We continue publishing brilliant theses by a new generation of architecture or design graduates. In the following pages, Meena Chowdhury shares with us the work she has done questioning normative forms of architectural representations, understanding their great limitations when attempting to depict the refugee condition. Through sewing, she has found a practice that more aptly represents the journey of her mother (from whom she learned this skill), from Vietnam to the Philippines to Canada.
Most of the historical narratives that we build rely on documentation—old photographs, artifacts, written records, etc. On the other hand, the spatial and temporal trajectories of communities marginalized by these narratives rarely get told on the basis of such normative forms of record-keeping. Often, reconstructing their stories involves piecing together fragmented narratives, questioning past methods of recording history, and finding more apt means of representation.
In 2024, I completed my architecture master’s thesis on the journey of displacement of my mother, a Vietnamese refugee living in Canada.
Due to my Western education in architecture, I had preconceived notions of how I could and should represent her journey.
I started by asking my mom to show me on maps the locations that she had gone through and the dimensions of the different domiciles where she had lived. But that process made her frustrated, demanding that she conform her story to representational systems that do not have the depth required to depict the complexity of her narrative. That’s when I put the pen down and started listening.
Deconstructing: Traditional Documentation ///
I first rolled out a map and asked her to show every location she has lived. But it wasn’t as easy as I originally thought it would be. On multiple occasions, she could not tell me exactly where she went or for how long. She and her family would run back and forth between their house and the jungle when they heard bombs going off in Nha Trang, 400 kilometers north of Saigon. Similarly, when they lived in Ottawa, they moved eight different times in the span of ten years. When tracing her journey on a Cartesian world map, in the way migration is often depicted by those who do not experience it, it looked like the most important part of her journey was the crossing of the Pacific Ocean to go from the Philippines to Canada. In reality, the hardest part for her was the eight days it took to cross the South China Sea from Vietnam to the Philippines. This realization gave me the idea of making a temporal map, replacing longitude and latitude with time, and using hours as the main unit of measurement. The distorted map thus highlighted the moments that were most relevant to her. This was the start of deconstructing representation to uncover more of her story.
A similar process occurred when I started asking my mother technical questions about the houses she lived in. I asked her a number of times about the actual dimensions of her homes, but she could never give me an exact response. One day, my mother sent me an email containing her representation of one of the house’s layout. She had used free online software that can create a floor plan to help me understand the space. To do that, she had to conform to Western conventions of architectural representation. She put pictures of a bed, a desk, and couches in the layout to symbolize those pieces of furniture, pictures of Western furniture that did not really resemble the pieces in her home. When trying to represent objects for which there were no icons in the drawing software, she fell back on pictures of objects that were thematically similar yet significantly different. For example, my mother’s family never owned a basketball or a tricycle, but she added images of these two things to the floor plan to symbolize the area where she played with her siblings. When she showed me this, it made me realize how restrictive my methods were. I was missing something important just by trying to reconstruct every space to scale and identifying the materials that these spaces were made of.
At one point, my sister asked our mother if she could draw her own spaces. My mother sighed, grabbed the closest paper she could find—an old grocery list—and started drawing. She wasn’t bothered to try to draw a perfectly accurate depiction of the space. Rather, she wanted to portray the life that she had lived in these homes. She would stretch some spaces, draw objects not to scale, and write words she found important in the drawings. Asking her to make the drawings herself offered me a deeper understanding of my mother’s relationship with home and gave her the agency to represent her own story.
Transitions of the garment, made by Meena Chowdhury (2024).
The house she drew was her home in Nha Trang, where she had lived with her family. It had many lives, and had grown and shrunk with sociopolitical events during that time. The family made adjustments to it when needed. When bombing lit up the sky, their community rushed to the jungle, waiting for the situation to settle down. When there wasn’t enough time to escape, my family hid in a hole my grandfather had dug on the property. He would cover them with a plank of wood as he climbed the coconut trees to see how far the bombs exploded. My mom remembers that the shelter was completely black except for narrow rays of light that escaped from holes that her dad punched out of the wood plank to bring in some fresh air.
The last thing she did on this drawing was to write “Live to Eat, Eat to live.” My mom wanted me and my sister to know how different our upbringing was compared to hers.
Reconstructing: Sewing ///
The life of a refugee is one of constant and drastic transitions. It doesn’t just involve moving from one location to another. I wanted a way to represent this transience, which brought me back to the skill my mother passed down to me: sewing.
My mother and I used multiple methods for passing knowledge, from oral storytelling to mental maps. But it was our common craft of sewing that ended up being the driving force towards understanding her story. As with so many crafts led by women, sewing is a skill that is generally overlooked by patriarchal structures. But it is central in many cultures, and it has been passed down on the women’s side of my family for generations.
Training in the craft that numerous earlier generations practiced has helped me grasp the resilience, endurance, and labor of my female ancestors.
Sewing also gave me the freedom to manipulate drawings three dimensionally. To fold, to stretch, and to twist. For my thesis, I created a garment that can morph into one of four forms using darts and other techniques: shirt, pants, jacket and dress. The four forms represent four of the most important locations through which my mother went on her journey of displacement. The garment represents the agency she displayed through the process. Rather than having to simply adapt to the new spaces she encountered, she tailored the spaces to her needs. Adding my drawings to the garment further endowed them with a deeper narrative force and highlighted the transient nature of her past.
An example of this is when I used a sewing dart to depict my mother’s life in Nha Trang. During the transition from the shirt to the pants, the sewing dart opens up to reveal the sea that cuts through her home. I was inspired to make the dart after a conversation my mother and I had about a letter she wrote from the Philippines to her family in Vietnam, a few months after she had escaped Vietnam:
Me: So what did you say in the mail? Did they ever receive the mail?
Mom: Yeah, they did receive mail. And I said, do not go. Do not escape. Whatever it costs, stay home.
Me: Okay. But like, nudge, nudge, escape.
Mom: No, I did not nudge nothing because by the time I got to the camp, it’s not a glory place as everybody back home talked about it. It’s not like, you know, if you want to go to Toulouse, you can hit the button and see where you go. No, you don’t see nothing until you get there and realize that you’re in jail because we have to stay in a quarantine place until we all clean our hands and such. And then got out, my brother stayed one place and I stayed one place and no safety at all. Somebody can kill somebody easily, no problem. And there’s no promise that you may go to another country. So how much hope is that, right? And at that time, the camp was already full, totally full.
Yeah, just stay there. So I wrote a letter. I said, stay home. Don’t go. But then I work in this department of picking up people. Suddenly one day I look at the list, my mom’s name, my sister’s name, my brother’s name. I said, The whole family. I said, “What?! Do I just dream or something?” I did not believe, I read a list four more times. And then I went to my boss and said, “This is not real.” But then I went and picked them up at the shore- What do you call? The port, the harbor, where the boat came. Holy I scream. My mom still remembers my screaming until today… Until today.
For her, answering questions about her displacement seemed like it was the most mundane thing in the world, like explaining how to fold clothes. She was never precious with her knowledge or her stories. She never saw her story as heroic, her survival skills as extraordinary.
When I was in high school, I asked my mom to show me how to sew with elastics. She sighed and sat beside me with the sewing machine. She said: “Two things you need to know about sewing elastic: one, you need patience and two, more importantly you need very strong arms. Elastics are the hardest things to sew.” That night, we struggled together as I tried to sew an elastic while my mother stretched the elastic out. On my third attempt to sew the elastic, my arms were starting to get tired from pulling on it. “This is nothing,” my mom said when I started complaining. “I would have to do multiples of these in a row, this is nothing.”
It wasn’t until she talked about her life in Ottawa during our interviews that I understood what she meant by this. After they arrived in Canada and settled in Ottawa, my mother’s family had a hard time finding work, so, to make ends meet, they converted their basement into a sweatshop to sew for retail departments. My mom sewed about 200-300 items a week, receiving $1 per clothing item. Elastics, zippers, pockets… those were all new for her. After hearing about this aspect of my mother’s past, I had an even deeper appreciation of her sewing skills. The skills I learned for pleasure, she learned out of necessity.
Bringing the craft of sewing into my thesis project allowed me to come full circle and put into action a skill that I have carried with me for years. It helped me question normative means of architectural representation and made me think of the idea of site. Site gives context to a situation geographically, socially, and economically. My mother never had access to such a contextualization when she moved from location to location. What she knew was only who she was. Every time she had to move, she would design the space to fit her needs. Sewing reinforced that idea: adapting the cloth to fit the person, instead of the other way around.
Due to this, the drawings on the garment have their own life, morphing every time the cloth transits. It helped me deconstruct what I thought architectural representation meant and unlocked new methods of representation.
All the places in which she lived, either in Vietnam or Canada, eventually merged in her memory, as was shown through one of our conversations. One night, as I was catching up with my mom about the different locations where she has lived, I stopped and asked her how she would describe the transitions in her life. That’s when she brought up the painting A Northern Silver Mine by the famous Canadian Group of Seven artist Franklin Carmichael. It depicts a dark mine in the foreground juxtaposed with an image of a colorful inhabited hill in the background.
Mom: I look at my life exactly like that painting from one point and that’s going down to all various points in life. Different landscape, different household, different conditions.
Me: Yeah, different like this kind of continuous plane that changes depending on where you are on it?
Mom: Yeah. It isn’t like you go to totally different country if you still in the same kind of home, but different kind of home.
Me: Yeah. So, it’s kind of like through this map, it all feels like home, even though they’re all different locations. But this is kind of a way of visualizing just going to the next one, next one. They’re all close by to one another.
Mom: Oh so, maybe the threads between all of these are about home. ■