An installation of Dai’s book at the Museum of the Home, London.
It means a great deal to know that it can make a small difference to the important work you and the team at Children and War UK are doing. My decision to support the charity comes from a deeply personal place. I grew up in Vietnam, part of the generation born after the 1975 revolution, in a society still carrying the consequences of war across generations. Although I did not experience the war myself, its presence was part of the history I inherited through my family, particularly through my mother.
When my mother was just eight years old, she held her four-year-old brother as he died in her arms in a bomb shelter, his blood covering her shirt. It is difficult to comprehend what a child so young must endure, or how such an experience stays with someone throughout their life. Her story has stayed with me, not only as a memory of the violence of war, but as a reminder of the childhoods it takes away and the pain that can continue long after the violence has ended.
Growing up, I became increasingly aware of how suffering can be carried silently across generations, shaping the ways we love, protect ourselves, relate to others and find the strength to carry on. These experiences have informed my understanding of compassion and my belief that we need to make more room for the pain we cannot always see or fully understand.
These reflections have gradually found their way into my artistic practice. My new book of poems, i let you win, is in many ways a journey back into my own childhood and an attempt to understand the world I grew up in. While the work is deeply personal, I believe its questions are also relational: how do we live with one another, how do we respond to suffering, and how might we become a little gentler with ourselves and others?
The book takes the form of a long poem, with repetition inspired in part by the anaphoric structures of Tibetan Buddhist mantras. Through recurring phrases, I wanted to create a meditative rhythm; something that invites the reader to slow down, sit with a thought, and perhaps gradually learn to let go. The work touches on the tension between the self and the other, and the possibility of loosening our attachment to the self without losing our capacity to care for ourselves. For me, letting someone else win is not simply about losing; it is about making room for another person and discovering what becomes possible when we loosen our need to be right, to possess, or to prevail.
Beyond the book itself, I wanted the project to become a small act of giving. This is why I chose to raise funds for Children and War UK. I know that a book or a donation cannot undo the suffering caused by war, but I believe that what we make can still contribute, in its own small way, to the care and dignity that every child deserves. Perhaps this is also how compassion grows: through small gestures that connect us to something beyond ourselves.
Read more about Tran Quang Dai here.
