"BONG" reveals gay experience in Vietnam

by Kilian Melloy

EDGE* Contributor

Wednesday Aug 13, 2008

A Vietnamese man working with two journalists tells his story in Bong, a book named for a Vietnamese word for "gay."

Thanh Nien News.com carried a story on the new book, and its author, on Aug. 13, noting that Nguyen Van Dung’s name, in his native language, means "bravery."

Another linguistic coincidence that seems fitting: Dung’s memoir is set in what the Vietnamese call "the third world"--that of the GLBT community.

The 41-year-old Dung recorded more than 300 hours of spoken narrative with the journalists, who helped shape his story and his message into the finished publication, which details his sexual contacts with other men and, in a larger sense, his relationships with them.

The response has ranged from praise to condemnation, but negative response is part and parcel of Dung’s point: that anti-gay attitudes in Vietnam need to be addressed head on.

Dung was quoted in the article as saying, "I don’t want to be famous. Being famous means being notorious, and the price you pay is high.

"But to achieve my goal, I had to sacrifice my privacy."

Said Dung, "It wasn’t easy. It was a fierce struggle for me."

As an openly gay man, Dung is in a distinct minority. The values system in Vietnam derives from Confucian and Buddhist beliefs, and the social thrust in the country emphasizes traditional masculine virtues of family piety, patriarchy, and procreation, th article said.

As the book says, "If you were born gay, no matter whether you are a man or a woman, you were born at a bad time, on a bad day, in a bad month, in a bad year, under a very bad star."

But the book is not necessarily defiant; one passage reads, "If there is a so-called next life, I beg God to let me be an ordinary man or an ordinary woman, whatever gender it may be, but to be as normal as other people."

Adds the book’s text, "It seems a very simple dream, but for me and my friends being normal is impossible."

This may seem a far cry from the out and proud tone of many American accounts of being gay in a straight culture, but the strong family bonds and social pressures of the Vietnamese lifestyle lead to a more humble, less individualistic mindset.

Elsewhere, the book addresses the effect on families of having a gay offspring, reading, "You must be very courageous to rob a beloved son from his parents and to give them back a distorted creature."

Though Dung was something of a swain to women in his younger years, in private he was someone quite different; finally, at age 39, he came out of the closet, because, he said, "I could not pretend to love a woman just to maintain family happiness."

Continued Dung, "It would have been torture. I cannot live like that. I cannot be another person, rather than myself."

Added Dung, "I cannot hurt a woman just to cover myself."

The memoir is not Dung’s only means of living the truth of who he is. He is now employed by a foreign NGO; additionally, he’s started his own gay advocacy organization, Green Pine, which he named after the hardy tree that can withstand environmental extremes.

In his book, Dung does assert the wholeness and naturalness of his homosexuality.

His book reads, "I used to think that I was ill."

Adds the book, "Only now can I really understand that gays are normal people in terms of health and intellect.

"We are only different in terms of our sexual tendency."

For many people, that is difference enough; but to GLBT advocates, the sheer fact that Bong was published at all indicates that such human variations may at last be becoming accepted in Vietnam.

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* EDGE is a group of writers, artists and promoters dedicated to the goal of presenting news and information to the GLBT community in a fair, entertaining, non-conglomerate format.

Photo: AFP