A few years ago, I was walking through a forest and listening to Portland-based poet and multidisciplinary artist Dao Strom's conversation with David Naimon on his Between the Cover podcast. I had come to know her work a few years earlier through the publication of Instrument, an experimental blend of poetry, music, and visual art; Dao’s three forms of “voice.” One of Dao’s many rich insights during the podcast resonated deeply with me – that people teach their children about the past through mythology when they cannot bear to speak about their histories. Dao immigrated with her family from Vietnam to the U.S. in the aftermath of the war, and as one poem read on the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's stage during PICA’s Time-Based Art festival reminds us, it was not only “the war they left behind” but also the war the Vietnamese diaspora “waged daily in their own minds.”

In Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs, personal post-war and diasporic herstories are revisited by means of the Vietnamese creation myth, a multi-part origin story told at the outset by Dao, and further narrated by her two poet-collaborators Barbara Tran and Hoa Nguyen, fellow members of She Who Has No Master(s). Co-founded by Dao, this collective of Vietnamese womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora “engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries.” Dressed in unique yellow creations (by artist mai ide), the performers stood on a darkened stage, which centered a vertical yellow silk-like banner, flanked by two video projection screens, an installation co-designed by Dao with artist-curator Marcelo Fontana. These symbolic yellow forms invoked and sought to reclaim the perceived racial stereotype of Asian women and “the Asian feminine body as reflection/catalyst/consort,” as the TBA handbook had summarized.

All three performers alternately shared their own poems, interspersed with narrated personal memories about how the creation myth had interwoven with their sense of self, from childhood or later in life. The underlying dynamic was a dance between telling and holding back, unspeakable traumas and memory-sharing, which also takes the form of cultural silences. Spoken words were further extended by poetic phrases and evocative punctuation marks projected on the two video screens, familiar from Dao’s long-term experimentation with typography in her many hybrid (poetry) books.

The Vietnamese creation myth tells the story of two birds, symbolic of the sun and moon, who were born from two eggs. Attracted by the warmth and light of the sun on the earth, an immortal mountain goddess, Âu Cơ, and her sisters descend from their home in the 36th heaven to explore the earthly plane, but Âu Cơ’s fateful eating of a handful of dirt grounds her on the mountaintop, where her tears then create the rivers that flow down to the sea and attract the attention of the Dragon Prince Lạc Long Quân. Dao and her fellow performers focused on the figure of Âu Cơ, who, through her desire, left the ethereal world of form and entered the earthly world, leaving her sisters behind.

Often, the performers circled around a comparable wound, a diasporic separation which is a physical break but also exists on other levels of the imaginary. In their poems, definitions of home and belonging were de-territorialized through poetic questions, such as, “Can a place be called home if you have never lived there, and if you are there all the time but only touch things with your mind?” Their reflections were poignant but also political in how they reimagined and redrew borders, imaginaries and (future) possibilities of belonging. They invoked cultural silences such as the lack of vocabulary for the complexity of multi-layered cultural, political, and emotional forms of belonging.

Tran asks what verb we have “for existing where one does not live.” These were not just poetic meanderings but a heartfelt search for words to describe the fragmented ways of being that immigrants everywhere experience. I saw my own struggles as an Irish immigrant reflected in these questions, as well as the questions of my children. Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs entangled immigration with the imaginaries of the Vietnamese creation myth, so that diasporic existence became “not a want of love but a separation from sisters” (Strom). In the myth, Âu Cơ is a strong and multi-faceted protagonist who gives birth to 100 children, and she later recognizes how differently she and their father Lạc Long Quân inhabit the world.

The lovers cordially separate, and each brings 50 of the children to the land and sea respectively, symbolizing the ancestors of mountain and sea people in Vietnam. The poets highlight that we never learn if Âu Cơ and her sisters are reunited, and it becomes palpable that for diasporic people, there is often so much that is not and may never be known. In one of her poems, Tran asks, “Isn’t every mother mythic?”, and describes how “once, my mother was a bird. She flew with inner knowing.” Another poem by Nguyen reflected on the self-weaving of origins in the absence of a discussed family history. While watching, I found myself reflecting on how little of my past I have shared with my own children.

In the second half of the performance, Dao took to song. I had never seen her sing live before, and despite having listened to her music online, I was slightly in awe at how the beautiful, and often tenderly aching, lyrics of her “diaspora songs” landed through the poignant sweetness of her voice, which is as melodic as the dream-like music that accompanied it. This was played by Dao herself, combining folk elements on guitar with a multi-instrumental chamber music arrangement, co-created with another onstage collaborator, Kenji Bunch, a musician, composer, and artistic director of Fear No Music, a nonprofit chamber music ensemble and a platform for activism and dialogue.

Such collaborative co-creation, which is an ongoing aspect of Dao’s performance practice, was also manifest in the two-channel film of Dao walking through the Pacific Northwest landscape that closed the performance, and which she credited onstage to videographer Kyle MacDonald. Each of the two screens showed Dao walking through a Pacific Northwest coastal landscape, yet they were filmed at different times of day and seasons of the year, forming a visual echo of the existence of being in two places at once. The video ended with a scene of Dao overlooking the ocean from a coastal cliff, a contemporary embodiment of Âu Cơ, and an echo of all the diasporic womxn whose lives continue to inhabit the water from both sides.

The Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs performance at TBA was a celebration and an artistic extension of Dao’s just-released inter-echoing chapbook series, Yellow Songs 1-4, published by Olympia-based independent publisher 3rd Thing Press, and her LP, Tender Revolutions (made/distributed with Portland-based Beacon Sound and Antiquated Future Records). The record traverses a parallel path, invoking silence, hiding, and the reality that “post-war” does not equate with “post-suffering.” The LP features a haunting rearrangement of David Bowie’s “China Girl,” in which Dao reclaims the passive position of the Vietnamese woman who inspired the song. Changing Bowie’s “I” to a distinctive “You,” Dao sings with a tenderness that invokes how it feels to be denied voice and a power that reclaims that voice – for herself, and in line with the Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs project at large, for the wider sisterhood of Asian diasporic womxn.

Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs was performed at PICA on September 12 and 13, 2025. Dao Strom’s installation will be on view at PICA through October 4.