More Than Friends, Less Than Lovers

TOA 35

And so I spent all my years angrily defying a culture that has tried to erase and gaslight me into believing I shouldn’t exist. Now I wonder: did I waste all those years by not trying to find my connection to Vietnam instead? Am I guilty of choosing anger over my curiosity about Vietnam? As a new generation of Vietnamese performers grows along with the online space, do I even belong in this room with them?

Now that I had seen this other world, I felt torn between finding a language that spoke to me and discovering a world that I was kept away from through a false narrative of it being a war-ridden country. My limited knowledge of and exposure to Vietnamese, which was never spoken outside my parents’ home, makes it hard for me to understand Min, to learn more about her. I can’t comprehend her interviews with her Northern Vietnamese accent, as my parents taught me Vietnamese in a southern accent, and the subtitles to her music just don’t match the songs’ true meaning. I try to follow her Instagram but can’t read what she posts. One time, Min published an IG story of her music playing in a nightclub in Vietnam. Everyone was singing in unison to the song as they danced with their arms up in the air. I wanted to be happy for them but felt a heaviness in my heart; that same feeling of not being invited came over me. Maybe this is why my parents have never been back to Vietnam—it’s a country that’s moved on without us.

TOA 36

In November 2020, Min released the song “Trên Tình Bạn Dưới Tình Yêu.” In December 2021, the music video became her fourth video to hit 100 million views. I got to watch the song grow popular in real time. It includes all the things you’d expect from a big-budget Min production: sponsor ads, choreography, outfit changes, and the most ambitious storyline she’s ever put in a music video:

It starts with a comedic bit where Min stops her friend, a boy, from fighting on a train and makes him shake hands with his rival by grabbing his butt. The story moves them through each passenger car that’s labeled with TOA and her age, gradually showing each stage of Min’s friendship with the boy. In the middle of the video, as they reach adulthood, he wants to commit to something more. She hesitates as the train stalls and the lights flicker, and then leaves him behind.

Years later, now established in their careers, Min watches him fall for someone else. She runs back to that moment when she left him, to confront what she ran away from. She replays the memory of his friends popping up with streamers and a banner saying: “Let’s stop being friends and become lovers.” In that moment of her hesitation, Min sees his heartbreak and sheds a tear for him. The camera pans out and fades into the credits—there is no happy ending.

The video itself spawned YouTube covers, dance remixes, guitar covers, reenactments for a dance contest, and lo-fi remixes. But what I became fixated on were the reaction videos. Vloggers were upset with how the video ended. The hosts of Asians Down Under screamed in unison as one of them said, “Aw! That’s a sad ending.” In Valeria Luera’s reaction video, she asked, “Why did you run from him? This man is CUTE!” Sh3lby, too, sat in disbelief with the story’s conclusion, asking, “Is there another video?”

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.

Each video I watched compelled me to watch yet another reaction. Everyone was empathetic toward the rejected suitor. In my numbed-out state, these videos helped carry my emotions for me. It was almost like my version of exposure therapy, where these YouTubers mentally guided me and helped me grieve my own moments of rejection that were buried under shame. For just a small moment, I felt like I was part of a moment with a community. “This is part of the appeal of reaction videos,” the New York Times Magazine declared in 2011, “they allow us to experience, at a time of increasing cultural difference, the comforting universality of human nature.”

I want my heartache to be met with the same empathy. I want it to be known that, at one point in my life, when I was naive, I also tried for love. I too endured the anxiety of asking someone out, deleting the text over and over again to get it perfect. I felt the excitement of running into her and saying hi, of asking about her day, and for that rare moment, she would not feel uncomfortable saying my non-American name Long and would follow up with, “How are you doing?”

I wish people knew that, just like in the video, I also made the effort to put up the streamers and party favors to invite someone into my life. Despite my mental illness and trauma, which keeps me from trusting most people to begin with, I have tried to carve out mental space just for the idea that someone could occupy my time and affection. But every time she doesn’t arrive at the door of my welcoming party, the emotional labor to clean up the streamers and confetti takes its toll. And the space I carved out eventually fills up with hate for myself, I fill that room with stacks of boxes full of reasons why no woman could love me.

Sometimes I wish I had enough strength to mourn that time, rather than fill myself with anger and distance myself from it. I was taught that I’m a loser for being single, that it’s my fault nothing happened between me and my could-have-been lover, rather than it being her choice to not meet me in the middle. When I see Min shed a tear at the end of the video, I truly believe she feels the weight of her decision, he now exists in a “what if” fantasy in her heart. I hope that I have impacted someone’s life like that too, where she has dedicated space for me in her heart as she contemplates the “what if” fantasy from time to time. When there are moments I feel alone and detached from the world: at least there is one version of me, a metaphorical thought of me, being treated well and is loved.

TOA 24

The beginning of the music video asks: “If life is a train of time, which year would you go back to change the most important thing?”

If I could change one thing, if there’s a next life, I wish Min would be there to tell me “xin lỗi,” to say sorry in Vietnamese when my heart was broken at its worst, to say it the same way she said “khó” and “gắng.” The thing about the Vietnamese language being tonal is that the meaning of a word can change if you add different accent marks or contextual words around it. If you add ` to my English name Long, it turns into “lòng,” the Vietnamese word that roughly means heart. So if an American pop musician can say the bedroom is a war zone and romance a field of battle, a Vietnamese pop musician can save me from my love loss with “xin lỗi,” with the tone to add back in my life there’s nothing wrong with being Vietnamese. It can be beautiful.

Ever since I experienced that first heartbreak, throughout my life I have never found anyone close to my love. Yet Min would tell me to go and build other kinds of relationships that are just as important. She would tell me that the song “Trên Tình Bạn Dưới Tình Yêu” means “More than friends, less than lovers.” It’s about how much that relationship with her friend means to her, even if it’s not romantic. Jonno Revanche talks about these kinds of relationships: “… my straight friends withdraw their time and energy from their friendships, the same ones that kept them alive and thriving through their hardest periods.” Min would remind me that I have friends who are grateful for the times I was there for them.

Heartbreak doesn’t stop being devastating; each time felt like my world was crashing to its end. I’d want Min to tell me life will be like in the video, where the train still moves on in a different universe where those two continue on with their lives. Just as some songs fade out when they slowly move away from your ears but still continue on a loop somewhere else, I wish Min could tell me that my time isn’t over and I’ll still live my life out.

Long Vo is a nonfiction writer who has written profiles for Asian Diasporic writers and memoir essays for Kollaboration SF. He lives in San Francisco, where he works as a Personal Trainer, Maître d’, and is starring in a forthcoming TV Show coming out at the end of the year.