Reflection

This piece was reworked from another piece I had created a couple of years back during the time of the Syrian refugee crisis and inspired by the iconic imagery of children innocently playing with noise poppers in front of our Vietnamese Plazas. As a daughter to refugees, it was not hard for me to draw the connections, contemplating on how long it took for people who have fled war to heal and eventually rebuild new cultural plazas for the next generation. And so it is disheartening that this imagery and the same questions still remain and extend to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially during this time as we celebrate Tet. Tet is my favorite holiday. It's a time to celebrate and reunite with loved ones over food, hope, and the sounds of firecrackers to ring in joy and luck. I was also born during the year of the dragon. 

According to the folklore of the race of the 12 zodiacs, the dragon placed 5th in the race because it had stopped during the middle of the race to bring water to a drought-stricken village. As we move forward into the year of the dragon, we should be inspired by the dragon's selfless benevolence. We must not remain complicit to the fact that just 7,437 miles away from us are children and families that are being denied access to food, aid, and to where the sounds of explosions backed by the US Govt. are sent there to ring in their genocide... as of today, over 29,000 deaths and counting.

I hope for the Year of the Dragon, we can take a moment and more to demand for an immediate and lasting ceasefire now.