Boon Vong | Journal

I’m sure most of us have mixed emotions when it comes to thinking about the places where we grew up.  In movies and tv, you see it a lot, famous people and athletes returning to their humble homes with a lit match or a bulldozer in tow.  For regular followers of my work, I’m sure you know a little bit about my story; if you’re Lao or a refugee you can pretty much look to your own family’s history to see my own.

On the road leading up to the small town where we first settled, there was a dam where we used to fish for food.  I remember as a kid getting really filthy in the shallows, flipping over stones looking for crawfish or other critters.  We would come home with buckets full, and combined with bamboo shoots found behind the local high school made for some nice family meals.  Today the area is fenced off with no tresspassing signs.

Tryon, North Carolina was the home of the church that sponsored us, and it became our home as well, in the autumn of 1980.  It is a quaint small town, hardly changing at all since then.  I’m sure locals back then wondered about us, the scruffy immigrant kids walking the streets.  I don’t know if we ever dared enter in any of those stores, I only remember walking to the local gas station with my older brothers to get candy.

The church gave us a house, which is no longer there.  I remember it was at the bottom of a wooded hill, and below the local elementary school.  It was a simple fireplace and kerosene heated home, and even though I was bit beyond that age, I slept in a crib.  Everything we had came from the donation box at the church.  From our oversized suits to the furniture.  I remember it was really cold in the bottom portion of the house, and one of our sponsors would come over to teach my mother how to can and preserve all sorts of fruits and vegetables.  My dad worked at a textile mill and when he would come home on his bicycle, I would meet him at the door and he would pat me on the head and give me a candy bar.

My mother spoke no English, while I was lucky enough to enter school as a kindergartener.  It was October, around Halloween actually, when I had a most frightening experience as a little kid in America.  In class one day we were all having lessons when a teacher dressed as a green skinned witch burst through the door and cackled.  All the other kids laughed and tugged at the make believe witch’s straw hair while my cousin and I bolted to the next room.

I remember one day in gym class getting to experience hula hoops.  My mother would walk up the hill to pick me up in the afternoon.  One day I had just learned to tie my shoes, and was so proud to have taught my mother.

The local landmark was the Tryon horse.  I remember looking at it every time we would go into town, to church, or to the grocery store.  The little theater is still ticking, and we once saw Annie there.  It was an odd coincindence that I fell asleep at the same Annie did when Daddy Warbucks took her to the cinema.

In a short year, our family and extended family was growing quickly, with my parents and the church bringing over our relatives and friends.  In Tryon I remember my uncle’s family living in basically a tool/storage shed on the property of an okra farmer.  My cousin had a little duck toy that had a weighted base that never let it tip over.  The place was so small that when he and I would jump on the bed we would have to watch out not to bump our heads on the ceiling.  I think there was a crab apple tree in front of their home, I tried climbing it, slipped and a branch split open my leg, which I still have the scar from.

We then moved across the state line to Landrum, South Carolina, which was a mere stone’s throw away from Tryon.  Most of us lived together in these apartments.  Our lives had progressed to the point where we were now driving clunkers instead of old bicycles and had a normal life of school, work, church, and television.

This is the apartment where we lived, during the times when you really start storing memories as a kid.  It’s still the same after all this time.

Back then my dad borrowed a Polaroid camera from one of our sponsors and he would take photos of us.  I remember sitting on that bench with my corduroy brown pants and yellow Mickey Mouse t-shirt.  We had a blue Toyota Corolla that my dad basically built with his own hands.  I used to ride around with him everywhere.  He was so proud when he bought a steering wheel cover from the store and I watched while he was lacing it up.  I even remember the day he gave up smoking.  Being from the old country and in the military, everyone smoked.  One day he just pushed a barely puffed cigarette into the ashtray and that’s where it stayed.

As I was taking my own photos, I could hear little kids laughing inside our old apartment, and I thought that it was just like that when we were here.  I remember my oldest brother bought Michael Jackson’s Thriller on vinyl and was playing it full blast while my uncle’s foot tapped.  He was of the long hair Santana and Steely Dan era but appreciated the music.  Around Christmas, one of our sponsors at the church dressed up as Santa Claus and he brought me a Snoopy toy set.  I remember rushing home after school to watch He-Man on our black and white television.  I remember being so afraid of the dark and would run as quick as I could to my parents’ room where I slept on the floor to grab my blanket.  We didn’t have much then but the memories were still pretty good.

This was the second elementary school I went to.  In our early years we would ride the schoolbus, and I remember there was a new Mexican immigrant family that would board it in front of their house right at the railroad tracks.  It was a house smaller than the one we were given, without running water, so they couldn’t bathe.  When they got on the bus we all pinched our noses and no one would let them sit down.  We were fortunate then, and now.

This empty shell was the local TG&Y, a K-Mart type of store.  We rarely got to go in to look, and even rarer, did we get a toy.  One day my cousins were in town to visit and they would always remark how their mom would buy them things and how my mom was never as seemingly generous.  It was perhaps true, most of my comic books and toys came from my road trips with my father to the flea markets in Greer and Spartanburg, while my mom was concerned with preparing food and saving money.  That day my mother for some reason, perhaps under unwarranted pressure, took us there and said we all could pick out toys.  My cousins picked cap guns and I chose a rubber and plastic toy dinosaur that was a bit out of the price range.  I rarely, if ever pitched a fit in a store, but I believe I was on the verge of one, so she bought it for me anyway.  My mother didn’t have an easy time in the early years in America.  She had an enlarged thyroid that had to be operated on.  She had numerous dental problems that caused her pain and embarrassment.  One day my dad was working on one of our jalopies behind the apartment.  He had the thing jacked up precariously and summoned my mother to come help him.  I don’t have a full recollection of what happened but I do remember screaming, blood, and a neighbor helping my mother away from the scene.  My father’s never asked my mom to do any type of mechanical labor again.  Maybe that memory was just a dream, maybe this entire thing is just a dream.

We were blessed to have so many good people in our lives back then.  Sadly, there aren’t too many left.  One of our host families, we called Mr. and Mrs. D for short, with the inflection of dee, which in Lao, means good.  Can’t really say enough about them and their kindness and generosity, people who sponsored and supported a family they’d never met before, and definitely took a gamble on how we would turn out.  We spent so many good days and summers there, at their house in front of the lake.  Mrs. D would call me her “Monday Grandson,” as she would take me to the local art center and restaurants while my mother was taking weaving classes or at the hospital.  Somewhat embarassing but true, she can still recall the difficulty of showing me as a little boy how to use the toilet, and not always sit Indian style everywhere.  She is an artist herself, with paintings covering her walls, and perhaps that simple gesture of taking care of a young boy set me on my way.

One summer she took me and my brothers out on the lake on the canoe.  In trying to teach us English through experience, she pointed out the tons of water lilies on the surface.  One of my brothers snatched one up and bit the stalk.  She was surprised that we had lilies back in Laos, and would eat them.  Sharing of culture, sharing of lives, I don’t know if those summers will ever come to pass again.

When we escaped Laos on the Mekong river, we had two families and two boats.  From what my parents tell me, the boat that I was on with my mother and brothers was leaking and it was amazing that we didn’t die right there.  We didn’t, and we continued to live.

I was never the type of artist that had an amazing traditional sketchbook, the spiral bounded diary of sorts that you didn’t want people to see, but in actuality, you kind of did.  My books always had torn out pages, barely legible writing, and other poor attempts at witty sayings and bad poetry.  In browsing the archive to transfer it to my new modern ”sketchbook,”  I saw the cycle of things over the years.

The inside of my book, for those who would care to look…

…a satchel full of prints given out freely in the past…

…collaborations with eager minds today…

…just the same as the marks from the same pen passed around before…

…a stack of unsold/unwanted drawings in the past…

…a stack of unsold/unwanted drawings in the present…

…sketching away at the airport, hoping to be taken somewhere…

…sketching when mired at home, hoping for that job to call back…

…how can a person graduate college and still fail? easy…

…comic book ideas still rolling around today…

…recalling the sting of yesteryear…

…use to paint gouache and watercolor on the charcoal…

…now I color digitally on the screen…

…tried to boil down people to the essentials back then, with ink and color…

…same thing with the palette of pixels today… 

…back then used to be obsessed with negative    s   p   a   c   e…

…still am…

…never really had a real studio back then…

…it was just wherever I felt like doing stuff…

…back then muses were found everywhere, and met face to face…

…comments and instant messages were spoken aloud and in person…

…not the nonsense that things have become…

…was unihibited by the old technology, no matter how grainy it was…

…today we don’t realize how good we got it…

…interlaced, jittery, grainy, but I still used anything at hand…

…fireflies then didn’t care what cameras we used…

…and they still don’t…

…trying to stay with the curve is hard and expensive…

…but making money is not the top priority of why I buy…

…in the beginning the cameras we had were simple, but the potential was there…

 …to become the instruments of modern folk…

…in the early days, everything was novel and new, learning to attach humanness to circuits…

 …it’s still the same these days, ain’t nothing changed…

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Notes:  Dragon Boat practice at the lake, it’s not too late to join our team! Come out for papaya salad!

Notes:  Just some random gear talk.  Nowadays people enjoy talking about photography and photography related gear just as much as taking the pictures–or perhaps even more so…hopefully most of the shutter bugs out there drive their machines once in awhile.

The iPhone 4 camera seems to have something like a ~35mm equivalent f/22 lens.  Which in visual terms is your typical digital camera of convenience, everything sharp, and you have to pay extra special attention to converging lines and unwanted compositional elements due to the extreme depth of field.  Cameras like this one are the great equalizers. Almost anyone can create a good image with a large aperture lens and an SLR due to the knocking out of the background, but the point and shoot cameras remind me how hard it is to create a decent image with limited tools.

I do like the flares that I get when purposely shooting into a light source.  Here it makes sort of a flower pattern.

Having such a small sensor, the noise patterns and detail are a bit like watercolor.  Good for this image since it was sprinkling a bit.  I still wouldn’t really call it a “camera,” but it is a great imaging device that reminds me how far we’ve come from the floppy disc Sony’s we used to use.

It’s good for random compositions that I see and situations when carrying a big camera is not practical.

…or just random silliness.

The LED “flash” on the iPhone can also be used for light drawing/painting.  The light however is not like a real flash, so sadly my dreams of having the iPhone trigger an SB800 in SU-4 mode in a softbox isn’t going to work.  It actually can, but the light has to be right on the sensor of the flash, so that does us no good.  Here’s hoping someone can rig that IR universal remote attachment and application to support Channel 4, Group A.

Bad thing about shooting weddings in the summer is obviously the heat.  Another problem is that when you’re hanging out in the air conditioned venue, and then have to step outside for formals or the ceremony, the lenses always get fogged up.  These messups actually turned out interesting from an artistic/filmic perspective.  The top shot looks like an intentional software filter, but it was simply due to the fogging of the lens.  The third image has a nice pastel look, which is reminiscent of the actual Cokin filters I sometimes use. 

Speaking of messups, the next images I dug up are like the digital equivalents of light leaks on the last film frame, or ghost images or development mistakes in the lab.  With digital photography though, sometimes corrupt files don’t even let you open them and you pretty much have to trash the file.  Every once in a while, I do get some files that didn’t write to the memory card completely for whatever reason but still can be viewed.  It’s an interesting pattern/signal noise in the images, but goes to show that digital is by no means 100% reliable. 

A while back, I was browsing the junk clearance section at Ikea.  I found this semi transparent bag, that I think is for towels or pillows, and said to myself, that oddly enough, looks like a softbox.  Anything related to photography, companies will gouge you in price.  But this little bag cost me about $3.  It probably needs a back covering to focus the light more, but not too bad for a traveling bag of light.

Also been trying out the Lumiquest Softbox III.  It’s a simple softbox that is velcroed to a speedlight.  In first tests, the light is a bit too harsh, but the handholding ability of the setup is an advantage.

In the photo above, I shot the Lumiquest into the ceiling, further making that little light source into a softer one.  The bottom image is about standard for its light quality.

Charcoal on Canson Ingres | Sketchbook Pro for iPad + Pogo Sketch

Notes: …inbetween snaps I think about it, I sing the songs in my head, the ones that in any other situation, sitting in traffic or sitting on the couch, get drowned out by other concerns, but at the right time, it works, it tugs, it pulls, it makes you aware of the moment, the ones that don’t come along too often.  I do think about it, that one specific day when everyone is invited to pray, to say, all the good things locked up inside, combined with stories of how a random Tuesday when they call to say they’re on the way, can turn into a Saturday where you stand face to face.

Boon Vong
Atlanta Wedding Photography
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