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I started the month of April 1975 as a two-year-old Vietnamese orphan in Saigon. I ended the month as an American adoptee in Buffalo, New York. Growing up in the U.S., separated from country, language, and culture, there was no commemoration of April 30th. I left too young to have any first-hand memories of my birth country and couldn’t know or mourn what I was missing. If it wasn’t for the constant reminders that I didn’t look like anyone in my family or community, I would have forgotten that I was Vietnamese. In 1993, while a student at Harvard College and not satisfied with the war-centric stories and images of Vietnam to which I had been exposed, I returned to Vietnam to experience it for myself. There, with my adoptee’s curiosity and training in documentary photography, I captured glimpses of what my life could have been like had I stayed in Vietnam.