Every hun­dredth Varsov­ian is a Vietnamese, yet Asians are sym­bol­i­cally absent from the homo­ge­neous city. The project Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Viet­namese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Sta­dium was con­ceived in the summer of 2006 as a response, among other things, to that absence. The walk was a reference, on the one hand, to the idea of urban roam­ing, and on the other to headphone-​guided museum tours. The trip began on the left bank of the Vis­tula, oppo­site the National Museum, at the Warszawa-Powiśle com­muter train sta­tion. View­ers reported at a check-in point where they were handed tick­ets, an MP3-player, a map show­ing the places where the dif­fer­ent audio tracks should be played, a checkered plas­tic bag with var­i­ous wares, and 5,000 Viet­namese dongs. They set out in pairs, every half-an-hour. The first stage of the trip was to take the train to the next sta­tion, Warszawa Sta­dion. It took only three min­utes, but it was pre­cisely during that ride that the process began: per­ceiv­ing a different real­ity, and invest­ing it with an imag­ined, strange, con­sciously exotic dimen­sion, inten­si­fied by the Polish-​Vietnamese recorded com­men­tary on that sur­round­ing real­ity. The train the viewer boarded crossed the Vis­tula and rode straight into the stalls of the Viet­namese sector. When the first build­ings on the right-​bank appeared, it was easy to see they in no way resem­bled the devel­op­ment of left-​bank Warsaw. The stall roofs, chaotic alleys, and lush green­ery made them more like Asian sub­urbs, hastily con­structed with­out any archi­tec­tural plans and using cheap mate­ri­als. Little Viet­nam, where the train soon stopped, was a fluid, con­stantly chang­ing world that could dis­ap­pear at any moment. So map­ping it was strange, to say the least. By cross­ing the Vis­tula, the viewer passed an imag­i­nary border between Europe and Asia, lis­ten­ing on head­phones to the same recorded mes­sage air pas­sen­gers hear when land­ing in Hanoi. Upon dis­em­bark­ing from the train, the viewer went down an alley between ware­houses, before reach­ing, some 300 m down the road, the Dững Phờ bar, one of the Stadium’s eater­ies, and with longest hours, open until 4 p. m. when the nearby stall­hold­ers close their busi­nesses for the day. There was a feminist poster dis­played there, the work of Alisa Ahn Kot­mair, a Berlin-based Viet­namese artist, show­ing a cigarette-smoking woman in a low-cut dress. Even today smok­ing in public is seen as inap­pro­pri­ate for women in Asia. In fact, it is hard not to notice that most of Dững Phờ’s clien­tele is men, and that it is also men who dom­i­nate the public social space of the sector. The next stop was a spot under a flyover where the the ‘taxi drivers’ meet, men trans­port­ing wares on metal push­carts known as the uwaga, from the only Polish word (mean­ing ‘Watch out!’) they know and which they keep shout­ing as they squeeze through the crowd in the narrow alleys. The taxi dri­vers are fresh arrivals who have yet to repay the high cost of coming to Poland.

After find­ing stall 105 and hand­ing the bag over to its owner, the viewer looked for an alley filled with fast-​food bars, where he was met by pro-​Vietnamese activists Ton Van Anh and Robert Krzysztoń. In an per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion with them, he or she learned about the ori­gins of the Viet­namese migra­tion to Poland, the oppres­sion they expe­ri­ence here, the activ­i­ties of the Viet­namese embassy and spe­cial ser­vices, and about the char­ter depor­ta­tions and spec­tac­u­lar careers. The itin­er­ary then took the viewer to Băng Sinh Vien’s video-​rental shop. Hidden behind a folding door, the estab­lish­ment offers soap operas on VHS tape, musi­cals, black records, and CDs, pic­turesque copies of copies, a substitute of hap­pi­ness for the home­sick Viet­namese. The next stop, slightly ele­vated, was Mai Thái’s food shop, sell­ing any­thing from instant soups, through var­i­ous kinds of tofu, lemon-​grass and lemon leaves, ginger, rice, car­damom, mush­rooms, and sauces, to frozen seafood. The 5,000-dong note loos­ened both the seller’s and the itinerant’s tongues, and the coun­ter­feit money sud­denly gained trans­ac­tional value. Finally, at the out­skirts of the market, the viewer found the Thang Long Viet­namese cul­tural centre and the ever­green Pagoda. The temple is a miniature ver­sion of the One-​Pillar Buddha of Com­pas­sion pagoda in Hanoi, where charm­ing plas­tic chrysan­the­mums, water lilies, trees, and flow­ers blos­som all year round. The Pagoda was built over a couple of days, with­out any build­ing per­mits, and it is not listed in any offi­cial record (nor are many of its builders).

The Trip to Asia project built on the idea of trav­el­ling around your own city. The tourist, some­one afflicted with the dis­ease of ‘tourism’ — voyeurism, alien­ation, pas­siv­ity, or lack of thought¬fulness — was per­fect mate­r­ial for rec­og­niz­ing one’s own igno­rance. By per­ceiv­ing the world from the point of view of the Warsaw Viet­namese, the trav­eller was made co-​responsible for the real­ity around him. The staged trip around Jar­mark Europa market served as a mechanism of decon­struct­ing real­ity, revers­ing minority-​majority rela­tions by quot­ing the Viet­namese migrants’ every­day ges­tures (car­ry­ing the che­quered cargo bag, buying mango juice, vis­it­ing the Pagoda). The TV crews present to pro­vide cov­er­age of the project were puz­zled: ‘Where’s the action?’, ‘What are we sup­posed to film?’, they asked. The action took place in the viewer’s imag­i­na­tion rather than in actual real­ity, in the expe­ri­ence of another real­ity that, though invis­i­ble, is within hand’s reach.