At National Sawdust, *Five Years in Exile* arrives as a live classical concert performance shaped by the experience of displacement. Vietnamese singer and composer Mai Khôi appears with Mai Khôi & the Dissidents, presented here in concert, drawing on a body of work associated with her years outside Vietnam. In New York, the piece reads as both testimony and archive, translating personal and political pressure into structure and sound. Its restraint can feel deliberate, as if the music is documenting events it cannot safely name.