A few years ago, walking through a quiet forest with headphones on, I listened to a conversation between Portland-based poet and multidisciplinary artist Dao Strom and host David Naimon on his Between the Covers podcast. She spoke about history, myth, and silence in a way that has lingered ever since. One observation struck me deeply: when histories are too painful to articulate, they are often passed down to children as mythology.
For Strom—who immigrated with her family from Vietnam after the war—those silences shape her art. Her hybrid works like Instrument, an experimental blend of poetry, music, and visual art, explore the three registers of her “voice.” And this September, Strom brought her practice to the stage of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s (PICA) Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) in a performance titled Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs.
Myth as Frame, Diaspora as Wound
The performance began with the Vietnamese creation myth, a multi-layered origin story retold by Strom and her collaborators Barbara Tran and Hoa Nguyen, fellow members of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese womxn and nonbinary writers. Together, they reimagined Âu Cơ—the mountain goddess who descended from the heavens, fell in love with the Dragon Prince, and birthed 100 children—as a figure of diasporic longing.
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In their telling, the myth became more than folklore. It was a mirror for the diasporic break—a wound that is physical, cultural, and psychological. As Strom reminded the audience in one poem, Vietnamese immigrants did not only leave behind “the war” but carried with them the daily war in their own minds.
Staging the Color Yellow
Onstage, the performers wore one-of-a-kind yellow costumes designed by artist mai ide. A tall yellow silk banner stretched behind them, flanked by two video projection screens designed by Strom with artist-curator Marcelo Fontana. The set invoked the color yellow not as a stereotype or insult, but as a symbol reclaimed—what Strom called “the Asian feminine body as reflection/catalyst/consort.”
As poems unfolded, projected words and punctuation appeared across the screens, a nod to Strom’s long-time experimentation with typography in her hybrid books. The stage became a site of multiple voices—spoken, written, and sung—interwoven with pauses, silences, and memory fragments.
Searching for Language
The performers alternated between myth, memory, and personal poems. Tran asked, “Can a place be called home if you have never lived there?” Nguyen spoke of piecing together origins when family histories remain unspoken. Strom evoked separation not as absence of love, but as a distance from sisters.
These reflections were not abstract. They cut to the core of immigrant experience: What words exist for living where you do not belong? What language captures the fracture of being both here and elsewhere? Tran posed the question directly: “What verb do we have for existing where one does not live?”
For me, as an immigrant myself, the performance echoed my own struggles—and those of my children—in naming fragmented belonging.
A Myth Revisited
The myth of Âu Cơ and Lạc Long Quân ends with their separation: each parent taking 50 of their 100 children to the mountains and the sea, respectively. This division explains the ancestry of Vietnam’s highland and coastal peoples. Yet the myth leaves unanswered whether Âu Cơ ever reunited with her sisters, or whether the children ever longed for both worlds.
For Strom, Tran, and Nguyen, that silence felt familiar. Diaspora is full of what cannot be known—histories erased, words unspoken, reunions deferred.
The Poetic Maternal
Motherhood emerged as another recurring theme. Tran wrote, “Isn’t every mother mythic?” before recalling her own mother as a bird who once “flew with inner knowing.” Nguyen described weaving selfhood from gaps in family storytelling. In their hands, maternal figures were both deeply personal and mythically expansive, embodying strength and loss.
Music and Song
The second half of the performance shifted into music. Strom picked up her guitar, her voice tender yet powerful, carrying lyrics she has described as “diaspora songs.” She was joined by composer and violist Kenji Bunch, artistic director of the chamber ensemble Fear No Music. Their collaboration blended folk influences with chamber arrangements, producing soundscapes both haunting and intimate.
Song has always been a vital part of Strom’s art, but live, her voice conveyed a striking vulnerability. Through music, silence and pain became audible—aching, melodic, and deeply human.
Double Landscapes
The performance closed with a two-channel film created with videographer Kyle MacDonald. On the screens, Strom walked through Pacific Northwest coastal landscapes filmed in different seasons and times of day. The mirrored images created a visual echo—like being in two places at once, suspended between homeland and adopted land.
The final image of Strom gazing out over the ocean evoked Âu Cơ herself, looking across water, embodying both longing and resilience.
The Parallel Works
The TBA performance coincided with the release of Strom’s Yellow Songs 1–4, a series of chapbooks published by 3rd Thing Press, and her new LP Tender Revolutions, made in partnership with Beacon Sound and Antiquated Future Records.
The album underscores the same themes explored onstage: silence, trauma, reclamation. Its most striking track is a haunting rearrangement of David Bowie’s “China Girl.” By changing Bowie’s “I” to “You,” Strom reclaims the narrative voice of the Vietnamese woman who inspired the song. What was once a passive, fetishized figure becomes the speaker, tender yet forceful. In doing so, Strom reasserts voice for herself and for a broader sisterhood of Asian diasporic womxn.
A Politics of Connection
At its core, Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs was not just a performance but a collective practice of memory and resistance. As members of She Who Has No Master(s), Strom, Tran, and Nguyen model how hybrid-poetic, polyvocal collaboration can transcend national and generational divides.
By re-associating yellow, retelling myths, and weaving silence into sound, they created a space where diasporic identity is not a wound alone but also a site of beauty, possibility, and connection.
Closing Reflections
Watching Strom and her collaborators, I was reminded that myth is not escapism. It is a vessel for what cannot be otherwise spoken. For diasporic communities, myth and art become necessary tools for carrying histories too painful for everyday speech.
At TBA, yellow became not a slur but a banner. Âu Cơ’s descent became not just a story of loss but a metaphor for transformation. And Strom’s music became not only lament but revolution.
The performance closed with applause, but its resonance lingers—an invitation to reconsider how we inherit stories, how we rewrite them, and how art can reassemble fragments of belonging into something whole.
