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In 2021, my body collapsed from a severe episode of Graves’ Disease, an autoimmune disorder that causes hyperthyroidism. I vividly remember the terror setting in one night when I could not stand up from the couch, having only enough strength to crawl into the bathroom, to haul myself into the bathtub to pee, and then slither my way into bed. Among all the thoughts racing in my head that night, I prayed that I would keep on dancing, no matter what; that if my limp paralysis happened to be permanent, I would not waver in my dancerly devotion to the body and its visceral unknowability. I needed that existential comfort to distract myself from the waves of shock unleashed by the sudden loss of movement control. Sure, the body is never under our control anyway and the body/mind split is always fictional. But when my legs gave out and my illusion of bodily autonomy was shattered, it was apparent that the fiction of control was more important to me than I’d realized. It is difficult to contend with the fact that, a lot of times, things happen to us. There is not much we can do, other than to surrender. 

The bouts of paralysis in my limbs ended up being temporary, though my body continued slipping away from my grasp. One year later, I had a total thyroidectomy because my Graves’ Disease was too aggressive and did not respond well to the first lines of treatment. As I was spiraling out of control trying to find oneness with my new post-op body, an existential sense of peace crept in. The thyroidectomy unexpectedly initiated a new chapter in my gender transition. I was on the operating table. I now self-administer hormone every day, just like other dolls out there. I joined the rank of mothers, aunties, and sisters who struggle with thyroid problems and hormonal turbulence. The surgery released me from the compulsive desire to prove my femininity to the world and to myself — even though I did not become a woman, per se, I was not so haunted by my own manhood and its ghostlike emptiness, passed down from generations of Vietnamese men who emerged from wartime so lifeless that they do not feel like real people in my psyche. By undergoing a ritual of organ sacrifice, I let go of the rigid need to reject masculinity and welcome into my life the expansive horizon of transness. The surgical cut into my throat paradoxically helped heal the penetrative wound of manhood. If gender is something that happens to me and punctures my being, the ritual of being opened up allowed for more improvisational dialogue, more alignment between what presses in from the outside and what I am willing and able to receive.  Gender and I, we are dancing more with each other. 

I am taking up this cue from Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini to think through gender allocentrically, not as a given interiorized truth within the self, but as a painful unending process of making meaning in response to the invasive penetration from the outside world. In their book, Gender Without Identity, when Saketopoulou and Pellegrini describe this process as “wildly improvisational,” it also helps me circumvent the autocentric mode of improvisation that revolves around the individualized subject and its capacity to do things (e.g., with words, with the body, with gender). There is something wild and out of control about gender, which, if surrendered to, can bring forth waves of pain, confusion, and helplessness. For my guest editorial contribution, I wanted to stay with this existential pain of letting in what happens to us. My invitation is extended mostly to artists and writers in the Vietnamese diaspora, who bear the historical burden of wars and displacements. Maybe the fact of being born into the apocalypse of postwar devastation humbles us, crushing any feeble attempts to do away our existential fragility. It is impossible to do anything with this weight. Making do will have to be enough.