In The Morning After, I try to strip away the artifice of Hanoi’s "Train Street." By night, this narrow corridor is a high-octane "tourist trap," a stage where visitors perform for Instagram, chasing a curated version of reality. But as morning comes, I was able to capture the "settling", the moment when the performative noise fades to reveal a solitary woman in a conical hat, sitting in the quiet debris of the everyday.
As a counselor, I uses this scene to explore the profound cognitive dissonance between our public performances and our private truths. We often live like Hanoi's Train Street at night: projecting a "perfect" profile to the world while our authentic selves remain hidden in the shadows. This disconnect creates an internal friction—a tension between who we are expected to be and who we truly are.
The challenge of an authentic life is found in "The Morning After," when the audience leaves and we must sit with our own reality. In the painting, Vietnam's national motto "Independence – Freedom – Happiness" hangs near the solitary figure, suggesting that true liberty is found not in the public spectacle, but in the courage to be still, be real, and be enough.
