Photographing Pain and Truth
I’ve always avoided photographing my family because it hurts.
When I was in college, my teachers would tell me how wonderful it would be to see more images of my own family alongside the portraits I made of others. I would laugh uncomfortably and explain that my family is difficult to photograph. It’s not just imperfection—though we all have that—it’s fear. Photographing my family exposes truths I have carried quietly. It is a way to accept them and memorialize them.
I have been distancing myself from my family for as long as I can remember. I always felt different, out of place. In 2022, I finally made the leap to move out after Christmas. I was exhausted from hiding in my room, from hearing my mother complain about why I didn’t come out. I couldn’t face my father after learning, nearly twenty years later, the harm he had caused my parents’ marriage during my childhood. I felt disgusted, betrayed, and guilty—for leaving my mother alone in the house with him. I couldn’t tell them to their faces that they were hurting me, so I left.
Living away changed me. I shared a modest apartment in Fox Point, Providence, with two other girls. I commuted to Boston for school, first by car, then by train at 7 a.m. several days a week. I excelled in my classes, saved money from photography jobs, and felt more like myself outside my parents’ house. I was no longer hiding—but the trauma and tension of my family’s life still followed me, quiet but persistent. At twenty-two, I became conscious of a façade my family maintained, and I saw it finally begin to crumble.
Coming to Rochester has brought me closer to my mother’s side of the family. Witnessing my grandmother’s depression six hours away from my mom, I have begun to carry my mother’s guilt and sadness as my own. Leaving one’s mother to pursue a better life as a woman comes with complex emotions—a mixture of love, sorrow, and fear. My mother grew up in Cambodia, then the U.S., navigating a delicate balance between Eastern values of family loyalty and Western individualism. The weight immigrant daughters bear, striving to honor expectations while preserving their own wellbeing, is something I dread but now understand.
In April, reading my mother’s memoir, I wrote: “Why is being an immigrant daughter always a battle for mom’s approval? Why must we endure the cycle of hurting our daughters with what hurt ourselves?” At Butler, I thought often of my mother, wishing she would care for herself, seek therapy, and confront her pain rather than bury it. I cannot force someone to heal, but I cannot help wondering what kind of person I might have become if she had.
I am still in Hilton. Today I took my grandmother to the Highland Park Conservatory. We wandered among plants and flowers, played with quails, tortoises, turtles, and moths. She laughed and marveled, pointing out flowers that reminded her of Cambodia—the place I hoped the conservatory would feel like for her. She walked further than I had ever seen her walk, fully present, her curiosity and joy radiating in the sunlit rooms. For a moment, she was no longer trapped in the heaviness of the house in Hilton.
Returning home, the weight returned. She shuffled, slowed, and muttered about chores, while Mike sat on the couch watching Korean dramas—a reminder of the imbalance in their lives. My heart aches for the women in my family, constrained by men who diminish them, yet I feel torn at the thought of their separation. Simone muttered, “one more day,” then clarified to Mike with a gesture to her head, “it’s just me thinking.” Later, as she shuffled past, she whispered, “it’s one more day to live.” I urged her not to speak like that, rushing to my room to tell my boyfriend and friend. Meghan laughed, sharing that her grandmother says similar things. I understand intellectually, but I am still unsettled by the proximity of death in the everyday.
Being here has been confusing and heavy. My friend Sinden once said, “expectations versus reality” is one of the hardest things to navigate as an artist and as a daughter. I arrived intending to make something maybe a bit more lively, I’m not sure what, but I realized today that I must photograph what is really here, and trust the process. I need to make the pictures I am drawn to, and take everything as it comes.
My Burmese friend Filbert reminded me that what I am carrying is “incredibly heavy,” but that recognition gave me strength. These photographs, whether part of a large project or a smaller exploration of mental illness in the Southeast Asian community, hold meaning. As my mother once said, “you win some and lose some” when coming to the U.S. as a refugee. You leave what you know for the arms of a stranger—but those arms are not always golden. After days of struggle, confusion, and doubt, I understand Gloria Steinem’s words: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
