Post #9 Returning to the River
Back in Saigon now. The air feels different here--louder, faster, certainly more chaotic than upstream…
Before this year, I had just finished helping to construct a large climate-adaptive infrastructure project in New York, one of those enormous, technical, hopeful undertakings designed to meet the rising tides and biodiversity crisis head-on. (You can read more about that project [here].) When it was complete, I asked my office for a brief leave. I needed space to think, to return home, and to spend time in Southeast Asia. Not exactly for research really, but simply to be near the people and the landscapes that formed me.
After grad school where I completed a landscape architecture thesis project sited in the Mekong Delta, I always imagined I would come back to the Mekong somehow. Part of me wanted to contribute to knowledge production, to the design and stewardship of the region’s landscapes. Another part simply longed for the familiarity of its colors, its humidity, its smells and sounds, its people.
Before I left for Asia at the beginning of this year, I applied for the Ian L. McHarg Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. I didn’t know if I would be accepted, but the act of applying became its own kind of fieldwork. It helped me move through the landscape with intention, to observe more closely, while allowing for new questions to emerge along the way. When I learned that my application to develop a body of research about the Mekong cultural landscapes was awarded, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude.
Now, as I prepare for the second round of fieldwork with a more defined agenda, through Cần Thơ, Châu Đốc, Phnom Penh, Kompong Khleang, and Siem Reap, I’m still catching up with organizing field notes from the Feburary trip, listening again to recordings from Northern Laos and Thailand, tracing the waters that carry me here.
This blog will continue as a kind of archive, an open notebook of thoughts and reflections as I move between fieldwork, reading, drawing, and later, teaching. In the coming months, I’ll share interviews, sketches, and new drawings from the field and the studio; stories of dams and dikes, of animals and plants, of fables and faith, of the Mekong and all of its entangled beings.