Scanning family photos helped me connect to my Vietnamese ...

Quick Take

Erin Loury is trying to re-create her family’s past by scanning old photos. She is particularly interested in her family’s life before the Vietnam War forced them to flee. “War destroys so much,” she writes, “disrupting what gets passed down to the next generation in diaspora: heirlooms, stories, language, tradition. I’m trying to counter that loss one photo at a time.” She is also finding startling connections with the Museum of Art and History’s new exhibit, “Sowing Seeds” about Filipino American stories from the Pajaro Valley.

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The black-and-white photo shows my mom as a teenager, standing with her sister outside the Cao Dai Temple in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. She wears a flowered shirt and flared pants on this 1970s family trip. But what grabs my attention is her expression: She smiles wide and looks off to one side, caught in a laugh. 

My mom almost never smiled in the few photos of her youth. As an adolescent and teen, she was self-conscious of her not-quite-straight teeth. But even as a small girl she was often frowning and serious, her dark eyes  showing a hint of the worry and concern that she carried into motherhood. 

I treasure this photo that offers proof of her youthful lightheartedness, and the way it unlocks a time and place I’ve labored to learn about. Following the threads of my family history has guided me to a better understanding of my own Vietnamese identity.

Family photos are the only things remaining of my mother’s “other” life in Vietnam. Some pictures have bits of cardboard clinging to the back, revealing where a relative ripped them out of albums left behind in the Saigon house my family hastily abandoned at the end of the Vietnam War. 

Nearly a half-century later, my grandmother unearthed these photos from the depths of her closet. I picked up each one, placed it on a scanner, and gave it a new digital life. Scanning these pictures has not only helped me preserve the past, it has made me feel more connected to the role it plays in my own story. 

Family photos and their rich stories feature in a new exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, “Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley,” which opened Friday and runs through Aug. 4. It caps a four-year collaboration between UC Santa Cruz and the community-led Tobera Project to archive family histories from descendants of Filipino agricultural workers who immigrated to the Pajaro Valley in the 1920s and 1930s. Through this effort, housed in the Humanities Division at UCSC, family histories have become part of our collective community history.

I wrote an article about the project in 2022 for the research magazine inquiry@UC Santa Cruz, and it was the first time I learned about this chapter of Santa Cruz County history. 

These local Southeast Asian roots felt faintly familiar, and that recognition gave me a new connection to the place I live. I also resonated deeply with the project’s mission, seeing in it my own journey to document family history as a way to better understand myself.

In April 1975, my 20-year-old mom fled Vietnam with her family days before the fall of Saigon. My grandfather, a law professor, helped settle a labor dispute for an American oil company, ultimately securing his family a last-minute plane flight out. With two hours’ notice, they left their lives behind, bringing a small suitcase each and some gold leaf sewn into the hems of their clothes. 

My mom met my dad, a white, third-generation Californian, as graduate students at UC Davis in 1979. They raised me and my brother in San Jose, home to the largest Vietnamese population in the United States. But we lived on “the other side” of that sprawling city. I grew up without a strong connection to Vietnamese culture or community, and the only language I learned was English. 

While my mom fully embraced an American life and identity for me, I longed for a fuller understanding of my whole self. I ached at family gatherings where conversations and jokes swirled around me in a language I yearned to understand but could not. As decades passed, I finally accepted that I needed to look beyond my family to learn Vietnamese, and to figure out the path myself. 

Like language, other aspects of my heritage were fleeting. When I pressed my mom for details of her life before, her honest answer was, “I don’t remember.” I was a willing receptacle, ready for traditions and history to be poured into me. But war and diaspora are shattering forces. My experience of family history became archeology as I uncovered scattered fragments and pieced them together.

Gradually I created a new role in my extended family, appointing myself family historian. I digitized the short memoir of my grandfather who had passed away. My mom helped me record and translate an oral history interview with my grandmother. Each step helped me affirm my own place in our family story.

I also began scanning old family photos, which led me to the trove my grandmother had tucked away. In it, I found my mom as a chubby toddler, as a serious teen on the beach with her feet in the waves, the rare photo of her uninhibited smile. The pictures reveal my mom’s past life in a way that is hard for her to share. 

War destroys so much, disrupting what gets passed down to the next generation in diaspora: heirlooms, stories, language, tradition. I’m trying to counter that loss one photo at a time. 

The “Sowing Seeds” exhibit similarly excavates the past to invite a collective remembering. Family photos help make the past tangible, and root us in the story we are continuing to write.

Erin Loury is a writer and fish scientist who has lived in Santa Cruz since 2008. A graduate of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication program, she currently works as communications manager for the Coastal Watershed Council. Erin is writing a memoir about her journey into Vietnamese identity and family history, as well as a decade of work in fisheries conservation in Southeast Asia, which she updates occasionally on Instagram @motherriverdragonfish.