Mark Erickson

Other Streets: Scenes from a Life in Vietnam not Lived

In 1972, I was born Đỗ Văn Hùng in Saigon. In April 1975, as part of Operation Babylift, I was evacuated on a Pan American Airways 747, adopted in western New York, and renamed Mark F. Erickson. Growing up, I learned about Vietnam as an American, hearing and absorbing only the stories America was telling itself about the war. As a student at Harvard College, I made my first Vietnamese-American friends, studied Vietnamese history from a Vietnamese perspective with Hue-Tam Ho Tai, and learned documentary photography with Chris Killip and David Goldblatt. From Killip and Goldblatt, I learned how powerful photo essays undermined the stories the English (In Flagrante), the South Africans (In Boksburg), and the Americans (Robert Frank’s The Americans) told themselves. Thus, in 1993, I returned to Vietnam with my manual 35mm film camera to subvert the version of my birth country that I myself had absorbed from Hollywood films. Through these images of ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places, I had a glimpse into a life I never had the opportunity to live. And twenty-five years later, it is also a glimpse into a Vietnam—now transformed by rapid economic growth—that no longer exists.