Building Memory Into Monument

Sampan chats with Vietnamese American Artist Ngoc-Tran Vu about Little Saigon, art, and history

Growing up in Dorchester, Ngoc-Tran Vu would watch her father dress in his South Vietnamese Army uniform and gather with fellow veterans for ceremonies at Boston’s Vietnam Memorial. But even as a child, something troubled her about those visits. The memorial honored American soldiers — their names etched in stone — but nowhere did it acknowledge the Vietnamese refugees who had rebuilt their lives in Boston, or the veterans like her father who had fought alongside Americans.

“I’m always like, it’s the fact that we’re here and we’re not even recognized,” Vu recalls. “What does it mean for us to have our own kind of memorial, or a space?”

That question, planted in childhood, is now taking shape in Town Field Park, in the heart of Boston’s Little Saigon Cultural District. For nearly three years, Vu has been leading the 1975 Vietnamese Diaspora Memorial project — a community-driven effort to create Boston’s first permanent cultural marker honoring the Vietnamese diaspora. If successful, it would be a landmark not just for Vietnamese Americans, but for all immigrant and refugee communities seeking recognition in a city that calls itself a “city of belonging.”

Ngoc-Tran Vu posed for a photo in Dorchester recently. Photo by Adam Smith.

'Let Us Know How We Can Volunteer'

What makes this project remarkable is how thoroughly it embodies community ownership. “It’s truly intergenerational,” Vu says. “So many of our elders want to see themselves in this work.”

The most moving encounters come from the elders themselves. “A lot of elders are getting older, and they want to see this get built in their lifetime,” Vu shares. “They’re like, ‘Let us know how we can volunteer. Let us know how we can help.’”

The design itself has been collaborative, shaped by community input rather than imposed by outside experts. The project’s fiscal sponsor is Boston Little Saigon, and Vu has assembled a coalition that includes VIA Community Center, Vietnamese Community of Massachusetts, Fields Corner Main Street, and Fields Corner Public Library.

“I’m leading this work, but it’s in collaboration with so many of our community members, coalition partners, and funders,” Vu emphasizes. “I can’t do this by myself. And I don’t want to. It’s truly rooted in the community.”

Right now, the challenge is navigating city bureaucracy for land approval and organizing funders in “very unpredictable, underfunded times.” But Vu remains committed to seeing the memorial completed within Mayor Michelle Wu’s next four years in office.

Ngoc-Tran Vu posed for a photo in Dorchester recently. Photo by Adam Smith.

The Artist as Organizer

Ngoc Tran Vu moves seamlessly between roles—artist, organizer, teacher, mentor, entrepreneur. She’s currently an Artist in Residence at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, teaching arts leadership while building a socially engaged residency. Her path to this moment began in fourth grade, when an art teacher noticed her talent and brought her a scholarship application for classes at the Museum of Fine Arts. “I ended up applying. And then I got in,” Vu recalls. Her father, working full-time during the week, drove her every Saturday. “I kind of grew up in the MFA. I felt like I was traveling when I went to exhibitions—like floating to time, place and space.”

Those Saturday trips changed everything. At Brown University, she double-concentrated in Ethnic Studies and Visual Arts, later earning a masters in Arts and Politics. For the past 20 years, she’s worked in nonprofit management—experience that now informs how she navigates funding landscapes.

But her path wasn’t always straightforward. “There were times when I (felt) ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do this,’” she says. “I found that when I avoided art, it didn’t feel good. I was like, ‘What am I avoiding?’”

Growing up in public housing projects, Vu has translated for her parents and elders and helped her community with voter registration and language access. These experiences, she says, raised fundamental questions: “Why is it that in our community — I grew up in the projects – we really didn’t have access to resources?”

Born in the Year of the Dragon, Vu embodies what she calls a “fighting spirit.” Rejection is frequent in the arts world, but it doesn’t stop her. “Just because it’s a 'no' or a closed door, I just keep trying. I open another door, I find something else.”

Her understanding of creativity extends far beyond studio practice. “I see so much creativity when it comes to strategy, when it comes to visioning, when it comes to building connections,” she says. “Navigating things that have never been done before, reaching out to someone, making connections — I think that’s a form of creativity.”

This entrepreneurial mindset shapes how she mentors other artists. “One of the things I’m working on right now is making sure artists know that we’re essentially small business owners,” she says. Artists handle business operations, marketing, branding, websites, social media —usually alone. “How do I build systems so that it’s easier on myself? I’m trying to work smarter, not harder.”

Building Pathways, Not Just Monuments

For Vu, the memorial is part of a larger fight to maintain community presence in a rapidly changing Dorchester that is seeing more upscale development replace the old neighborhood. “Everything is getting so expensive,” she says. “A lot of Vietnamese community members are leaving because it’s so expensive.”

She’s involved in groups supporting affordable housing. She’s working to challenge how Dorchester is perceived. “A lot of people read about Dorchester in the news, but we have so much creativity and arts and talent.”

The memorial is just the beginning for Vu. She travels regularly — teaching in Western Massachusetts, attending peace building conferences in Barcelona last November, connecting with artists and organizers internationally. “I love being in spaces where I’m able to connect and understand more different cultures of different societies,” she says.

But everything connects back to her home community. “I love being in different spaces, but tying that to my home community,” she explains.

Most importantly, she’s committed to creating pathways for others. “I want to be able to create pathways so that the artists I work with, artists in my community, can do the same too,” she says. “It’s not just one person and then it’s done. I want to create a platform and pathway for other artists to come through the door too—especially working class artists, artists of immigrant and refugee descent, artists who oftentimes don’t have that pathway to really plug into large institutions that have resources.”

This means more than just networking. It means transforming how institutions engage with marginalized communities. “I don’t want to feel constantly like I have to advocate for myself,” Vu says. “I want to feel supported in my vision... I want to be able to connect more to people who believe in this vision.”

'Don’t Quit'

When asked what advice she’d give to young artists from immigrant backgrounds, Vu’s response is immediate.

“Keep going. If you’re tired, take a break, but don’t quit. Just because it’s a no doesn’t mean it’s a no forever. Think about the doors that you may not see—they’re already open, and you can always come back to a door.”

Her most powerful insight: “What people end up regretting more is what they didn’t do, rather than failure. People regret more the steps that they didn’t take.”

For artists struggling with visibility, she offers practical advice: “Post at least once a week. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but something to let people know what you’re up to. A lot of people are doing cool stuff, but they don’t let people know.”

Then, almost as if speaking to her younger self, she said: “The world and our society really needs your vision and creativity. So keep going.”

A Permanent Place

The 1975 Vietnamese Diaspora Memorial remains a work in progress, navigating the slow machinery of city approval and fundraising. But for Ngoc Tran Vu, the work itself—the organizing, the relationship-building, the intergenerational collaboration—is already creating change.

The little girl who noticed no Vietnamese names on Boston's Vietnam Memorial is now leading the effort to put them there permanently.

“What does it mean for our stories when we’ve been here to really get acknowledged, affirmed and valued?” she asked earlier. The memorial she’s building, stone by stubborn stone, offers one answer. But perhaps the deeper answer lies in the pathways she’s creating, the young artists she’s mentoring, the community she’s mobilizing—all the ways she’s already rewriting who gets to claim space in Boston’s public memory.