Cuong Ngo | The Golden Pin / 2009

the impossibility of turning a lover into a friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Guerin and Cuong Ngo (screenplay), Cuong Ngo (director) The Golden Pin / 2009 [15 minutes]

 

The Golden Pin is another film about the difficulties young men and women of Asian heritage have in coming out to their parents given the strong sense of familial expectations and cultural pressures. This work by Canadian director Cuong Ngo focuses on the character Long (Kris Duangphung), a swimmer in love with fellow swimmer Ryan (Ben Bela Böhm), who hasn’t yet been able to tell his parents about his sexuality.*

    This 15-minute film puts the central issue right up front, with Long’s Vietnamese father intoning what must have been a speech heard by his son many a time as he grew up, an intonation of family failures and desires that begins with the reminder that Long is their only son; they wanted more children but were allowed only one. All of his brothers were killed during the war. “You’re the only hope to continue the family line.”

     The centuries’ old heteronormative notion of the family line being continued dominates the young boy’s experience, and is an emotionally heated topic not easily shed even for a gay man. Clearly it’s having a terrible effect on his love life with Ryan as Long continues to date his beautiful girlfriend Vanessa (Lily Nguyen). And early into this work, Long’s family hosts an elegant party, to which Ryan is invited wherein his father announces that Long and Vanessa are to be married.

    A complete shock and sadness registers upon Ryan’s face, but this is not a soap opera, and basically, although there are certainly dark encounters that follow between the two gay lovers, the focus remains on Long and what the decision to obey family tradition means to him as he is forced to suffer the consequences of never being to find the love he really seeks.

      A beautiful sequence in the swimming pool where Ryan encounters him about not sharing the fact of his marriage is not played out as some hostile reprimand, but rather a true attempt by Ryan to try to probe into the wall Long has been forced to create in order to keep his desires in abeyance  in the process of suddenly turning his lover simply into a friend—an impossible proposition revealed in the next moment as the two young men kiss, with Long pulling away, apologizing, knowing that his actions are the wrong ones, but unable to challenge them.

      Lots of long looks in the mirror, stalking the room, staring on photographs of himself with Ryan, and other tropes of inner dilemma follow. But finally, it is his mother (Minh Ngoc Nguyen) who notices that her son cannot sleep and comes to him to talk. She senses his worry about the wedding and relates a long story beginning with the fact that for her wedding she had choose a yellow dress, even though her husband’s family were against it, particularly since her former boyfriend had known about her love of yellow roses. She tells her son a story that she has never before shared with him.

      On the boat from she escaped from Viet Nam, his father saved her life by rescuing her from the refugee camp, presumably through his proposal of marriage. But just a few days before the marriage, her ex-boyfriend showed up in the same camp. Torn between love and obligation, she wrote a farewell letter the night before the wedding to Long’s father, determined to follow her heart. But her lover wouldn’t permit it, and disappeared as he had previously, leaving her the golden hairpin passed on to him by his mother as a goodbye present. They had just attended a classic opera where the Princess refused the King’s order to abandon the warrior she loved in order to marry King whom she didn’t love.

      The King sent her poison, a rope, and a sword. But she chose none of them, stabbing herself instead with an object like the golden pin.

       But I didn’t choose that, she admits. People all have tragedies, but we need to move on. “It’s fate,” she argues.

       It sounds almost as if she is suggesting that he must accept the fate that he is born into. Pausing in her story, however, she holds his face close to hers and argues that she wants him to be happy and to stand up for what he believes, even though it is clear that she was unable to; that she has lived a life basic unhappiness.

       Were every Asian gay boy to have such an understanding and experienced mother. She leaves the golden pin with him, a woman’s object but also a kind of symbolic weapon for his own life or death.

       He arrives at swimming practice the next day to see his lover sitting on a bench in the hall. He turns into the showers instead speaking with him, and soon all the swimmers march out of the locker room, getting into their positions for a swimming maneuver. They all dive in, except Long who stands in place for a few moments, pondering matters, before he finally pulls down his goggles and jumps in. During the credits we watch the bodies swim back and forth underwater across the pool before they finally come up, smiling, the camera moving one by one down the line to observe their faces.

       The film provides no definitive answer to the issues that are rushing through Long’s mind, but somehow it nearly impossible to imagine that he will not not turn back to his swimming friend for a deep hug and a kiss after the others have left. Indeed, any other decision is nearly unimaginable unless he chooses to become a martyr for a cause that no longer has any meaning. His decision is surely a refusal to marry into the same kind of unhappy relationship into which he mother had.

     

*Just a few short and feature films since 2000-2020 which share the Asian perspective (China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indonesia) in exploring LGBTQ+ sexualities are Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004), Samantha Rebillet’s The Suitor (2004), Tsai Ming-liang’s 黑眼圈 (Hēiyǎnquān) (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) (2006), Hong Khaou’s Summer (2006), Josh Kim’s 엽서 (The Postcard) (2007), Vũ Ngọc Đãng’s Hot boy nổi loạn và câu chuyện về thằng Cười, cô gái điếm và con vịt (Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck) (2011), Liang Hu’s Listen (2012), Hong Khaou’s 轻 摇晃 (Qīngqīng yáohuàng) (Lilting) (2014), Ray Yeung’s Paper Wrap Fire (2015), Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night (2016), Leon Cheo’s People Like Us (2016), Chih-Yen Hsu and Mag Hsu’s 誰先愛上他的 (Dear Ex) (2018), Hao Wu’s All in My Family (2019), Ray Yeung’s 叔．叔 (Suk Suk) (2019), Szu-Wei Chen’s 小傑 (Jay) (2019), Koo Chia Meng’s After Noon (2020), and Alice Wu’s The Half of It (2020). Although, there is no one common theme or issue in this diverse selection of films, conservative attitudes toward sexuality and generational differences in attitude are a common subject. An archetypical film concerning these issues was Ang Lee’s 喜宴 (The Wedding Banquet) of 1993.

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).