When my youngest sibling was two, the kid looked me straight in the eyes and said: “Chị, I’m not a girl. I’m a boy.”
This was more than 16 years ago. I remember feeling a bloom of anxiety in my chest. There is a gap of 22 years between us; he could easily have been my child. I wanted to mother him and to tell him that I was scared for him. Instead, we sat and played with a set of wooden toys. I had bought him a pastel miniature tea set, instead of trucks and cars. I too was making unconscious gender-based choices.
Over the years, my brother has grown into a young man with a beautiful sense of self. The kid loves Jeff Buckley and Taylor Swift in equal measure. We went to his first music festival at Austin City Limits and he introduced me to Cigarettes After Sex. He still has a collection of Monster cans which he constructed into nerf rifles. This year, my brother will become a psychology undergraduate at New York University. The fear I felt on his behalf has turned out to be largely my own fear of the unknown.
In Vietnamese culture, the concept of gender is more linguistically flexible. The language allows for gender-based pronouns like “cô ấy” (she) and “anh ấy” (he) and non-binary third person pronouns like “nó” to coexist. Historically, gender-fluid performers would frequently take on the task of being a spiritual conduit for people, often singing at funerals, holding séances and providing fortune-telling services. As I did research while preparing for my new feature, Skin of Youth, it became clear to me that the concept of Transgender is very close to that of Transcendence. I was fascinated by the transmutation between the physical and the metaphysical, between the flesh and the soul, between male and female, between love and violence, between light and dark. I wanted to translate this state of standing within dualities onto the screen.
Shifting dualities became the core tenet for Skin of Youth. My composer, Ton That An, wrote songs for the main character that flew from high to low registers in the same verse. My cinematographer, Chananun Chotrungroj, played with evoking the colors of fire and water for the male and female roles, blurring and contrasting them as the young couple fell in and out of love. My editor, Julie Béziau, created a swirling dance combining all of these elements that often took my breath away. I felt like I was watching alchemy unfold. During the making of Skin of Youth, I frequently thought that the art of filmmaking is indeed transcendental. In his book Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch talks about how transcendence via meditation allows us to reach a Unified Field of Consciousness where inspiration may be communed from the beyond. Lynch calls this netting the “big fish.” I felt it in full force as I watched Skin of Youth materialize from abstract ideas into a deeply human experience.
The human at the heart of this story, my actress Tran Quan, ran away from home at 16. She worked for years at a noodle stall in Saigon to save money for her transition. When I met her, she was 19, not much older than my brother. We joked about how she and several other young cast members were my “film kids” and my brother was my “real kid.” When I shared the script with Tran Quan and the cast, they laughed at me. “Chị, we don’t talk like this!” The kids helped me rewrite almost every single line of dialogue. Spending more than a year working with Tran Quan, I saw the quiet resilience that is truly at the core of so many Vietnamese youths. I would like to think that what we did together changed their lives in some ways. I know it changed mine.
When Skin of Youth premiered in New York, my brother was there in the audience. I had dedicated the film to him. When he allowed me to bear witness to his transition, he also inspired me to create without fear of repercussion. Skin of Youth is the first narrative fiction film made in Vietnam to have cast a transperson in the leading role. I do not know what path lies ahead for the film within my country of birth. I do know that Tran Quan and everyone on my team have given everything to this story and the emotional truth of our work will extend beyond our own lives. Skin of Youth is a gift to my brother. This film is also my love letter to every queer kid out there. No matter where you are on your journey, trust that your story will be understood.
In Skin of Youth, the main character, San, stands on a bridge and prays as we bid her farewell. As an audience, we may not be able to accompany the characters on their paths. however, we are able to bear witness. Perhaps we may even be able to allow such a journey to shift us into a space where dualities hold more promise than fear. This too, is Transcendence.
