Vu Pham’s latest project, “Sea Rose Ashes,” sharpens the focus on a traumatic personal history. It’s a story that looks back over four decades of the post-Vietnam War aftermath within a community of Vietnamese refugees struggling to forge new lives in Beaverton, Oregon. The film also chronicles Pham’s first return to Vietnam after the tragic 1983 murder of his mother.

As the world closes the mind opens

In March of 2020, Pham had taken a work trip to Juneau, Alaska, landing there just in time to be stranded by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

“I pretty much was a stranger in a strange land in a strange time wherein I had the entire town to myself every night, and every night I would go on these walks.”

It was there in his imposed exile that Pham’s creative pursuits would take a new turn. Away from his busy life back home, Pham found his mind adrift for days and able to delve deep into his private thoughts.

“There were things that were beneath that surface that started to crawl up. And that was the tormented life of my own mother in what she had gone through in her relationship with a man who would later kill her.”

Under the pall of the global pandemic and the solitary landscapes of Juneau, Pham could feel the first flames of a new project flickering to life.

“I wanted to travel back into my past in order to better understand the mystery of my mom’s life and death because there is something quite profound there.”

This time, Pham wouldn’t have the familiar intermediary to reality that narrative fiction can often provide. He would be confronting his past directly with his first foray into documentary.

“There was sort of the wellspring of a motivation to somehow seize control and regain agency of my life. And the answer that arose was ‘I need to find the man that killed my mother’. I made the decision that upon my return to Portland, I would do the necessary investigative work to find the whereabouts of the perpetrator and begin a process of restorative justice dialogue with him.”

Escaping danger, or so they thought

Pham and his mother arrived in the United States in November 1981 as boat refugees after escaping the Communist government in Vietnam.

“She did her best to try and assimilate. But, you know, the language is a challenge. Cultural connection is a challenge. And so, you know, a group of immigrants kind of have to find a way to socially cooperate and cohere to weather the storm of a foreign land.”

One of the men that she naturally gravitated towards had been in Beaverton for about a year. A fellow refugee, he had a job and knew the language a little better.

“And he seems very interested in her. In me. He was a man that I hung out with, you know, and he was a father figure to me.”

At some point in time, Pham’s mother decided that he was not the right man for her. She tried to break up with him. But no matter what she did, he wouldn’t go away.

“There must be some universality to what heartbreak means when we’re driven to do and say things that we can’t control. From memory, from reports, I can tell you that this man was possessed by something. I don’t know what it was, but it was a kind of apoplexy of fury that completely drove him to the abyss.”

In the summer of 1983, Pham, having returned from church with his mother, witnessed the man attack his mom. In an instant, Pham’s life changed forever.

“The other miracle to my life, aside from when we were able to survive the boat journey, was the fact that I wasn’t killed that day myself.”

A private investigator friend

Pham enlisted the services of a personal friend who is a private investigator and was able to obtain the original DA case files of his mother’s murder from the Washington County deputy district attorney. The files contained court orders, memorandums, police reports, diagrams, notes and interviews with witnesses and the immediate community.

“I did not read through it. I printed it up and I gave it to my partner, who read it first for me.”

After his partner read the report she felt Pham shouldn’t be digging into it. She wasn’t sure if what he was seeking would actually materialize any healing answers or closure.

But the DA files were impossible to ignore, and after two months, Vu decided he had to read them.

“The DA report was this crossfire of information. It was as if I had lived all of my life in some dark cave. Because there was so much that I had not understood about the lives of these refugees, about the perpetrator, about the legal system, about law enforcement.”

Reaching into the shadows

Braced with the full story, Vu was ready to reach out to the man who murdered his mother. Through the nonprofit agency, the Center for Trauma Support Services and Pham’s private investigator, he was eventually able to locate the perpetrator’s whereabouts, a man who had served 10 years in prison and was now living his life back in the world.

For Pham, it was time for the next step. He searched for the words and then began writing a series of letters to the man.

He is still awaiting a reply.

A restorative justice journey

As part of Pham’s efforts to locate the perpetrator, he was introduced to the Portland Community Justice Partnership (PCJP) through Lutheran Community Services Northwest. Here, he met program manager Theresa Huggins.

“Vu came to us for a restorative justice process with the person that murdered his mother.”

Huggins sees restorative justice as a different way of looking at harm that happens in the community.

“The criminal justice system is based on law and applying law. When harm happens in a community, they ask three questions. One is ”what law was broken?,“ “who broke the law?” and “how much time do they get?” They see harm in the community as a violation of the state. Restorative justice sees harm in the community as a violation of relationships. Of individuals or the community.”

For Huggins, when a restorative justice process is successful, the person who was harmed gets their power back, and the person who caused the harm gets an opportunity to learn how to repair.

“This is a concept we used to live by when we were Indigenous, when we were in smaller tribes. That’s how we resolved issues. If something happened, we all came together and talked about it.”

Now Huggins and others are bringing this process into the modern conversation, in hopes of not only mending individuals but the community as well.

“I want to live in a community that we care about each other. And I think we’re all seeking that, to belong and to be part of a community. And um that’s what would be healthy for our society is we teach each other how to get along.”

Through exposure to this program, Pham has begun consulting and participating with the PCJP, and was invited to speak live at the Reser Auditorium as part of The Immigrant Story Live!, an ongoing speaker series with the goal of combating “historical erasure by bringing immigrants and refugee voices to public spaces.”

Back to the Beginning

After successful crowdfunding in early 2026, Vu and his small film crew flew to Vietnam in the spring. There, he interviewed his aunt, his cousin, and many others from the hometown he had left as a child. The film shoot culminated in retracing the dangerous boat escape over the South China Sea that he and his mother took many years ago.

Back in Portland, Pham is sequestered away in the editing room, spending every day with the footage captured here and abroad. He has taken on the role of editing his own film, one in which he now has a new relationship with the subjects, including his aunt and his cousin.

“Now being able to sit down and look at their interviews and stare at their faces and look at their gestures and capture every little, you know, glimmer of nuance is as if I am making up for 43 years of lost time through every frame of their image.”

Learn more about “Sea Rose Ashes”.

searoseashes.com

nomenstatua.com

Instagram: @sea.rose.ashes.doc

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/07/vu-pham-portland-oregon-sea-rose-ashes-vietnam-beaverton/