Cô Linh and Cô Trang had been together ever since I could remember. They were friends of my parents, and I’d see them at gatherings where we sat in backyards at long white plastic tables – at least one for the adults and one for the kids – eating bánh cuô ́n and chả giò. They weren’t any different to the other grown-ups, not really – they’d all known each other forever, and they’d sit at the adult table talking about things we found dreadfully boring as we chased one another on the grass and collapsed into laughing heaps, out of breath.
But of course they were different, because they were together and they were both women. They had delineated roles, though: Cô Trang was soft and feminine, with colourful scarves, bright pink blush, perfectly pouted lips and permed hair that looked like she’d styled it on a cloud. Cô Linh, on the other hand, had short hair like mine. She always wore pants, button-up shirts and an unimpressed expression. There was no doubt about who was the man and who was the woman in this two-woman couple.
Behind closed doors, we called Cô Linh ‘Chú Linh’, chú being the Vietnamese word for uncle. We all did it – my parents, my sisters and me. We’d laugh but we weren’t being mean; we didn’t hate them. We still hung out with them, didn’t we? It was just a joke between family members. It was alright.
Such a silly thing to even think about – a girl marrying a girl. Such a good joke.
When I was growing up in the sleepy suburbs, bisexuality was a foreign concept. Either you liked girls or you liked boys – and if you were a girl, you shouldn’t like girls. When my sisters and I played The Game of Life and reached the stage where our little movers would get married, inevitably someone would put a pink mover next to another pink mover, and we would laugh and laugh. Such a silly thing to even think about – a girl marrying a girl. Such a good joke.
If we heard about a man who had left his family to be with another man, we would gasp theatrically: imagine finding out your husband had been gay the whole time! What if you were the one who turned him? The shame! He was always pretending. He never wanted to be with you. He only wanted to be with another man.
When I was six, I heard the word ‘lesbian’ for the first time, when my older sister spat it venomously at me as we brushed our teeth. I didn’t know what it meant, but by the hatred in her voice, and the way our father’s face darkened as he yelled at her to never say that to me again, I knew she’d used a bad word.
When I was nine or ten, we were watching SBS when a beautiful man appeared onscreen, draped in red, make-up accentuating his delicate features. I was transfixed, but my reverie was broken by my father’s snarling voice: poofter. I should have known better; it was unnatural. I didn’t think about the beautiful man again.
When I was sixteen, I told my mother that I was a lesbian (I wasn’t) just to see how she’d react. She burst into tears at the kitchen sink. I remember thinking that even if I did discover in the future that I was a lesbian, I could never tell her.
You were one or you were the other. You could not be both.
We spoke in hushed tones about my cousin in America and his husband, my other cousin who lived just a few suburbs away and his new boyfriend. I had seen Cô Linh and Cô Trang all my life, so I knew that kind of relationship existed, but we didn’t talk about the truth of it. They were just friends who were always together and lived in the same house and slept in the same bed. Roommates. Definitely not two consenting adults in a loving relationship that had stood the test of time for almost as long as my parents’ had.
You were one or you were the other. You could not be both.
When I was ten, I got a scholarship to an Anglican private girls’ school – my family was Buddhist, but we lived in Sydney’s bible belt and all the ‘good’ schools around there were religious. Off I went to this strange new world where we got detentions if we wore ribbons that weren’t the regulation blue, or dared to step out into the world wearing anything but our school blazer.
This is an extract from 'Growing Up Queer In Australia' (Black Inc. Books). Source: Black Inc Books
Here was a place where we were told outright that it was a sin to be gay (ironically by a female staff member who, despite informing me I was going to hell for not being Christian, would hand me gifts after class with a little knowing wink, giving me preferential treatment that I only recognised as inappropriate later on). There was an unspoken rule forbidding teachers who were gay from dis- cussing their personal relationships. Whispers shot across the schoolyard about the girls rumoured to be lesbians – how disgusting and creepy. When the time came to get changed for PE, we didn’t want those girls around in case they checked us out. We were told that no one was to take a girl to the school formal.
It was during my time in this peculiar place that I met her. I was in the orchestra for a school production of South Pacific, and Jessica, a new exchange student a few years older than me, was one of the leads. Her wild, Hermione Granger–esque hair swept over her soulful brown eyes, and she had the most intoxicating smile. I don’t remember the first time we met, or how she got to know my name, but every time I saw her my heart would jump into my throat and I wasn’t sure why.
Every time I saw her my heart would jump into my throat and I wasn’t sure why.
‘Hi Giselle!’ she’d say brightly, and I’d stammer a hello back before running away. We never said more than that, but somehow it meant everything.
I moved through that year like I was in a daze. I had my first boy- friend, if you could call him that – someone I exchanged timid confessions of love with over the phone and on MSN, and met in person just once before he dumped me and I felt the crush of heart- break for the first time. But Jessica was a physical presence. I’d walk the corridors hoping I’d run into her, although I couldn’t quite say why. I thought she was so cool, this older, confident girl – I wanted to be like her, just like I wanted to be like Sarah Michelle Gellar, who I had a poster of on my wall that I loved to look at, staring into her paper eyes, drunk on the feeling of it. I told myself it was because I liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’d never watched the show.
Jessica left at the end of the year, moving back to the island she called home. One day she was there, and the next day she wasn’t. I never got to say goodbye or tell her how I felt – not that I’d recognise it myself for years.
Life went on without her, as it tends to do. I wonder where she is now – if she’s with someone, if that someone is a woman, or if I’m just projecting. I wonder what I’d say to her if I saw her again. Thank you, maybe.
Could my love for Jessica coexist with my love for that first boy who broke my heart? Was there a part of me that I had buried somewhere so deep, so secret, that I couldn’t find it?
One or the other. Never both.
This is an edited extract from Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen’s chapter ‘How To Be Both’ from Growing Up Queer in Australia, edited by Benjamin Law and published by Black Inc Books RRP $29.99.
