Inside the gashapons

“No one knows what it means but it’s provocative” (*)

Dear friends, 

If Vietnamese netizens ever teach me anything, it’s to stay low whenever a discourse emerges. 

Do you remember the last time your parents and you collectively agreed on something? 

I don’t. 

We are people of opinions which have been framed, twisted, nurtured, switched and proven wrong through the steps of individual lives.

Any issue showcased to us is viewed under different lenses.

“I gave birth to you but why are you different from me this much?” mom once annoyingly asked when I didn’t share her perception of some controversial problem that I now forget. 

“Well, that’s because my mom is not yours.”

I, however, recalled how I responded to her.

Because my mom is not hers, the world I live in has revolved around different foci. I’m brought up to believe cooking is an essential survival skill that everyone needs to know, for example. Most of the time, only half of the ways we dissect an issue match, meaning we share the majority of opinions – the rest is room for disagreement and discussion. However, it can never be a ground for hateful sentiment to grow between us. And I believe it speaks to your relationships with others in real life as well. 

One can never expect and force someone to completely agree with oneself. Even the echo differs in intensity from the original sound. 

I started browsing Threads a couple weeks ago and instantly regretted the decision. It was during the national mourning for the late Communist Party Secretary General Nguyễn Phú Trọng.

The faceless army of netizens kicked off their hunt for public figures who allegedly showed disrespect for the leader. The signal varied – sassy podcast host Thuỳ Minh to post Old Glory on her Instagram story, motivational vlogger Giang ơi to post a picture of herself and the UCLA cohort laughing or GenZ actress Khánh Vân to change her Facebook profile picture of wearing a tiny swimsuit into black and white in a failed attempt to pay tribute to Secretary General Trọng. 

Those acts of insensibility – an indicator of low EQ – were accelerated to treason and any voice trying to make sense was aggressively quenched. 

Only after a week, when the atmosphere chilled down a bit, short notes of not exculpating those tongue slips but showing their horror of the online witch hunt started emerging. 

There were scans of Secretary General Trọng’s essay in Communism Magazine that analyzed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in April 1992 that have been circulating online. Of five reasons, he concluded “the fifth – abandoning proletarian internationalism, fanning the flames of radical and narrow-minded nationalism”. 

I might need to borrow Sontag’s words in The conscience of words to ends this lengthy newsletter: 

Not: Been there, done that. But: For this, against that. But a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine. As a black poet in my country put it, when reproached by some fellow African-Americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism, “A writer is not a jukebox.” The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences. It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on.

In this day and age, a short note on thread might be considered as literature – something one needs to always bear in mind to truly protect and nurture what one loves and believes in. 

Till next time, 

T. 

(*) Blades of Glory

This week’s top picks 

Will Ferrell’s line in Blades of Glory on Black Eyed Peas’ My Humps reminded me of this masterpiece 

It has been crazy how prices have been soaring. Watching this video not for the sake of aesthetics but for the visualization of inflation