- [Linh] My name is Linh My Truong, and I'm a visual artist based in Detroit.

Love to collage together different types of videos and images to create narratives.

But for this piece, the narrative is my family's story.

So that was really important for me to treat that with respect and to represent that properly.

And it's the first artwork I've done at all about my heritage.

(person speaking indistinctly) - [Linh] When I started this project, I really wanted to get stories from refugees themselves, because that generation is dying out and they're my parents' generation.

But I was surprised at how many younger Vietnamese were embracing this idea of gathering oral histories.

So I really opened it up to like, if even if you didn't experience the journey yourself, this is a great opportunity to ask your elder, to ask your grandparents, your parents about their experience, or even just talk about how their voyage, their refugee experience impacted your life and your identity in America.

The open call really was very wide reaching in terms of the stories and different generations.

So I'm really pleased about that.

My background is in textiles.

I love the slow, meditative art form of weaving, embroidery, sewing.

About six years ago, I started incorporating electronics because I feel like there's a lot of opportunity to combine textiles with electronics for interaction.

Whenever I go to a gallery and I look at a textile exhibition, I just wanna touch everything.

That's just the nature of textiles.

So it's really frustrating for me when you can't.

So I'm trying to disrupt that idea you have in a gallery that you can't touch the art, and actually invite the viewer to interact with the piece.

But I find that, you know, the engagement really goes up if you allow people to interact with the work.

And in a sense, the viewer, the participant becomes part of the art itself.

- My mother's thread starts in Bac Lieu.

Rural southwest.

- They have a table here at my exhibition that's all Vietnamese American authors.

I wanted to include all of the cultural aspects in with this exhibition to give people a wider view of the amazing voices from the Vietnamese community.

- Just meeting you.

I wish my family was here.

- I've noticed a lot of my friends who are American and they are like fifth, sixth generation in, they know nothing about their heritage.

They're so far removed from it.

And I think that fact that I'm second generation, I was born in America, my parents came over and they had such a harrowing journey.

And my mom, she grew up in a village.

She was born in a village in the north where her ancestors had been for generations.

She doesn't know, you know, when they moved there.

It was just so many generations.

And then within her generation, she moved twice.

She moved from the north to the south and then left Vietnam for America.

So that's a pretty abrupt change from your lineage.

And I wanted to be the generation to record that.

So I wanted to capitalize on this moment 50 years after the war, so that it would last for future generations.