Behind the Zine: “Changes”

How much of who we are is reshaped by where we are?

I remember the first time I left Vietnam. I was fourteen and about to embark on a major journey. In a little more than twenty-four hours, I would be thousands of miles away from home. I said goodbye to my cousin, whom I grew up with and bonded as sisters. Vietnam was all I’d ever known: the heat, the crowded streets, the people who felt like an extension of myself, the mother tongue.

It was November 2011. The slow pace of winter draped over Sandnes and the cold bit into my skin. Each day, I learned more about my new home, and the changes slowly became familiar. We grew used to the routine: Norwegian at school and Vietnamese at home. Weeks turned into months. We stopped celebrating Tết, but jul became a precious time for our family. My world was expanding. At the same time, I felt like I had one foot in each culture. I wasn’t fully grounded anywhere.

Moving to Trondheim in 2016 on my own made that feeling stronger. Where is home? Where do I belong? I kept asking myself questions I didn’t have answers to.

When I began making this zine, Changes, I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it. What I did know was that I had a lot of thoughts and feelings bottled up. Too many. They lingered and grew heavier with time. I needed an outlet. I wanted to give them shape. Changes became a way to process my baggage – the memories, the goodbyes, the losses I had never found the words for. One late night, surrounded by magazine cutouts and paper scraps, I started putting the pieces together. Not just on the page, but also in my mind.

In Changes, I chose to tell my story in a fragmented, collaged style. The cover of this zine features a playful image: a hand that transforms into the body of a bird, with legs attached, as if it’s walking–or running. The bird in motion hints at the physical movement of migration. The next page is a portrait of myself surrounded by names of the cities I’ve lived. The face is layered with several overlapping pieces to create a mismatched look, a hybrid identity. The second page starting with “Dear me …” is a letter to myself. It contains a long block of wavy, unreadable lines that represent the memories I wasn’t ready to unpack. A small photo shows a hand waving goodbye, or hello, to “what I missed most”.

I put inside this zine a handwritten quote from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. This extract looks at how migration reshapes home through the metaphor of monarch butterflies migrating south. The butterflies that begin the journey don’t live long enough to come back. It’s their children that complete the cycle and return. On one hand, migration is a survival instinct that brings life and safety to the next generation. But migration also fractures the ideas of home. Home is what the next generation remember and reconstructs.

The backbone of Changes is a double-paged collage unfolding in sequence. A girl with a flower blossoming from the top of her head reacts in shock when her flower is cut off. She cries and touches what’s left of the flower. Finally, she pours a can of water over herself, symbolising the act of healing and self-nurturing. These incredible images are stitched with different cutouts of flowers, leaves, water, and fragmented phrases. Through this collage, I wanted to visually depict the way changes stimulate growth, and that growth is the beginning of healing.

The title “Changes” poses a challenge, which I hoped to resolve at the end of this zine with the phrase “embrace the changes”. Each move, each change of home peeled away parts of me. But the process also taught me new ways to build a sense of belonging. In each place I’ve lived – Hải Phòng, Hà Nội, Sandnes, Trondheim, Newcastle – I learned to find home in people, in moments, and in the person I was becoming.

And for that, I’m always grateful – takk.