COLORSxSTUDIOS

“So what hole does the baby come out of?” This was the question Nhung Đinh’s university dorm-mate asked after scoring the highest mark on their paper. At the time, Nhung and her colleagues were biology majors at the University of Science, a member institution of Vietnam National University in Hanoi. “We would do well in exams and when looking at illustrations, but we were clueless when it came to the real thing,” she says. The environment Nhung found herself in shrouded sex and sexuality in the clinical language of sexology and medicine, which was peppered with chronic misogyny and state-sanctioned discourse. In her opinion, there were complex questions left unanswered.

Several years later, Nhung became an assistant for the Center for Creative Initiatives for Health and Population (CCIHP) in Hanoi. While working on projects enhancing young people’s sexual agency, and showcasing stories from the LGBTQ+ community, she encountered yet another hurdle: while these projects encourage people to be open about their sexuality and sexual experience, only stories deemed “beautiful” in the eyes of the organization got selected and publicized. Many stories were excluded for their pessimism and use of “vulgar” terminology. “Fearing the public’s reaction, many organizations did not include this type of language in their publications.  For them, as well as some curators I reached out to, the stories were not striking, creative, or poetic enough. The language was too raw. To me, they were important lived experiences.”

As a result, Nhung decided to document the dismissed and unwanted words and stories she encountered. One example is the word lồn, which translates to “vagina” or “cunt” in English. She also has a list for different sayings associated with the word, such as lồn quốc dân (a “national cunt”, which either means a public, free-for-all vagina or a pretty vagina), lồn lá tre (a bamboo-leaf cunt, which means the vagina is small), lồn vàng (a golden cunt, a vagina that can create wealthy offspring or brings prosperity to its owner), and lồn khả lồn phi thường lồn (which translates to “the cunt that can be told is not the eternal cunt”, a play on Lao Tzu’s quote in Tao Te Ching).

The artworks created in these workshops were later displayed in Lip Xinh, an exhibition program first held by Nhung within the framework of the 2017’s Queer Forever Festival at the Nha San Collective space in Hanoi. Then, in 2018, Nhung brought them to Saigon, filling a cafe’s second floor with vagina drawings and hand-sewn plushies. The exhibition area doubled as a “living space”, where Nhung welcomed visitors with a host of stories behind every object and the people who made them.

Three months after the official launch of ‘Bàn Lộn’, the artist Gabby Miller introduced Nhung to ‘The Lesbian Lexicon’ (2007), a humorous pocket guide to queer slang edited by Stevie Ann. She then joined Gabby and other Vietnamese artists, writers and activists in compiling ‘Tuyền Từ Quêêr’, a small zine for community-sourced queer slangs. Reading ‘The Lesbian Lexicon’ and working on ‘Tuyền Từ Quêêr’ inspired Nhung to bring together all of the words and terms she’d collected over the years into a lexicon of her own. Through interacting with fellow artists and people in the queer community to create it, Nhung became more aware of how language and sexuality inform each other. She started to pay attention to the way participants in her workshops articulate their experiences, eventually encouraging them to discuss what words and phrases they use to talk about sex and sexuality. As a result, Nhung’s slang archive continued to grow.

The same year, with encouragement and help from friends and collaborators, Nhung compiled ‘Saigon Pê Đê 8x’ (Queer Lexicon from the Saigonese 80s Generation), a zine featuring queer words and terms originating from a group of trans women she met while doing a project for CCIHP. Born in the late 1980s in Saigon, they belong to a generation less privileged than their younger counterparts. Many of them were forced out of the schooling system from an early age due to their sexualities and gender expressions, lived in parks, and made made money as sex workers, through lô tô (a bingo game that is also a drag show where numbers are called out through songs) singers, or cross-dressers. The first copies of the zine were very “DIY”, with the words/typeface either too small to read or too large to fit on the page. They did, however, serve a purpose: Nhung brought “Saigon Pê Đê 8x” along to workshops she led and invited participants to make art based on the words in them.

In 2018, Nhung was able to expand upon the zine and release her first ever properly designed—by Nhật Q. Võ— book. Titled ‘Chỉ Bàn Lộn’, the 123-page publication featured a reprint of “Saigon Pê Đê 8x” (with properly sized words this time) as well as a second section about words related to “dick, pussy, and what we do with them”. The list of collaborators on the project also grew, featuring even more word-collectors, translators, and illustrators from across the country.

Due to its content being easily misconstrued as pornographic, when Nhung sent the first ‘Chỉ Bàn Lộn’ manuscript out for printing, ten print shops rejected the book before she found one that agreed to print it. “This form of self-censorship, and how people automatically abide by the system, was new to me,” she says, though she did admit she later experienced self-censorship herself in the process of creating her ‘Unstraight’ exhibitions in Vietnam in 2020. Despite this, she persists: Nhung released a sequel to ‘Chỉ Bàn Lộn’ four years later, which, with more than 500 pages of words, definitions, artworks, writings, and riddles, is almost five times the size of its predecessor. Funny, sassy, dark, and unapologetically improper, Nhung lovingly calls it a big baby birthed by many people. While the words included in the first book are specific to Nhung’s generation and the community that she worked with, the second one features more Gen Z lingo and vocabulary from online spaces.

When asked if she sees herself as an activist or an artist, Nhung said she is most comfortable identifying as an amateur, without rigid and professional labels. One label she can’t escape, however, is that of someone who is politically motivated, speaks her mind, and takes action without asking permission. “I just go ahead and do it, because I already have the right. That’s my kind of activism,” she says. “My decision to act politically is never an individual one. I depend on other people to be in tune with me.” Other people and human connections remain the most important aspect of Nhung’s life and work. Some of her happiest moments are receiving messages from readers who found the books eye-opening, entertaining, and useful. “The fact that the people who have joined me on this journey have a chance to understand the book better and that they cherish it is the biggest reward I could imagine.”