In Vietnam there is a saying: A house with male relatives from three generations -- grandfather, father and son -- is a lucky house. Trac Minh Vu, a Vietnamese- American from Beaverton, Ore., in a dual-degree program in theater and fine arts at Cornell University, has witnessed such a fortuitous reunion within his own family. Not in reality, but in video.

Vu has created an experimental video, Nha Ba Nguoi (The House of Three), which contains footage from a trip he made to Vietnam with his mother during winter break. The 18-day journey marked the first time he had been in the country since emigrating to America as an infant with his parents in 1975. The highlight was meeting his 87-year-old grandfather. Vu's father, Vu Huy Tu (who unlike his son follows the Vietnamese practice of using his last name first), could not accompany wife and son on this excursion. But by combining images from the trip with those from an earlier one his father had taken, Vu has brought himself, his father and his grandfather together in an illusory "house of three." He recently screened the video at Cornell's Undergraduate Research Forum, an annual showcase where selected students can demonstrate projects that have received funding from the university's Undergraduate Research Board. Vu currently is seeking additional funds to expand his 15-minute video into an hour-long production.

In the video's first vignette, Vu sits on a chair in an empty room, viewing footage of his father and grandfather in Vietnam. By standing up in front of the projector, Vu imposes his own shadowed image upon the one on-screen. In another segment he portrays the passage of time by presenting a series of negatives from family snapshots taken at very different times and locales, and faded newspaper clippings recounting the family's emigration from Saigon. Many of Vu's experiences in Vietnam are not captured in the video: Like the time he stopped at a roadside stand to buy 28 pineapples for his cousins. Or the pilgrimage he made with his mother, a devout Catholic, to the statue of the Virgin Mary where she used to pray daily when she was pregnant with him. Or the visit to Bao Loc, where he discovered that the room he was born in had been converted to a pigsty. Or the scene in the Saigon airport at journey's end, when security officials tried (but failed) to confiscate one of his videos.

But Nha Ba Nguoi does capture the most exciting moment of the trip: when Vu met his ailing grandfather, Vu Van Vong, at his home outside of Ho Chi Minh City.

"Part of me was frozen in terror," Vu recalled. "It was very scary to meet this person I'd been hearing about my whole life. I wanted to say something brilliant. But all I said was, 'Grandfather, I've come home.'"

Speaking in a reedy voice in the tonal cadence of his native Vietnamese, Vu's grandfather expressed his joy in meeting his grandson and reuniting with his daughter-in-law this way: "I believed there would never be a day when father and son would be reunited, but already Tu has returned to visit me, and today, mother and son Trac have also returned. . . . Every day, I thought, father and son are scattered everywhere with no hope of meeting. But we have met, a true gift only God could give . . . and for this special occasion to meet my grandson Trac, I am very grateful."

Vu had a hard time leaving his grandfather, knowing he might never see him again.

"On our last day, as we were pulling away from the house, he pulled himself up from his chair and with his cane walked over to the gate," Vu recalled. "It was very tough for me to leave."

Vu said he only recently became interested in his Vietnamese heritage.

"Going to Vietnam was sort of like meeting, face-to-face, a part of me that I hadn't ever allowed to surface," he said.