from Issue 6: Vietnamese Futurism & Queer Posterity | Published by Vănguard | October 2024

from Issue 4 | Published by For Page & Screen Magazine | August 12th, 2023

Screenplay Written for AAPI/WGS-137B-1 : Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene | May 17th, 2021

Artist's Statement:

Memory and dreaming lie at the core of Asian diasporas, but for my entire life, Vietnam has lain at the outskirts of both, too distant to be either. This is the violence of colonialism and imperialism— the erasure of memory, the suppression of dreams. What, then, can we do, to rediscover both?

When I left home for college, this question became more urgent for me. Although I spent most of my life living in a largely white suburban town, I grew up in the Bay Area, which boasts one of the largest Asian-American populations in the U.S. More specifically, I spent the first few years of my life in and continued to spend a large amount of time in the San Jose area, where my mother’s entire family lived, and where the largest Vietnamese-American community in the country is located. So attending college in Massachusetts involved a lot of cultural and familial shock and grief. There was no longer a Ranch 99 in every city, no longer the familiar dim sum restaurants, Vietnamese sandwich shops, or Asian malls and shopping plazas I had frequented before. Additionally, I was now an entire country away from my mom and her family. I could no longer listen to them speak Vietnamese, visit my Ngoại’s place for her homemade food, or celebrate holidays like Tết with all my cousins and aunties. 

I felt isolated in ways I didn’t know how to express, especially to my white friends at college. I didn’t know how to say that I had grown up immersed in the loss of a home, a language, a culture, a life I had never even known, that it was enough to grieve the lack of memory of Vietnam, but to then feel like I was losing or had already lost my only connections to it, the only anchors I had to my ancestry, pushed me over the edge.

It was then that I decided I would never lose Vietnam and my family. I began a journey of filling in the cultural and linguistic gaps in my inherited knowledge of everything Vietnamese, and making my heritage and identity the central theme in much of my writing, art, and academic work. My embracing and expansion of my spirituality, queerness, and radical political beliefs further deepened my bond with being Vietnamese. My fear and my rage served for very long as motivation. But as I reconnected more and more with my past, ancestry, and memory, I found the hope and courage to dream. My screenplay, Chuyển Giới, is the manifestation of that dreaming.

Chuyển Giới is the story of Huỳnh An Linh, a 25-year-old non-binary historian living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam centuries into the future. After the downfall of colonialism and racial capitalism across the globe, thanks to the combined liberation efforts of peoples across the Third World, Vietnam is rebuilding and restoring itself. Since the great revolution, the Vietnamese people have developed a new technology using meditation practices and engineering, which allows them to access their ancestral memories, individual and collective, through advanced astral projection. Linh uses this technology in their job to witness and document the history and everyday happenings their ancestors, or past lives, experienced. On one particular day, Linh has been tasked with astral projecting through the life of another non-binary Vietnamese person from the 21st century who grew up as part of the diaspora in California, which will be a documentation of my own experiences (Linh, then, is a descendant and future reincarnation of my own self). Linh will experience the types of feelings and memories I described prior, zooming in on the resilience of a people searching for both the past and the future, and completing this forging of the bridge between both. In doing so, Linh will push the audience to ask ourselves: if pain and memory can be passed down and inherited, why can’t dreams?

The title of the screenplay, chuyển giới, which is the Vietnamese phrase for “transgender,” also translates to “crossing realms of existence” and “transforming the world,” according to Ly Thuy Nguyen in their essay, “Fruits of the Future.” I use it to reference, not only the innate queerness of having two queer non-binary femmes as the protagonists, but also the literal transcendence of time and space in the story through astral projection, as well as the figurative transcendence of memory and dreams.

I asked in class once why we do not have more joy in Asian/American film, why Asian women and femmes must be subjected to pain and trauma in all stories of us, and why we must always be subjected to the white gaze (and the male gaze). Through this screenplay, I have discovered the joy, written it into being, and I have removed the white male gaze and the pain. Neither fetishized nor desexualized, neither allying with nor competing against white women, neither sacrificed nor having to sacrifice something, Linh and their former reincarnation live a reality where there is joy, connectivity, and safety, smashing harmful orientalist tropes of Asian women and femmes.

Chuyển Giới also challenges techno-orientalism, this idea that, in the future, humans will be nothing but empty (often still sexualized) shells, the earth void of nature, everything replaced by computers and robots— and with super-tech communist Asia, of course, at the center of it all and responsible for influencing culture, negatively, worldwide (when in reality, the type of dreary future portrayed in this way would be brought about by the continuation of capitalism, western imperialism and colonialism, and white supremacy). Instead, the future Vietnam I have imagined is one where relationships with spirituality, the land, and each other are nurtured.

As such, I do not draw inspiration from portrayals of Asian women such as in Sayonara or Miss Saigon or even Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior, or portrayals of Asia-futurism such as Ghost in the Shell or Blade Runner. Rather, I draw inspiration from portrayals of Asian women and Asia-futurism such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, two Studio Ghibli anime films by Hayao Miyazaki that present women protagonists unrestricted by orientalist tropes and which explore anti-imperialism and indigenous relationships with the land, both in the past and the future. 

And I draw inspiration, too, from the dreams of my queer and/or femme Asian comrades, both in the present, such as Mimi Zhu, Jess Snow, and Alok Menon, and the past, such as my ancestors who came before me. And lastly, I am inspired by my own dreams, and the dreams of my mother. By writing our dreams, perhaps, I can make them come true. Writing a screenplay like Chuyển Giới reminds me that safety, freedom, and joy are possible. It reminds me that, even if the future feels far away, even if memory feels like it fades— dreams are in the present.

Note from the Editors on Issue 4

“This issue of For Page & Screen Magazine feels, to us, unlike any other. These stories are bold. They are graphic and violent and tragic and beautiful. We are privileged to work with authors who understand that—while life needs both pain and joy—unmitigated violence and blind faith in the systems we participate in can only end in ruin.

As such, we present these stories. Stories that play with genre and perception, stories that question what it means to heal and what it means to have hope, stories that challenge the reader to consider what role, unwitting or otherwise, we have played in these cycles of violence.

We at For Page & Screen strongly believe that horror, as with all genres, can be as deeply cathartic as it is critical. While this is not, by theme, a “horror” issue, we hope that you’ll open yourselves up to the more graphic nature of these works so that we may understand and appreciate the criticisms, the joy, and the pain these wonderful authors have come to share with us.

With Love,

For Page & Screen Editorial Team"