We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People

A memoir in text + image + song. In this unique hybrid work, author/musician Dao Strom navigates the spaces between shores, mother and father, two cultures. The daughter of writers, she fled Vietnam with her mother at the end of the war. It was not until years later that she learned her father was still alive and had spent a decade in Communist "reeducation" camps as persecution for his work as a writer in the pre-1975 era of Saigon. This rift--caught between the forward-looking mother who severed ties with the past, and the only tenuous presence of a father who could not turn away from the past--is the initiating ethos behind this memoir, which renders itself also as an experiment in literary multimedia, combining text, image, and song to express the nuances and buried emotions of aftermath. Strom juxtaposes documentary images next to family memorabilia to ruminate on the intersection of personal and collective histories. She travels between the Pacific coast and the Champa ruins of Viet Nam to capture original photographic images that re-imagine folk myths. Her autobiographical essays are candid at the same time they are enigmatic, playing with white space and the shapes the text makes on the page. The result is a multidimensional work that draws disparate "voices" together into one confluent, challenging whole.
We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People is accompanied by a music album, East/West, that explores the mythos of two "geographies." The book's "chapters" correspond with song titles on the album, with lyrics interwoven amid the essays and fragments. All songs written and performed by Dao Strom. Recorded at Type Foundry Studio in Portland, OR; co-produced with Dylan Magierek. For a full experience, we recommend listening to the songs to accompany your reading.
The book is available as a full-color, perfect-bound, 8x8 paperback; 200 pages.
The digital album is available at: daostrom.bandcamp.com
Please visit paperdollworks.com or theseaandthemother.com for information about a limited art-edition printing of the book.