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Eyes wide open
Thursday, September 16, 2004 Story by Matthew Chin Photos by Anh Dao Kolbe

Professional photographer Anh Dao Kolbe does not store her photos from a recent homecoming trip to Vietnam behind glass. Instead, she prefers framing them in black matte, a method she says gives her pictures an intimate feeling.

“There’s no barrier separating the people looking at the art from the art they’re looking at. They’re connected,” she notes.

Her philosophy of display is the same as her method of working: getting up close and using her camera as a conduit from her eye to the wonderfully vibrant prints she produces.

This same desire to link to her heritage drew her to Vietnam last year, more than three decades after her adoption, for a two-month backpacking trip through the country, gear in hand.

Kolbe, 33, was adopted in Vietnam at 18 months old by a Greek-American mother and German immigrant father. The family returned to the Eastern Seaboard, where she stayed until age four. Her father, an architect, followed jobs to the Middle East, with four years in Qatar and nine years in Oman. Anh Dao, the child, then spent four years in England before returning to the United States in her early 20s.

Though she praises her multicultural heritage and her global childhood, it’s also been a source of distance. Time and time again, groups she first thought would embrace her instead picked up on her differences and kept her at bay.

“For a while, I wasn’t Asian enough, at least with my Asian American peers,” she said.

And in the Vietnamese community, people always are surprised she’s Vietnamese because, despite her name, she said she doesn’t quite look the part. Kolbe’s biological mother was Vietnamese, but she doesn’t know the ethnicity of her biological father.

For years, she had planned a return to Vietnam, an experience she hoped would help her find her Vietnamese soul. She started to build up momentum after finding several friends and resources through the Vietnamese Women’s Forum, an Internet group that helps adoptees around the world.

This culminated in early 2003 with a trip that was part pilgrimage to learn more about her heritage and part photographic journey to explore the country she was not familiar with.

“I wanted to capture the true Vietnam, beyond the thousands of typically posed photographs of Vietnamese culture I had seen prior to my trip,” she said.
The place she saw amazed her. Internet cafes were easy to find. American pop idols like Jennifer Lopez and Missy Elliott blared from radios and televisions tuned to MTV Asia.

Still, she shed her American constraints and immersed herself in Vietnam. Throughout her trip, she chose to stay at small inns and backpack and motorbike though the country.

Her photos tell of her success in her photography goal: women playing cards while smoking cigarettes in a market place; fishermen reeling in their nets and selling their catch; ethnic minorities such as the Hmong; and patrons praying in what, by Western standards, is a colorful and almost garishly decorated temple.

Perhaps the most telling images from Kolbe’s trip are the faces of the children she photographed — looks of fleeting curiosity and wonder that one can imagine may have been the same look that Kolbe had on the other side of the lens.

“I think what surprised me is I accomplished this,”she said, of finding the real Vietnam. “But at the same time, the universal humanity conveyed in a lot of the images inadvertently broadened the focus of the series.”

Of the second goal of the trip, “her dash toward becoming more Vietnamese,” she said was successful. But not at first. She again found rejection sensing that her status as an adoptee kept her from being truly embraced.

Though Kolbe knew that an adoptee wouldn’t be welcomed with open arms, the experiences still struck her. Many people she met felt she had betrayed and abandoned them and was privileged to be taken to America, she recalled.
But the travel also closed a chapter in her life and now, she’s much more comfortable with her identity.

“Once there, it did quite the opposite because I realized that my ‘Vietnameseness’ is only a small part of the many things that make up the person I am today,” she said. “It’s nice not to have to keep looking over my shoulder in hopes of finding the missing links to my past.”

Having returned to New England, Kolbe settled down from her adventures, photographing weddings and other freelance assignments. She hopes to find more work where she can collaborate with her partner, Raquel, who is a make-up artist.

As for her plans for the future, Kolbe wants to publish her Vietnam photos in a book.

And she pictures the images mostly standing alone, speaking for themselves, with a touch of her words and shared insights.

“I want people to feel like they were on the trip with me every step of the way.”

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