“We never had a chance.”

In 2010, when I just got into high school, and right when I started developing my first crushes, I started to write in a diary. Unfortunately, my mother read it. I knew this because I saw changes in my mom’s behaviors and how she addressed me, she even knew the things I wrote that I never told a soul. I felt a little odd then, even frustrated, because what I wrote were things I wasn’t ready for anyone to know, but part of me hoped that since my mom already read my diary, I could come out more easily. There was this one time when we were talking and she called me her “daughter.” I was a little taken aback, but I kept my cool and acted like we were just joking around. I had the feeling that my mom was trying to send me a signal and I knew for sure that we would have an official conversation about this at one point.

But that moment never came, because a little while later…

My mom passed away.

It’s a shame that we never had a chance to sit down together and talk about it.

The following weeks, my mom’s colleagues paid us a visit and asked if my dad and I happen to keep the books my mom had borrowed from the company library because it was passed due. I ran into my mom’s closet and found a book titled “Bóng*”, an autobiography from someone in the community who weren’t sure if they were a gay man or a trans woman. I read the back of the book and started crying. I was already mourning then, and I was overwhelmed with the loss of direction. That bright and beautiful life and future I had planned in my head — I would come out and life would be peaceful with my family — was cut short because of that tragedy. I felt both pity and sadness. Only then did I understand why my mom had a change in lingo and behavior after having read my diary. My mom did her own research on the community and probably took a long time to find all sorts of information, and perhaps tried to learn how to talk to her child. It’s a shame that we never had a chance to sit down together and talk about it.

*a Vietnamese slang for “gay”

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Rồi Sẽ Ổn Thôi (“Gonna Be Alright”) is a project that collects coming out stories from the LGBTIQ+ community and their loved ones in Việt Nam. To find out more details or to read more stories from the project, please visit our official social media site on Instagram at ComingOutVN.