More Than Friends, Less Than Lovers

Screenshot from “Trên Tình Bạn Dưới Tình Yêu.”

TOA 25

There’s a quote by Hanif Abdurraqib that I think about all the time: “From a metaphorical standpoint, one of the worst things we do is compare love to war.”

Sure, love is about seeking a partner that completes you: dancing together, pouring champagne for two, holding hands in a theater, matching wavelengths with your soulmate. But the acts of love I’ve seen from other people are destructive earthquakes. I’ve watched friends bring out their toxic ex-spouses and yell at the waiter, but it’s excusable because “he had a bad day at the office.” I’ve watched a woman throw fits at parties over the DJ not playing a song she wanted but still get invited back because she’s “hot.” However, as a POC in the game of love, where rules are explicit binaries and being white puts you at the head of the pack, I’ve been highly scrutinized. One time, a house guest gawked at my body, pointed her finger at my white friend, and said, “If only I can put that body into him.” No one around us noticed and simply carried on with their night.

Hasan Minhaj talks about the double standard against Asian men when it comes to datability: “there’s this whole movement of approachable white dudes, whereas with men of color it’s like Idris Elba, Henry Golding, Zayn Malik … or you work in IT. There’s no middle.” White men are allowed diverse subtleties—they can work out and read books as they develop their inner selves—however, because I look “pristine” and am well read, that makes me gay: in other words, not worth talking to.

Abdurraqib clarifies his take on the love-and-war analogy: “Mothers bury their children while a pop musician calls the bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle—as if there is a graveyard for heartbreak alone.” With the way this country glorifies war, stories like Miss Saigon where the White savior rescues Asian women from “dirty brown men” like me were the narratives I internalized. So how do I tell my mother that she came to a country that won’t love her son because he’s Vietnamese? A friend once tried to set me up with her coworker, but when the coworker found out my ethnicity, she said: “I don’t date Vietnamese men.” The way she told me was as if I was the problem, rather than her being a bigot.

There used to be an online community for unwanted people like me. In 1993, a woman named Alana created an online community of people of all genders to talk about loneliness, undesirability, and sexual inactivity. Now it has been violated by the extreme right, especially with a group that’s predominantly Asian males called MRAsians. We say we are a culture that’s getting progressive, but this is the racist and bigoted behavior that’s allowed to fly like shrapnel because all is fair in love and war.

TOA 35

In their article “On the salvational quality of queer friendship,” Jonno Revanche calls the social need to find a life parter “hetero life goalposts.” They say, “… anyone who doesn’t follow the same path is inferred to have failed at meeting the demands of the social order. They’re losers, misshapen and psychologically inept.” But for everyone in 2020, social isolation became mandatory. No matter how hot you looked or how wealthy you were, no one could escape COVID-19. Society came to an abrupt halt as if someone hit the emergency button on a train.

I, for one, had always been isolated, so not much changed for me, except that I no longer had to be caught up in the tangle of everyone else’s lives. All those nights telling the restaurant host that I’d be eating just for one while the other tables were filled with couples, all those nights being left behind by friends who found people to hook up with, all those New Year’s Eves I watched other couples kiss at midnight—I didn’t have to be there anymore. On Zoom calls during the pandemic, I’d hear friends complain about their struggles with online dating, but I felt no sympathy for them because at least they were given a chance at romance.

I grew so tired of people. Not caring for others slowly turned into me not caring about myself. It bled into things that once enriched my life: literature and TV didn’t grab my attention anymore, pop songs about love were just stories that were never about me, and comic books became useless because nothing was worth saving. Gradually, everything in the world meant nothing to me. I bought blackout curtains to shut out the sun and to sleep as much as possible in the dark.

Not all types of darkness are bad. A movie theater needs to be dark to project the film on the white screen. Darkness is needed to see fireflies glowing in the night as they dance above the meadow. Sometimes you might close your eyes to complete darkness, like when you pray, so you can absorb what you’re hearing—and when you reach the gods through your soul, you raise your hands, just one breath short of screaming “amen!” It was in the darkness and gloom of the pandemic, while waiting for the other shoe to drop, that I was able to hear a voice I didn’t realize would bring me so much healing.

As I kept an eye on the news to figure out my next move, I watched John Oliver cover the pandemic on HBO’s Last Week Tonight. He noted the countries that were doing well—including, to my surprise, Vietnam. The same Vietnam that Americans casually refer to when using the phrase, “This is my Vietnam.” The same Vietnam that has made me invisible for my whole adult life. Vietnam was doing so well, it had a PSA music video promoting hygiene tips to prevent the spread of COVID. Oliver called Vietnam’s PSA on hygiene “incredible.” “Vietnam made a song about washing your hands to prevent coronavirus infection and it absolutely slaps,” he said. “That’s a club banger right there!”

In the song, a woman sings the line: “Tuy rằng khó, nhưng toàn dân đang cố gắng.”

The word “khó” means hard or tough in a terrible way. The word “gắng” means try. When I heard these two words, a wave of grief and emotions hit me. The tonal shifts that the Vietnamese use in those words triggered memories of my mom trying to ease my frustration that things weren’t getting better. Although I had heard those words many times, I never thought twice about them as I drowned in my pain.

Throughout my life, the Vietnamese language was mostly communicated to me by my parents or extended family. It’s a very formal but also endearing language that I took for granted because family is expected to say those things. But expressed through this music, the language sounded as beautiful to me as if my family were speaking it, except now it was coming from a pop star. A star who didn’t have to hide her accent as her voice was meant for the song. I was so enamored by her voice, that my immense curiosity flooded through my veins and into my fingertips that typed vigorously on my keyboard to find out who this woman was.

Her name is Min. Though her real name is Nguyễn Minh Hằng, she got the name Min because when she and her family moved to Germany at the age of 13, her German friends had trouble pronouncing Nguyễn or Hằng. The way she got her name was the same reason my parents named me Long: they wanted to give me a name that was still Vietnamese but easy for Americans to say.

During the pandemic, I played so much of Min’s music when I was down or needed to escape the current reality I was in. I would go on walks through Golden Gate Park with my headphones on and immerse myself in a new world I never knew about.

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Min started her solo career at the end of 2013 with the song “Tìm,” which now has 15 million views on YouTube. Browsing the thumbnails on her YouTube channel, I can see Min grow from her early 20s, when she sported short, wavy hair and portrayed both comedic and tragic characters in her music videos with depth. In her later videos, she blossoms into a sophisticated, chic-pop Vietnamese woman dancing to elaborate choreography in nicely fitted Gucci dresses. In an interview for iONE in 2015, Min talks about how she evolves her image with every song: “Every comeback, I bring a different genre of music, I always try to refresh myself so that the audience doesn’t get bored :PP.”

But times for her weren’t all fun. After an unfortunate undisclosed event that bankrupted her family in 2014, Min became her family’s main source of income. In 2016, her career was in trouble and Min became so stressed that she sought a doctor for treatment. “About a year-and-a-half ago, I had a lot of problems, not just an unsuccessful song or money,” the singer confided to Zing News in 2017. “Therefore, I feel like I’ve lost everything, don’t know where to turn, don’t know what to do next in this career. Too much stress without knowing who to tell leads to frequent insomnia and a lot of weight loss.”

Min became the first Vietnamese female singer to achieve over 100 million YouTube views on three of her music videos:

Đen ft. MIN – Bài Này Chill Phết

Popular indie rapper Đen joins Min in a melodic song meant for the summer road trip to get away from the big city. Known for making music that speaks to the younger Vietnamese audience, Đen raps in the form of a letter as he reflects on the city life’s hustle and bustle. The track is sparse where the guitar gently weeps over Đen’s verses and the drums come in a minute late, right before Min balances out the rap song with her chorus.

MIN – ĐỪNG YÊU NỮA, EM MỆT RỒI

A gentle ballad where Min belts out her sorrows of an incomplete love as the orchestra swells up and down and the piano carries her throughout the song. The visuals in the video are lush, the color palette is pastel, matching the floral arrangements spread across the dinner table of guests.  This tune became a fan favorite as Min lets the audience sing with her as she presses one hand close to her heart dearly and the other hand holding the mic close to her mouth, making sure the audience can hear her soft voice.

KHẮC HƯNG x MIN x ERIK – Ghen

One of the many collaborations she’s done with Erik, this song is about jealousy laid out over a bed of guitar plucks, synth riffs, and hand claps that builds up to the catchy chorus where the words triple up as if the record was skipping on the needle. The video has chaotic energy as the two lovers break fishtanks and throw darts at each other trying to prove who is wrong in their relationship.

Going though these digital archives is very bittersweet. In pop culture, one’s fandom is always tested, where people brag about knowing an artist before they blew up or boast about how deeply they know someone’s discography. But in America, exposure to Vietnamese music is limited. Growing up in California, I only saw Vietnamese music being consumed through bootleg CDs and DVDs and the variety show Paris by Night. The music on the show was stuck in the past: often slow, nostalgic songs that used Casio keyboards to mimic the plucked strings of a zither, known as the đàn tranh. Its core audience was older Vietnamese listeners who yearned for a pre-war homeland. There was no music for young diasporic Vietnamese kids like me that told our story of being caught in the middle of two worlds.

2 COMMENTS

  1. A compelling, vulnerable and courageous sharing of a sensitive soul; I am in awe of this writing. Congratulations Long. Well researched, written and a masterful entwining of two lives. I loved the welcoming party analogy. Heartbreaking. You inspire. Thank you – keep writing.

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