[ID: 1: cao wei ning walks over to gu xiang’s side as they smile at each other. 2: wei ning smiles fondly as xiang grins and leans towards him. 3: they stand together, staring off-camera. END ID]
Chào bạn! Hello! Welcome to ‘Don’t learn Vietnamese with Squeakygeeky.’ I am your host, an obsessed weirdo who does not actually speak Vietnamese. I’m trying, though. Please remember that this is intended to look at linguistics within the world of Vietnamese Boy’s Love Drama and not as actual language education for speaking to other humans. Specifically, we’re going to be looking at pronouns.
The best thing I ever did for myself was google ‘Vietnamese pronoun meme.’
[id: Meme with text ‘therapist: vietnamese pronouns aren’t real they cannot hurt you. vietnamese pronouns:’ followed various vietnamese pronouns superimposed on cats with creepy glowing eyes.]
The Vietnamese language doesn’t use pronouns so much as it avoids true pronouns and the way you refer to yourself and your conversational partner depends on the relationship between you. In this particular series of posts, I’m going to focus on the words used for ‘I’ and ‘you’ between friends and romantic partners in various BLs. It was inspired by @absolutebl‘s posts on the Thai language in BL. You can’t really think of ‘I’ and ‘you’ separately, you have to think of them as I - you pairs.
I used a lot of sources when trying to learn Vietnamese pronouns, but here I’m relying heavily on 3 posts about pronouns on the blog ‘Learn Vietnamese With Linh!’ I would link them, but apparently tumblr hates when you cite your sources and will hide you from the tags.
Textbook Pronouns:
Tôi = I Bạn = You
These are the most neutral possible pronouns. They don’t really imply superiority, inferiority, or equality. They don’t really imply anything about the relationship between the people speaking. They are what Duolingo will teach you. They are also not that common in real conversation, or in fictional conversations intended for a Vietnamese-speaking audience, which is all we care about here.
‘Tôi’ is used for ‘I’ when writing a novel in the first person. It’s used when you don’t know enough about the person you’re talking about to be able to choose a more appropriate pronoun, including with colleagues and acquaintances. Apparently if your spouse suddenly starts dropping ‘tôi’ to refer to themselves it means they’re mad at you. It’s not rude but it can be distant. There’s a sense of disconnect from the person you’re talking to. You can pair ‘tôi’ with other versions of ‘you’ besides ‘bạn.’
‘Bạn’ is also the word for ‘friend.’ ‘Bạn’ is the ‘you’ you use for the unknown reader which is why I used it to say hi to you at the beginning of this post. It’s a little too friendly for government forms, but otherwise it’s the most neutral you. It wouldn’t really make sense to pair ‘bạn’ with anything except ‘tôi’ and our next vocab word ‘mình.’
Mình:
‘Mình’ gets its own category because it does a few things. ‘Mình’ is like ‘tôi’ but also functions a little more like ‘self’ (the literal meaning being ‘self/body’). When posting to social media it’s common to use ‘mình’ for I. If I were writing this post in Vietnamese I’d refer to myself using ‘mình.’ ‘Mình’ is also used when talking to yourself. ‘Mình’ can be ‘we’ but I’m just not ready to face plural pronouns yet. Oh, and you can use it as ‘you’ for your beloved who is like your own self, but I think that’s an old-fashioned thing?
Names:
Real names and pet names can be used for ‘I - you.’ This is totally normal and not the equivalent of talking about yourself in the third person. It’s respectful and maybe a little cute to use your own name for ‘I.’ But if someone is a lot older/higher status than you, you should use their kinship term as a title followed by their name. Celebrities tend to use their own name for ‘I.’ I’ve noticed Bá Vinh, that one actor from every Vietnamese BL, refer to himself using Vinh (Vinh being his given name, not family name. Family names go first, but don’t really get used. Bá is his middle name).
Friend Pronouns:
Tớ - cậu = a nice thing to use with friends. Unisex, but favored by girls. Tao - mày = a rude thing to use with friends. Unisex, but favored by boys. If used with someone who’s not your friend, it will cause a fight. Ta - mi/ngươi = for close friends, kind of teasing and just weird in any other context because it’s other use is by royalty in historical dramas
In all these cases they don’t switch around, both people use the same thing for I and the same thing for you.
Kinship Terms:
This means you use words for actual family relationships as pronouns for people you’re not related to, based on age (sort of). These words can also be used as third person pronouns for he/she but we won’t worry about that. There are A LOT, but all I’m going to cover are:
Anh = older brother Chị = older sister Em = younger sibling
This can be used with your actual siblings, but also people around the age to be a younger or older sibling. So a man who is older than you, but not old enough to be your uncle, is ‘Anh’ and a woman who is older, but not auntie-old, is ‘chị.’ You would be ‘em.’ Anh/chị might imply that they’re like a sibling to you, but it might be like using ‘Mr./Ms.’ Context is key. Unlike with friends, the words for ‘I’ and ‘you’ switch depending on who is speaking.
Technically you can use ‘tôi’ (or less formally ‘em’) with ‘anh/chị’ in a way that functions like the friend pronouns with no switching, where you call the other person ‘anh/chị’ even if they call you ‘anh/chị’ in return. This is respectful, and means you don’t have to find out the other person’s age, but kind of makes it sound like you work in an office together. ‘Anh/chị’ is definitely functioning as ‘Mr./Ms.’ here.
Further complicating the situation, a man may be ‘anh’ to a woman’s ‘em’ even if the woman is technically older because, well, the patriarchy, but let’s just go with the fact that it’s cuter to go by ‘em.’ A heterosexual couple will definitely go by ‘anh’ for the man and ‘em’ for the woman. ‘Anh yêu em’ means ‘I love you’ if a man is speaking, but ‘you love me’ if a woman is speaking. Here ‘Anh - em’ has the added connotation of an exchange of endearments, and will occasionally get translated as things like ‘honey’ or ‘dear.’
Okay, you’re thinking, but this was supposed to be a post about BL?!?! The whole point of the genre is that the boy loves another boy! Welp, here we go. Buckle up.
The Use of Anh - Em Pronouns in BL:
Let’s start by acknowledging that masculine/top/dominant and feminine/bottom/submissive gets conflated in general. It especially gets conflated in Vietnamese media (I’m trying to avoid touching the real world with a 10 foot pole except I kind of can’t), because there is no way in the Vietnamese language to discuss biological sex, gender, and sexual orientation as separate concepts unless you use loan words, directly translate concepts from the English term, or are very, very, very careful in how you explain things. (See comments.) Combine that with the linguistic expectation that in a romantic relationship someone has to be the ‘anh’ and someone has to be the ‘em,’ and you get ‘anh - em’ being used in Vietnamese media between fictional male couples in a way that tracks with stereotypical expectations.
(See: Black, Joshua James Croft (2017) Queer male identities in modern Vietnamese literature. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London. )
The creators of any BL have to wrestle with the degree to which their choices will conform to the audience’s stereotypical expectations of a male couple as well as their expectations for who will get seme/uke tropes within the narrative. And if you don’t understand what I mean by seme/uke you sure are on the wrong tumblr post, but I’m basically using the same definition @absolutebl does in that the seme is the active pursuer in a romantic narrative, who wants to be the protector and who gets similar tropes that the male would in a heterosexual romantic narrative. For example, the seme will save the uke from physical danger.
The creators of a Vietnamese BL also have to decide who will be ‘anh’ and who will be ‘em.’ For reasons that I hope are obvious at this point, the use of ‘anh - em’ can be expected to track with seme/uke tropes. When all of this stops tracking together it’s time to sit up and take notice. I suspect that in some cases no one really thought about ‘anh - em’ usage because it just seemed obvious, but in others very deliberate choices were made. I suspect all of this also ties into the modern Vietnamese LGBT+ community’s activism and conceptualization of identity (as well as that of the international target audience) combined with the general genre-savviness of the Vietnamese BL industry and the close attention it pays to Thai BL.
But wait, there’s a wrinkle! A magical get out of jail free card! Younger men always call older (but not too much older) men ‘anh.’ So make one character older, or at least make it possible that he could be older, and then that can be the full explanation for ‘anh - em’ assignment and you can act like it doesn’t have broader implications. Just don’t make the uke older or then you’ll really have problems.
The funniest example of this is Minh Anh, the main character of Nation’s Brother (Anh Trai Quốc Dân, ‘anh trai’ is for when you need to make it clear you’re referring to a biological brother). Yes, Anh can also be a name, and for added confusion it can be part of a man’s name or a woman’s name. He’s ‘anh’ to his actual younger sister and to his love interest, Tâm, who is also clearly younger than him. He’s also shown on top in bed. He is ‘anh’ in every possible way you can be ‘anh,’ truly the nation’s brother.
The thing is, BL loves a classmate romance, so you can’t always count on an age difference. Phùc and Tùng in The Most Peaceful Place have a friends to lovers arc and as friends they use ‘tao - mày.’ There is an actual pronoun-based scene. Just before this scene, they get back together, put their couple bracelets back on, and sleep together with Phùc being shown on top. In the scene in question, they are still in bed and start their conversation using ‘tao - mày.’ Phùc tells Tùng to refer to himself as ‘em.’ Tùng laughs and refuses until Phùc playfully wrestles him into submission. They do actually stick to ‘anh - em’ after that. This is Phùc asserting linguistic dominance, but also getting them out of the linguistic friendzone. The friends to lovers arc is both narrative and linguistic.
The translator made the smart decision not to even try to translate ‘em’ here. It’s just not possible. The translator makes a note that ‘em’ is how a wife or uke would address themselves. Of course uke is a BL/yaoi trope term not a real world thing, so that makes me think the translator wanted to get their point across without touching the masculine/top/dominant and feminine/bottom/submissive conflation with a 10 foot pole.
In The Most Peaceful Place, the use of ‘anh’ and ‘em’ tracks perfectly with the audience expectations for that use the narrative just set up and the physical appearance of the actors cast in these roles. The anomalous thing about The Most Peaceful Place compared to other BLs is that the switch to ‘anh - em’ is very directly initiated by one character, so I think it’s pretty clear the creators know they were making A Choice and went ahead and put a lampshade on it.
I’m planning to do more posts looking at pronoun use in specific BLs, beyond just ‘anh - em.’ Feel free to suggest what you want me to cover next or to guess who is ‘anh’ and who is ‘em.’ I will definitely post about Hey Rival, I Love You, My Lascivious Boss and eventually Mr. Cinderella. I want to post about Stupid Boys, Stupid Love but there are no Vietnamese subs and I’m struggling with the accents and the sheer number of characters interacting with other characters. Tagging @heretherebedork because who knows if I fixed truly fixed the issue and whether anyone can even see this, I love tumblr but I hate tumblr.
[id: Gia Lam, the sister from Nation’s Brother, saying, ‘I watch them to learn foreign languages…’]
