buinhathahuong

[buinhathahuong]

The Problems Within The Lesbian Community in Vietnam

I first awared that I liked girls when I was 11. Unlike most lesbians’ experience when they first found out, I was not confused or felt bad about myself. Instead, I went to find people who were like me, attracted to girls, right away. Internet was my bestfriend. It was something I totally relied on, I trusted people who shared the same experience with me online rather than my own family. Of course I admitted that it was not a wise thing to do for me or any other 11 year old girls who has not yet gone through anything serious in life. But I was like the others, feeling alone and disconnected to “normal” people around us. Internet was a great thing to me, it brought me so much new information and details that I could never find in school or the enviroment that I lived in, especially with the lgbt themed films, writings, and art. I was really into an anime genre called “Yuri”, it focuses on the relationship between 2 females and I got to make new friends in the Yuri’s fandom. As I grew up, I was terrified to think whether my attraction was legitimate or I was just affected by the images I watched from those films. And I concluded I was not misconcepted about myself, but instead those animations helped me realized that my feelings were real, and that those kind of relationships do exist.

My parents eventually found I was active on a anime forum when I was 12. They were mad, they called me names, hit me, and banned me from using computer. I was upset and started to experience depression from then up until now, even I have officially come out to them and been accepted by my parents. But an other part of me felt grateful for what they did and thought they made the right choice to me even it was brutal. Being isolated was terrible, but I was having all the time in the world to reflect and understand myself better. There was nothing to influence me but myself alone. So at 14, I was able to access the internet thanks to my cousin’s Ipod that was given to me. I went back to all the forums that I spent my times on and feeling exciting to finally meet “my people” again. Instead of the joyful reunion that I imagined, I was like a foreigner wandering around the community that I was supposed to feel related the most.

Before the 2000s, there were not much information about the LGBT community in Vietnam. Then the internet happened. LGBT people who lived overseas or able to understand English started to translate any news they came across about the community and uploaded to forums so people could read about it. More people started to understand more about sexualities, new terms were met and applied to people from the community. I came across the terms identifying different types of lesbian when I was 11. Two notable words that are still not frequently used by lesbians are “soft butch” and “femme”. A “soft butch” is a homosexual female who likes to express her appearance more masculine and tend to dress male’s clothes. “Femme” in the other hand is a “normal” feminine girl who just happens to attract to females. Those terms would be fine and only used to describes the appearance of homosexual females if they were not used to determinate the individual’s role in a relationship, and even affacted the value a human being. Now, I have nothing against if a woman feels comfortable being boyish for I used to be one myself, and there is nothing wrong with that in the first place. I believe people should be allowed to dress and express themselves in anyway they want. The root of the problem is the Vietnamese culture and its views on gender identity.

Since Vietnam is heavily influenced by Confucianism, we still view sexes and genders as black and white. If you’re a man or a woman, you must dress in a certain social accepted way, act in certain ways, interest in certain things. If you just show a small sign related to the opposite gender to yours that is not what the society expecting from your gender, you will be view as less of a man or a woman. Vietnamese lesbians are still deeply depended on this cutural participate, therefore when one shows a sign of being more dominate than her significant, she will immediate think is her job to become “the man” in the relationship. She will cut her hair short, dress boyish, and act aggressively. She will also try to show her emotions less since “men should not show their emotions”. Since femmes still fits the idea of a feminine woman, they play the role of the woman in the relationship and they are expected to be submissive to the soft butch or the other more dominating lesbian. This makes women are not only being oppressed by men in Eastern culture, but also by other women. Some can argue that if this way may works for their relationship or just for themselves personally then there is nothing to criticize. Why I agree that I am in no place to tell others what to do with their relationship. But this does not stay in a personal level, this problem has been affecting the whole community for a long time and it has made it way to become what considers the standard of a lesbian relationship. These standards are harmful especially for young lesbians who just start to discover themselves, this makes them instead of trying to understand what they want, they lock themsselves in the stereotype boxes.

When I was just starting to learn more about my community, I knew that I disliked to be told what to do by others and wanted to control my ownself. I also did not feel comfortable wearing dresses and having long hair was annoying. I then assumpted those signs meaned that I was a soft butch and then tried to fit the stereotype of the soft butch image back then. It was until I hit 13, I realized I was too “girly” to be a soft butch, I stopped trying to be one. I still kept my short hair and dressing tomboyish up until 18. The more I grew, the more I felt the comfy from my femininity. But not many lesbians experienced the same way as I did. When I went through some fanpages on Facebook for lesbians recently, I have seen some butch lesbians trying to tell others what is the right way to be “a man”, how to treat your “woman” right. Physical and emotional abuse exists among the lesbian relatioships, soft butches abuse and hit their feminine girlfriends to show their domination. They consider the numbers of the girl they sleep with as their pride. The more girls they have slept with, the more valuable they are. Soft butches criticize other soft butches for being to girly. Femmes laugh at soft butches who are not the dominant one in their relationship. It was and is still a mess. You can easily find these people at shopping mall in district 5 and 3, walking together as groups, and the securities watching them cautionly fearing they might steal something from the stores. I remembered hanging out with my cousin when she was going to study abroad. A shop keeper used a male pronounce to call me, when I told them I am a girl, they were surprised. Vietnamese lesbians also feel that the concept of a “soft butch-soft butch” couple or a “femme-femme” couple are weird, and they came up with ridiculous terms such as “soft butch gay” or “femles” to describe those people. But isn’t lesbian is about a realtionship between 2 homosexual females? Aren’t soft butches and femmes females? Why are we imprisoned ourselves and reinforce the gender role stereotypes instead of trying to break free from it? This misconception is not just within the lesbian community. Society view those “standards” as what a lesbian is supposed to be, other GBT community view those standards as what lesbians are supposed to be. You can easily see those lesbian stereotypes in news about lesbian. Even in literature such as “Bóng”, an biography by Hoang Nguyen, in which he describes a butch lesbian as “a sloppy, dirty, misbehave man in a woman’s body”. Or in a fiction book called “Les-Thế Giới Không Có Đàn Ông”, roughly translated to “Les-A World Without Man” by writer Bùi Anh Tấn, it still portrayed a gender role based lesbian couple. It is like a circle, we keep wandering around and around, and will never find the way out. And it is not just me, many lesbians I know and talked with also find this mindset is problematic.

Moving on to 2011, a new era of lesbianism started with the rise of a new literature genre called Bách Hợp. Bách Hợp means relationship occurs between 2 females who are not necessary lesbians. They can be lesbian, bisexual, or even pansexual as long as they are in a same sex relationship. The upside in this era is femininity started to be more appreaciated. Homosexual women were being encourage to be feminine rather than forcing the image of a man to themselves, and that was the only good thing. Being feminine does not stop the mind set of applying gender role into the relationship. Gender roles are not as visible like in the soft butch-femme era, but it is still heavily influenced. The people who have “Bách Hợp” mindset like to criticize any lesbian that looks to much like a man, they hate the heterosexual pronounce in the romance relationship, but yet they still believe in dominant and submissive roles. New terms were adapted, “Công” is used for someone who is for someone who is more dominate in the relationship, “Thụ” is used for the passive one. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Yes, it is still the same stuffs just with longer hair. “Công” is always preffered by others since they are the active one in bed rather than the one who just lie their on their back and “enjoy” everything. The lesbian’s value is now being measured based on what a person’s position on bed. And like the mainstream lesbian culture, they can never comprehense how can 2 Công or 2 Thụ can be together. There is nothing progressive in this new era nor it contributes anything good to the community.

The mainstream lesbians and Bách Hợp lesbians think they are different, but actually they are the same. They both still views feminity or woman’s role as a sign of weakness, and only with masculinity or man’s trait is considered strong. While I may sound like I’m blaming everything on men, it is not like that. Like I have mentioned about how Vietnamese culture is influenced heavily by Confucianism and gender roles, Vietnamese women or Asian women in general tend to be looked down by society. Lesbians, like any other people, were raised with conservative mindset by our parents. Maculinity was always being held higher by society compares to feminity, and no one likes to be considered weak. This also happens in the gay community as well, where masculine gay men are always get more respected by not just heterosexual people but also the gays themselves. And it is not just gay and lesbian, straight males, straight women are all being affacted. It is not only men’s fault but women’s as well, it is our fault to keep participate to this misogynist culture.

Things got better when organization like ICS or Hanoi Queer appeared. The people who run and work for these organization are well informed by progressive thoughts and mindsets. They are the most active one to raise awareness about sexuality and gender identities to the community, also pointing out the gender stereotypes that exists within the Vietnamese LGBT culture. They held events, talkshow, discussion events. They created other organization such as Rainbow School, focus on creating club and a safe enviroment for LGBT students. For the first time, lesbians have some places to go to meet and exchange opinions to eachother. Of course not all lesbians have the privillege to come to those events, but it is a great start for lesbian community. Liberal lesbians started to be more active and raised their voices about lesbian’s issues. They advocate on breaking stereotypes and gender roles, while still being respectful to other people’s choice of relationship and identity. But as much as I appreciate their work, as I have volunteered to some of their events, I still see some problems in their ideology when it comes to lesbian identity and LGBT community in general. As liberal and pro-choice, they seems to be accepting to every new ideaology just a bit too quick. I got a chat with 20 year old lesbian when she said that “lesbians can still enjoy having sex with men”. Her reason was “All humans l enjoy sex. If you blindfold someone and let a person simulated sexual act on their body without the blindfoled person knowing what gender the other is, that person will get turned on, therefore they enjoy it”. I pointed out to her that of course that person will get turned on, it is like when you get hit and you feel hurt, it is body’s reaction. And when that person was blindfolded, he or she already lost their consciousness about the enviroment about them, they will get turned on if being simulated. But when you take the blindfold away, that person will gain back their awareness. When they see the person who just praticed sex act on them is someone they are not sexually attracted to, they will immidiately feel uncomfortable and violated. That is how sexuality works, it is the awareness of who you find attracted to. And even if that person is someone they are sexually attracted to, they will still feel violated because that person acts without their consent. Her example was awful. As we talked more, she went on and blamed on all the labels and thought they should not be exists. Ironically, she labeled herself as a lesbian. What she did not realize, it was not the labels’ fault but the person who chose to use those labels. There were a lot of conflicts in what she said in her debate, I could write another 3000 words just to analyze them. It would have not been a big problem if she was irrelevant to the LGBT community, but she was an active member and contributor to the Hanoi Queer, the biggest LGBT organization in the North. This frightened me in many levels, I wondered what have they taught to their members and other LGBT people. How many unreliable informations were spread?

But that girl was not the one who made me become skeptic to these organization. ICS was the first thing that made me realized I could not just trust anything that this organization said. But this one is more subjective to my own opinion than the other one and it is sensitive to today’s issues. Beside from not agreeing with them for the not accept but not against incest, I do not believe in transgenderism, and in no way approve that a transwoman who attracted to women should be consider lesbian. But I support that they deserve to have human rights since I can never get what they have gone through. Even I have some transgender friends in real life, but I have to admit it does not make me less of a transphobe. Just when it comes to my own identity, I do not want it to be taken away from me. Liberal lesbians’ arguement was simple, a transwoman is a woman due to her gender identity, therefore when she’s attracted to other women, it makes her a lesbian. Some would go far enough to call any lesbians who refuse to date transwomen even if they look like a real woman a.k.a feminine, “transphobe”. But lesbians are homosexual females, they are romantically and sexually attracted to same sex people. Transwomen’s gender might be women, but their biological sex are not. Feminity does not make a woman, her womanhood and experiences in life is. Using gender expression to determinate someone’s gender identity is nothing but reinforcing gender stereotypes which we are trying to break. Why hijacking lesbian’s identity after we have invented nearly a dozens of sexualilties? The problems with liberal lesbians are the most dangerous to lesbianism even if they have been sugarcoated by what the contributed to the community. They are changing and erasing lesbian’s identity. I would willing to support making a new terms for homosexual females just to stay true to our identity. All the phases and eras we have been through, we are just taking one step foward but two steps back. We have been skipping to many steps instead trying to make things right from the start.

After 3 years exposing to feminism and comprehensing opinions from liberal views when I was 18. At the age of 21, my mindset is set back to when I did not know about feminism. I am now considering myself as a moderate but leaning just a bit to the right. Some of my other liberal queer friends called me “conservative” due to my view on transgenderism. But if being conservative means sticking to my own ideas and still willingly to listen to other ideologies and see if I can shift my view to be more open-minded, then I’m happy to be one. I am not alone, there are actually a lot of lesbians like me out there, but they prefer to stay silence. But as the development of social network, I started to see some of lesbians who have the same mindset as mine started to speak up. The world is still changing and maybe we can find balance for eachother.

[buinhathahuong]

Best Game I’ve Ever Played

I never thought I’d be attached to a video games, but that was what happened to Life Is Strange and I. The game took me to a “feel” trip, a roller coaster ride of emotions. Life IS Strange is a choice based game, much like The Walking Dead by Teltate, but better. In this game, I am Max Caulfield, a teenager with time controlling power, and her adventure with her best friend, Chloe. As the story of the 2 girls progress, I got a chance to meet all kind of characters, learnt about them and some how become related to them. And little did I know that, the characters in the game somehow become my own friends.

Ok, let’s go straight to the point. I can not write like this. I am J.D Salinger, not Ernest Hemmingway. Life Is Strange is one of the deepest, best story telling game I’ve ever played or watch people’s playthroughs so far. Yet, I have to admit that I wasn’t impressed with the game at first because the art style some how anime-ish and Max’s characteristic was annoying. But over and over again the game proved me wrong and amazed me by its characters’ development, plot twists and cliff hangers, and especially it covered the sensitive topics that other games wouldn’t dare to speak about it. This is the first game I created a tumblr account just to join its fandom, the game I always had to think of first before I sleep. I even saw Chloe Price in my dream. The game that I count days to days just to wait for a new episode to release. A game that used personality stereotypes to create the most unique and relatable characters. The game that made me question a lot. I love this game. But I also hate it for its ending. The ending of this game is unfulfilling as hell. I guess it’s because I still prefer a happy ending over anything, and I got furious when the game couldn’t provide me the ending that I want.

In the end, I have to choose to sacrifice between Chloe, Max’s bestfriend, and Arcadia Bay. The right ending is to sacrifice Chloe and save the town. I chose to save Chloe instead. The weird thing is, Chloe is not even my favorite character. Maybe I’m selfish, maybe I’m a weak and sensitive person, but the thought of erasing all my choices and they were never matter in the first place kills me. Through out the game, both me and Max’s main objective was to keep Chloe alive. It was also proved by how Max keep repeating she must save Chloe and keep Chloe alive. And now the game wants me to kill off Chloe, like her life was never mattered at first? Even it was foreshadowed at the beginning but to me it still seems unfair. Unfair for Chloe, unfair for Max, unfair for me. And what about all the memories and adventures we have between Max and Chloe? It may sounds childish, but all I want is every characters in the game to be happy. If I save the town, basically none of the events ever happened. No one in town would remember anything except for Max and us, we will remember exactly what had happened in the town. Who would know and believe that Max has spent time with Chloe? No one would know what Max has been through and how she has even risked her own life to save Chloe, to save the town. No one, only Max would remember all of these and I’m afraid that she might have a ptsd or what happened, it may affect her mentality.

And for Chloe, Chloe will die on the cold hard floor in the toilet room, the most filthy place in the world. She  will die without meeting her best friend for the last time, she will die without her relationship with her stepdad improve, she will die without finding out where the love of her life is, she will die without knowing she will have the best memories with Max. She will die in the darkest time of her life. All the memories between them and us would be nothing but Max’s imagination. And I can’t even hug Max because she’s just a video game character.

Arcadia Bay doesn’t deserve to be wiped out by the tornado, but neither does Chloe has to die.  The game has gone far enough to make me question my own morality. It makes me wonder was choosing to save Chloe the right thing to do? And it somehow reflects myself in real life, would I sacrifice almost all of the population in the world to save my love one? The answer is yes. I remember crying like a baby after I finished the game. Then I went to my girlfriend’s house and hugged her for half an hour straight. I couldn’t bear it. I was emotionally and mentally crushed. The game hurt my heart. And while I was making that important choice for the ending, putting my girlfriend in Chloe’s place just made things worse.

Other people said eventually I will have to accept that Chloe died, but not right now. I’m still in denial. I’m still finding details and make up theories that most of my favorite characters are still alive even if I let the tornado destroyed the town. To be honest, right now I still have no idea what’s the main point of the game is, but I guarantee it’s not simple as “would you do anything to meet your loved one for the last time?”. I’m sure the development has more things to put in the game, but due to the low budget and time rush, they have wasted a lot of potentials to actually make this game the greatest game so far. But nevertheless, this game has affected me almost more than anything in my life and that is indeed strange.