside him we buried my father’s ashes — sent to us from Vietnam in 1980, five years after the war’s end. His remains had been exhumed, cremated, and carried across time, grief, and silence. She had waited a long time to lay him to rest. But in her quiet grief, she called it enough. And in my own body, I agreed.
My brother’s burial marked a turning. A kind of permission to stop searching for home in memory.
The question wasn’t: where is home?
It was: what is the structure of feeling that lets me dwell fully in this moment?
I came to understand that for me, home wasn’t a place. It wasn’t a people. It wasn’t a grief I needed to metabolize.
When I think back on that time, I see now what I was already reaching for. Not identity. Not verification. But presence.
I felt at home by my brother’s grave, writing. I felt at home when something in me aligned, just enough, to notice.
What held me wasn’t memory — it was the act of attention.
If Joanna’s reflection moved through the tangled, generative roots of diaspora, mine rested in a single stone, laid with care. Not in opposition, but aligned with a different gravity.
That hasn’t changed. My home lives in practice, in breath, in the felt shape of what holds. It lives in the unspectacular mystery of staying present, even when the world expects you to be haunted.
I did travel to Vietnam in the years that followed — first in 1998 on a Jerome Artist Travel Grant with my mother, again in 1999 with my grandfather, and once more in 2007 with my wife. Those experiences were meaningful as acts of relationship rather than pilgrimages of self-discovery. They added shape and memory to my understanding of the place, but they didn’t draw from some buried root. They were not revelatory of a hidden-self.
What was whole in me remained whole.
In that journal, many kinds of home were written. Some turned outward, toward origin. Mine turned inward, toward resonance. That’s still true. It’s the quiet current I continue to follow—the third domain that holds without demanding.
— Luu D. Pham
~ End ~
Postscript: On Rupture and Form
It might be easy to read this reflection as bypassing rupture—as if coherence meant the absence of pain.
But rupture was never absent.
Grief shaped this reflection. Burial shaped it. History shaped it. What differs is the way those ruptures formed me — not into myth, or longing, or identity, but into a structure that seeks alignment, not resolution. I didn’t metabolize rupture into narrative. I let it become form.
I don’t write from outside of fracture.
I write from what settled in its wake.
For orientation beyond this page, you may enter through:
•
The Vibrating Thread: From the Field of Redibility
•
Naikan in Four Movements
•
Threadwork (or begin with
Threshold to Threadwork ⧉ for a gentler entry)
•
The Holding Vow Sutra (drawn from the arc of
Naikan: The Rhythm of Vow ⧉ , but arriving later)
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