Kathy Nguyen
Culture impacts how you interact with queerness, whether it be your own or others, or the concept of queerness itself. For example, my mother asks God to give me a husband after she tells me she wants me to be happy. I am not sure how to conform my queer body to make my mother happy. How do queer bodies integrate themselves into a cis-heteronormative regime—disruption through conformity?—and be revolutionary? It is contradictory; it is not possible. How do I explain to my mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who followed her Vietnamese immigrant husband to the “land of the free,” to pursue an American Dream, that I don’t want any American Dream?
José Muñoz’s “Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism,” from his Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity posits that gay pragmatism is strategic essentialism. A quick Google search of the word “pragmatic” gives you this definition: “Dealing with matters in accordance with practical rather than theoretical considerations or general principles” (OED). The Oxford English Dictionary’s philosophical definition of “pragmatism” reads, “ the assessment of the truth or validity of a concept or hypothesis according to the rightness or usefulness of its practical consequences” (OED). Strategic essentialism is a term coined by Gayatri Spivak that means to temporarily engage in “essentialism to affirm and consolidate the political identity of minor groups” (Singh). The fight for gay marriage was pragmatic at its core, a practical step for gay rights, a practice in strategic essentialism. If strategic essentialism is only meant to be temporary—transient—and if Muñoz claims that gay pragmatic organizing is “direct opposition to the idealist thought that I associate as endemic to a forward-dawning queerness that calls on a no-longer-conscious in the service of imagining a futurity,” then what does that mean for gay marriage (Muñoz 21)? Has the legalization of gay marriage made it safer for gay people to exist freely without condemnation and the threat of harassment? What exactly has it accomplished aside from assimilating a marginalized identity a bit further into the regime of capitalism through participation in its institution of marriage? How can queer bodies exist within a system that wasn’t made with them in mind and, in some cases, constructed to work deliberately against them, and still hope to change the system from within while simultaneously perpetuating the ideals and markers of success dictated by that system? I, for one, do not see this as success, and if this example achievement of gay pragmatism is not successful, if it only keeps us stagnant, placates us with surface-level progress, then it is only natural to look beyond, toward the “theoretical considerations” of Muñoz’s queer horizon.
Gay pragmatism is limiting—for us to carve a space for our queer bodies into a system that even exploits those who already make up the majority works only against us. Conforming to neoliberal ideology feels like we are participating in a liberatory act, but we are only being placated with a false pretense of revolution so that we do not seek more. When Muñoz argues that “queerness is…a potentiality,” in the context of it existing on the horizon, it instantly made sense to me. You can see the horizon, and set sail with the intention to reach for it, but there is nowhere you can dock and claim that you’ve touched the horizon with your own two hands. Engaging in gay assimilation politics and staying within the “straight time,” which Muñoz describes as “an autonaturalizing temporality” promising only a futurity of “reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality,” only stalls progress towards freedom—freedom of queer expression, freedom of queer existence. I read this and understand it, and then I agree with it. And then, I think about my immigrant mother and her American Dream.
The American Dream is a concept that illudes most who believe in some version of it (because there are different versions depending on who you are) and for my mother, it is one that is shared with millions of those who’ve come to this nation with hope for a better life for them and their future children, whatever “better” may be. I can’t help but wonder if she has felt disillusioned by the American Dream in the two decades she has spent in this country, at what point in her life she felt it, and at what point in my adolescence it manifested. I’ve never read a novel where I felt so much of my own mother in someone else’s before I read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Little Dog’s mother, Hoa, is named after the Vietnamese term for Rose, and my mother is named after the Vietnamese term for Autumn—Thu. Both women were born and raised in southern Vietnam (Little Dog’s grandmother, Lan, was born in the Gò Công district and my mother was born in the Mỹ Tho district, both within the Tiền Giang Province). Lan escaped her home in Gò Công to the then capital city of Saigon (later renamed Hồ Chí Minh City in honor of the late revolutionary leader of the northern forces in opposition to the Americans fighting on the soil) and her daughter Rose was born amid the Vietnam War to an American GI in the capital city of Saigon. When I ask my mother if she remembers anything about the war in Mỹ Tho, she tells me no. Mỹ Tho is only roughly twenty-five miles west of Gò Công. Both women, after immigrating to America, settled in a southern state and started working in a nail salon. It is so common for Viet women to work at nail salons, so universal, that I am genuinely surprised when I come across another young Vietnamese person in America and find out their mother does not currently work at one, and for some, never have—I forget that not all immigrant stories are the same, not everyone starts with nothing, and then I question if that is even a fair assessment to make. Both my mother and Little Dog’s mother do not know how to deal with their children’s sexuality and gender expression. Neither understand.
The novel starts, “Let me begin again. Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are,” (Vuong 3). If I am to be completely honest, I cannot tell you a single other novel that has made me so terrified to continue from just how much I related to the first two sentences alone. Both Rose and my mother immigrated here with little understanding and practice of the English language, and both Little Dog and I have played the role of their interpreters since our first days of school, but I’ve never felt so far removed from my mother’s tongue than when I am speaking to her, speaking for her. Our families came from Vietnam and brought what they could of the culture with them, including the taboos and beliefs about gender and sexuality ingrained within them. Little Dog comes out to Rose in a Dunkin’ Donuts during a moment in which he senses a clearer bond between the two and I’ve thought about coming out to my mom every time we unwind in the car after a day of running errands together. He tells her he doesn’t like girls, opting not to use the word “pê đê—from the French pé dé…Before French occupation, our Vietnamese did not have a name for queer bodies,” (Vuong 130). It is a Vietnamese term, from the French loan word for pedophile, to refer to gay men, but I have heard it been used to cover every kind of queer relationship. Before this, I don’t think I had ever known what women who wanted other women were called in Vietnamese. She worries if he will start wearing dresses and then asks him when it started, when did her “healthy, normal boy” become this (Vuong 130-131). Immediately there is the association of sexuality and gender being inverse (Little Dog likes men, Little Dog will crossdress), and then there is the association of queerness with sickness—a man loving another man as wrong, immoral—a deformity. My own mother has expressed such sentiments and I know of many other Vietnamese friends who’ve told me their parents are the same. I compare Little Dog’s coming out to the time I asked my mother what she would do if I married a woman —I used marriage as an example because I did not know the Vietnamese expression for “fall in love,” though I knew even then that I did not wish to marry anyone. She told me that a mother should love her child unconditionally and promised she would do exactly that, but she paused and laughed in a way that I can only describe as nervously, and said, “But Mommy hopes con don’t do that,” (‘con’ is a Vietnamese term to refer to child). She will love me unconditionally, but she’d rather I love someone the shared heteronormativity of our two distinct cultures has normalized for her to think I should love.
Rose does not seem like a religious person, not even when she goes to church (though she does seem to find comfort in the religious hymns and music in general), but Catholicism made its way to Vietnam in the early sixteenth century and was defended and widespread by French colonialism well into the twentieth century (Keith). My mother tells me she prays that I will come back to church one day and tells me she has prayed that I will eventually give her grandchildren, so I have to wonder if she has ever asked God about my sexuality because, to her, it is a determinant factor in the American Dream that only I, as a first-generation college student and child of two working-class immigrant parents, can deliver to her—the horizon of having a large family, a community, in the promised land of opportunity that she chased for half-way across the world from the familiarity of her own community. She has since found community in the Vietnamese Catholic Church that my family goes to, the one that I was baptized in mere weeks after my birth. But that community is full of people like my mother, who want the same heterosexual, chrononormative Dream as she does, and those who have had their children succeed in that Dream boast because they are proud and right to be proud. But when she comes home to a daughter who talks about loving another woman and not wanting children, does she think she has failed her dream? How do I look at my mother and tell her that her horizon is no horizon to me when she left everything and everyone she knew so that she could watch her child reach for it? It feels wrong to shame her for her idea of success, marked by a collectivist Vietnamese culture that revolves around a straight time that has no room for me, demanding I shave off flesh to fit in, when she has given up pieces of herself so that I can do just that.
José Muñoz claims that assimilation is not a revolutionary act, and while I do not actively live my life with revolutionary intent, his ideal of a queer horizon in opposition to conforming to straight time is something that I find deeply resonating. In the end, I don’t have an answer as to how I can get my mother to understand and accept her child’s queer body within the context of her culture and the different cultures I exist within and adjacent to, but perhaps this is something that can be delegated to the horizon—a goal that exists in the futurity of progress the keeps one looking forward.
Works Cited
Keith, Charles. Catholic Vietnam : A Church From Empire to Nation. University of California Press, 2012. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=nlebk&AN=484485&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Muñoz, José Esteban, et al. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2019.
Singh, Pallavi. “Gayatri Spivak’s Strategic Essentialism: Meaning & Examples.” Literatureandcriticism.Com, Literatureandcriticism.com, 5 Oct. 2023, www.literatureandcriticism.com/strategic-essentialism/.
“Pragmatism, N., Sense 4.a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1925505004.
“Pragmatic, Adj., Sense 5.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2177131844.
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Press, 2019.