Lottery Life — Bingo Fate. A neon pink poster for all the gray lives.

I don’t forget the mission of Hand Fetish Projects®: counter-culture by design. And what a coincidence—today is September 2nd. There’s plenty that could be said, but I’ve traded all the tedious words for a single lottery life poster, inspired by the lottery ticket—an emblem of the working-class hope to flip their fate over iced coffee and sidewalk tea in the South.

Every time I eat at a street-side diner, there are always old men and women with shaky legs holding out lottery tickets, or little kids with baby faces carrying baskets of candy, gum, and tissues. This is a specialty of Ho Chi Minh City. Over time, the sight has become ordinary, as if the elderly poor and the street children were just another piece of the city’s scenery. Nobody bothers to ask why the old aren’t at home with their grandchildren, or why the kids aren’t in school.

As for me, I can’t do much more than buy a ticket out of sympathy, and I never even check the numbers. “With ill-gotten fortune comes inevitable trouble.” I buy because I like the shabby romance of that student who once gave his girlfriend a lottery ticket in place of a birthday gift. I buy because I’ve turned into the cat in that painting—leaning against the wall, glancing at society with a haze of smoke, half cool and half afraid, dressed in glittering petty-bourgeois trinkets, buying a ticket from people who look poorer than me.

At a crossroads in Binh Chanh (HCMC), I once saw a limbless man selling tickets right at the curb, dust rising thick as motorbikes rushed past. At that red light, no one stopped to buy. The sun was too harsh, everyone just wanted to speed away. The seller was trapped in his body; the riders trapped in their thoughts.

We are those riders—suffering because we know too much. And why does the cat that represents us look like a cheap hooker? Because what difference is there? After pocketing a hundred thousand dong as a “National Day bonus,” we obediently go back to plowing away, enriching the very class that once, in 1975, was delivered to us as an enemy to hate. As for me, I guess I now belong to that class too—but I still ride a motorbike, and I exploit no one.

That pink lottery ticket is just a poster. I’ll splice it into my cluttered designs and sell it widely. The profit won’t buy rice; it will just go back into buying someone else’s ticket.

HAPPY NATIONAL DAY, YEAR 2/9/2025