đô la, đô la, đồng

Nail polish on plastic, washi tape
28 in x 28 in
2020

After his retirement as a food packer at Pearson International Airport in 2001, our grandfather lived half of the year in Vietnam with his much younger wife and the other half in the suburbs of Toronto with my mother or one of my aunts. Unsurprisingly, he kept up-to-date with exchange rates (CAD to USD and CAD to VND), checking his phone for the latest numbers, scribbling them down and crossing them out on napkins. Equally concerned with the daily profits from my mother’s nail salon, he would wait eagerly for numerical reports when she returned from work. Their conversations had a routine quality:

Mother: Ba, guess how much I made today?
After all my expenses, and splitting profits 40/60, about 1,200 dollars!

Grandfather: Wow! You were the dumbest out of all my children and now you make more than Long who has a university degree and manages a company!

I asked my mother to help paint cut-outs derived from our grandfather’s exchange rate notes. He had written them a few weeks before he passed away in the summer of 2017. This work was temporarily installed at my mother’s house above the sofa where our grandfather used to take afternoon naps or FaceTime his wife.

Nail polish courtesy of Serena Nails and Hair.

*Violent animals, hard-earned cash and mortality were themes of interest to my grandfather. His notes about these topics inspire a series of works about language, currency, geography, familial relationships and the immigrant’s split identity.