Vinh-Paul Ha is a death doula, writer, artist, tarot reader, empath, and a dad to his young queer friends. Follow him @mysticdadde and sign up for his newsletter, where you can read more about his musings, see pictures of what he's cooking, and submit a question for relationship advice.
This episode was produced by Nicole Kelly. Editorial advising by Sharon Mashihi, Phoebe Unter and Kaitlin Prest.
Music: “Truckin,” “Circuit Breaker,” “Polka,” and “Nitro” by Bio Unit/Metre. “Illumination” by Kai Engel. “Trivium” by Nctrnm. “Triste Alegria 3 (XIII)” by opo.
The final song — “A New Year’s Story” — was performed by LA ghost pop band Bitter Party.
transcript
Kaitlin Prest:
From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia. Welcome to The Heart. I'm Kaitlin Prest.
[theme music starts, light bass sounds like a heartbeat]
This is One. A mini series. In this season, we are bringing you stories about learning how to be alone.
[acoustic guitar strumming "One is the Loneliest Number"]
Vinh;Paul Ha:
In some ways, I think the - like the way that I try to live my life is one that is pretty solitary.
Kaitlin:
Stories about finding pleasure in loneliness.
Kamala Puligandla:
The loss stung, but even more, I felt the deep desolation of leaving a space for someone to be close to me that was never filled.
Kaitlin:
Stories that go deep into the lessons of those experiences.
Michelle Parise:
Fear. Futility. They may as well say your husband cheated on you. Now you think no one can love you.
Kaitlin:
The relationships that we have with ourselves.
Vinh;Paul:
Now, the idea of what it means to be alone is so different from when we first met 10 years ago when I was 28. You know, and I think that like...
Kaitlin:
10 years ago this fall, it was in NK's first day of grad school. She was about to spend three years taking fiction writing workshops in Orange County, California. All of the writers, new and old, sat in a circle of chairs in their teacher's backyard.
Vinh;Paul:
Um as a writer…
Kaitlin:
And across that circle.
Vinh;Paul:
Thinks a lot and is stuck in his head a lot...
Kaitlin:
NK and Vinh Paul locked eyes for the first time.
NK:
Like yesterday I switched my OKC from women to only show me queer men.
Vinh;Paul:
I'm gonna pop up!
Kaitlin:
It was love at first sight. They spent the whole night talking mostly to each other.
[laughter]
NK & Vinh;Paul in unison:
It's faster.
Kaitlin:
At the end of their first year, NK went to spend a summer in Berlin. And Vinh;Paul went to Panama.
Ancient Taoist and Buddhist scholars talk about: The journey. Travel.
Traveling as a liminal space. A space of in-between where the rules of home don't really apply and the rules of the new place don't apply either because you don't really know them. In this story, NK's longtime friend, Vinh;Paul Ha takes us on his journeys. Traveling alone. The story begins in the summer of 2011 in Panama. Here's Vinh;Paul...
Vinh;Paul:
So the first summer after grad school, I decided to travel to Panama. It was the first time I ever traveled alone and I was 28 at that time. And I definitely was dealing with a lot of questions of romance, love, being a loner, processing through like five years of being celibate. Trying to figure out how to be, I think, an adult on my own. And so Panama seemed like a really good kind of transition point for me. I had to navigate the space for five weeks and in the process, figure out just who I am and test myself.
[street sounds]
So I arrived in Panama City and I actually right away went to a bus station and took that bus to David. So essentially, I traveled a total of 13, 14 hours.
[horn honks]
I remember riding this yellow school bus to this mountain town.
And listening to other people speak Spanish and I don't really get what they're saying, all these other people feel so engaged with each other.
They're either arguing or they're in love or just having small talk.
But I'm completely oblivious to all of that, right. As they're connecting, I'm by myself. I was the only Asian person on the bus. But that's OK. I'm looking out the window and I see all these beautiful trees. And it makes me think about how this is the experience that my parents also had the first time they came to the U.S. from Vietnam as refugees and have to learn a new way to sort of experience community and to experience like, home.
[quick violin and drum beat]
And I don't know, like sitting alone on that bus as it was winding through the mountains and thinking about that experience just really made me feel really close to my family.
I felt close because there was a sort of solidarity. We're now both these foreigners in the space that, like, hasn't really thought about who we are as people here yet.
[horn honking, person speaking Spanish]
I arrived in David at 2:00 in the morning and I was really nervous and I arrived at the hostel, but it was completely dark. It was new. Everything was novel, right? Traveling alone for the first time. Being around a community that I have never experienced before.
It was really scary to be in a country in which I didn't know the language,
[shrill bird]
But also was so incredibly freeing because of the ways in which it asked of me to be constantly sort of present.
It was the last sort of- the end of an era of my life in which I was really trying to navigate this very specific kind of like hetero normative space, and that in itself was such a lonely space.
I'm fearful that someone is going to read a particular hand gesture or, you know, an intonation as being gay. And my fear was that if I was the person I am, I would also be complicit in this idea of playing into this role of the effeminate Asian man.
The options I had, at least at that point when I was thinking about it, was that I could come out and that scared me and I had to figure out and navigate what that meant. To be now, a gay person in this world. [Panama style guitar strumming]
I just sat with it right. I just said for these five weeks, I'm just going to, like, stop pretending because I don't have to pretend.
I don't have to pretend with anybody.
What was really liberating about the trip to Panama was, was that it was the first space in which I was fully allowed to be myself, right? I was completely anonymous to everybody. I think it was that trip that really gave me the courage to come out.
[horns blowing an intro]
But once they go back to the U.S., I was so scared to own up to it of being gay.
And then I finally did it and I was really excited about dating. And then dating didn't happen. Like, it just wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.
[horn sound droops & falls]
And that's when it opened up this whole other door of, like, questions I had about attractiveness being Asian, am I desirable. I think that like because of the ways in which I had chosen to live my life up to that point, I was really shielded a lot from the ways in which traditional homo-normative spaces operate.
Like, you know, white men who, like, are obviously into each other and like are going to be dating each other. I was really naive about it. I don't know anything about it. And so I was like, of course, like, you know, like I'll find somebody. Like, it'll be chill and we'll have a love affair. It didn't happen! [laughter] Or didn't happen right away, I guess, right.
[sound of plane]
After coming out, the one thing I wanted more than anything else, I really wanted to have a boyfriend. I really wanted to just have tons of, like, gay sex, obviously.
[plane announcer voice speaking in background]
I just want to feel liberated. I want to like you to have, like, dicks in my mouth. Like, I just want it all, like, you know, like cock. I'm like I just — feed me. Yeah. I was like, Yeah. Give it to me. Give me all of it.
[dancey music begins]
My trip to Berlin the next summer was about trying to experience that.
[announcer voice]
Berlin has it's own sort of ethos, right. I don't have to explain that. It's a place that draws a lot of people for different reasons, for artists, for sex, for hanging out, for everything. And I'm trying to go for all three of those things, for some art, for some sex and to hang out. What's a better place to go when you don't feel like the hottest person in a raunchy place? Because my idea was like if everyone's a slut and everyone's horny, then I'm going to have such a great time [laughter]. I was like, I'm gonna party hard and sleep with everyone because everyone is sleeping with everyone.
So this was the second trip that I ever took by myself. Screw you Catholicism that I had to grow up with. I'm just going to get wild and nasty.
[announcer voice mixes with dance music]
We don't want to go because that was at that point, it was, you know, four years after my first trip by myself outside the country, and I felt confident about who I was, more so than you, I've been building up my sort of sense of self, right. I've been building up a sort of ease. I think what it meant to be a queer person. I was like okay I'm going to find an apartment to sublet, it will be totally chill. And I did find an apartment to sublet. It was an amazing apartment in an amazing part of Neukolln. I'm not saying it right, but yeah.
The whole point also of me wanting to get my own sublet was because, like, I need to know that, like, if I'm gonna bring something home at like midnight, which is early.
Person with German accent:
Berlin is one of the best places in the world.
Vinh;Paul:
Or at 4:00 in the morning, which is early.
[dance music is picking up energy]
Vinh;Paul:
Or at like 7:00 in the morning, which is early [laughter].
Person with German accent:
Awesome and insane parties.
Vinh;Paul:
Felt like it would be chill because it's my own place.
Person with German accent
And you still haven't seen them all?
Vinh;Paul:
I was definitely thinking like, it's Berlin. Like people always talk about like I'm definitely going to have orgies.
Person with German accent:
[Rough laughter]
Vinh;Paul:
So I didn't — so I was excited. I was excited to be in the city. I was excited to be this place alone, I was excited to be able to, like, be who I felt most confidently.
So I remember going on dating apps and uploading a picture of me shirtless. Not too risqué, right. But like, just enough to, like, feel kind of sexy. And I didn't want to show my face right away. But I also don't want people to not know what my face looked like. So I used the emoji of the man with black hair and a mustache. It does look like me. I enlarged it over my own face. I definitely put out my profile that I was also Asian. And we're chatting. It was going pretty well. I was like flirty, was kind of fun.
And then when they ask for a picture, I'll share them the same picture, but then with my real face and they'll be like consistently like radio silence after that.
I didn't want to assume right away. I don't want to assume that it was because I was Asian. It was because they felt, you know, that I was misrepresenting myself. They're obviously attracted to something about me. Because the messages are pretty consistent before I showed my actual face. I remember then changing it where I had a different picture up.
And this one was much more prominent in, like, showing that I was Asian. And I remember at that point, that's when I started getting less and less messags.
Person with German accent:
You will have the best time here.
[dance music continues but softer]
Vinh;Paul:
Throughout that trip, I met a lot of really wonderful people who were really kind, but I also felt unseen. Being Asian, people are never overtly rude to you, but they certainly don't acknowledge that you exist. This happened a lot actually in Europe. I would go to like places to go dancing. I was dancing and other people were dancing. And slowly I was like being crowded out into a corner to the point where, like, I didn't have any space to dance.
[music pauses, comes back and sci fi edge to it now]
And nobody said anything. And I'm sure that, like some people would argue that, oh, it wasn't intentional and nobody knew. But also, like, there's - there's a person who's dancing here, like people are doing something. I also thought I was going kind of crazy. These are these - these things that happen. Right, like being pushed out of a dance floor makes me feel crazy because part of it is wondering, like am I overreacting or is this an actual microaggression that's happening?
Who do I talk to if I'm by myself? Right. Who can I ask? Are we both being pushed out or is it just me? Is this happening only because, like, I'm the one person and there's like a whole group of people dancing and this is what's going to happen. There's so many things I'm trying to figure out.
It's weird to be in a space in which you're trying to not be alone. Right. You're you're you're actually actively there to be somewhere where you can cultivate these very communal experiences that people talk about exists in Berlin and I go, and the consistency of that or that narrative didn't really exist.
I remember it was like a random weekday afternoon and I was sitting in front of my laptop just pretending to write because a part of the mission that I had and going to Berlin was to write my novel, which I didn't do at all. So I'm on Tinder and I'm swiping. And for me, when I'm swiping it's yes. He's hot. Yes, he's hot. No, he's not hot. Yes, he's hot. Yes, he's hot. Mmm, maybe he's hot but I'm going to say yes because why not. And I saw this one picture of this very handsome man who was the same age as me at that time, so he was 33. And his bio didn't really say much. But I remember clicking his pictures and I was really excited. When you finally get another hot Asian, like, you just really want to go for it.
And so I messaged him on Tinder hoping he would message back and he did message back.
I was- I was nervous. I don't know how other people are. But for me, back then, I was petrified of talking to somebody that I thought was really attractive. I asked him if he was German, if he's from Berlin, he said no, he's visiting from the U.K. After I said that, you know, you're very attractive. He goes, you're hot, too. And, you know, when I saw your profile is like, wow, this person's really attractive, marry me. And he's like, joking, not joking, joking. And I was like, oh, cool. And asked him if he wanted to go have a drink. And he said, just a drink or a drink and other things? And I said, you know, do you want to meet up later? We can like, get burritos. I'm a Californian. And I was just craving a burrito. I really just wanted something that felt like home. He actually responded and said yeah, sure. And so we ended up meeting up later that night.
[soft wave of sound, similar to an ocean wave]
And so I remember waiting in front of the restaurant and I saw this person walking up and I remember him looking one exactly like his photos, black shirt, black pants, and he had salt & pepper hair. He had a South Yorkshire accent, even though a lot of Germans do know how to speak English, it was nice to speak to somebody else who was a native speaker.
So he's sitting across from me a bit slow and woozy, still hung over from the night before, even though it was already 7:00 in the evening. And his voice was quiet, but certain as he spoke in between bites.
I could tell that he was Hapa, but mixed with what I couldn't decipher. But I'm also not the type to ask because that's weird and rude.
[music wavers, almost sounds drunk]
So I'm listening. And he's still speaking with the same certainty in his voice. But now it's louder, more comfortable.
Yeah, we'll see. I said, if I think you're fun enough, he laughed and said, is that so?
Well, the night's early. Anything can happen. And he wipes his mouth clean with a napkin.
And I also wipe my mouth with my napkin as a way of showing him that I'm paying attention.
Kind of flirtatious gesture, signaling to him that I'm more at ease now and vulnerable and open to wherever our desires take us.
As we're just casually getting to know each other, he mentioned, I'm half Asian, half Filipino. In that moment, I think I felt even more excited about meeting this person right, it felt like this moment of such complete rarity that I was able to meet this person who I thought was really attractive, identified as being Asian and identified as being a brown Asian. Like I do.
And so it really sort of opened up this ability for us to communicate. These moments are so rare right. I think that like in general, when you're, like, excited about something or someone, there's chemistry. You really just want to sort of live in it.
[computer sounds]
It's 3:00 in the morning and it's still pretty early by Berlin standards.
We left the club and are now standing in front of an U-Bahn station. I asked him if he wanted to go to another club that was close to my apartment. And he looked he looked at me straight in the eyes. And I remember his stare was really intense. No one was around us in the station, despite it being only three in the morning in Berlin on a Saturday. My heart was beating really fast. I was getting hard and felt bold and and pressed myself up against him and he pressed his hips closer to mine.
[sound of train in background]
I'm still laughing and I'm still trying to read his face for clues and quickly see his eyes like getting softer. And he smiles and his teeth are crooked and British teeth, he later joked with me. But honestly, in that moment, I really couldn't imagine a more handsome face. And he asked me, where do we go from here? So back at the apartment, we stood on the balcony and I came behind him and I put my arm around him and he kind of leaned into it. I wanted to grab him and kiss him, but I was still too nervous. And either he sensed that or he was just following his own instinct. But he put his face right up next to mine. And I could still smell the alcohol on his breath and his eyes closed. And I've kissed like many times before but this time it felt new and an unknown. And I was like, this is like so wonderful. And this is something I've wanted for a really long time. And we didn't have sex that night. But we did make out a little bit. We cuddled. The next morning, I woke up first, showered, and made coffee. He woke up a while after, while I was in the kitchen and he got dressed. I offered him coffee and he accepted and I led him back to the bedroom and had a very lovely time. And even if it was really brief it was nice to be in that moment with this person. I walked him to the station and waited for the train to come. And I remember in that moment thinking to myself, I don't want this moment to end. And if we could be fully romantic, right. That sort of ending of something that was kind of in that time, like felt perfect.
[train announcer, train arriving]
But the espon finally came. He got on and said goodbye.
[train speeding up]
And I think because of the way my time was in Berlin up until that point, I remember feeling when he left- not necessarily longing for him, right, but longing for this connection that I had experienced. The whole time I was there, I always felt like a foreigner, right, and I was a foreigner. But I also felt a foreigner in the same ways that I feel a foreigner in the U.S.
Person with German accent:
Some of the best events happening here are some that you unfortunately cannot go to as a visitor to Berlin.
Kaitlin:
Please forgive this momentary interruption. We’ll be right back.
Vinh;Paul:
I move to Tucson. I'd been there for a few months and I was there specifically because I was now actually working on my novel project and I was committed to finishing it and I was making pretty good headway. And when I feel like I've accomplished something kind of big and put my life, I'm gonna celebrate and take a trip. So I was still in contact with him. We bought tickets a year in advance and we were exchanging texts or just talking for a year. He and I had been texting every day, you know, beyond just how are you? It would be just, you know, what are you thinking or who are you seeing or how are you feeling today? And the conversations, for the most part, were friendly, but they also always had a sort of tinge of flirtation behind it. And I remember telling him that the next trip I want to make is to Southeast Asia. I've never been and I have always wanted to visit Vietnam and sort of get a sense of, you know, the motherland and sort of get a sense of where my grandparents and my parents lived before they came to the US. You know, we're talking and he said that sounds like a really good idea. And I said to him, you should come with me. You know, we had such a great time in Berlin. We've been in touch every day.
And he felt at that time kind of stuck in his life. Wasn't sure what he wanted to do. And so the timing of it worked out really well. And I really liked him, which is kind of, you know, silly, right, in so many ways because travel romances never really work out. Our plan was just to get one way tickets and buy our return flights later. And as we were having this conversation, we really were clear about how we were going as friends, where we would separate, do our own thing and then come back together. And I felt exactly how I wanted it to be, like still independent, still with somebody. So I still had a travel companion. But it was exciting because for me, it was like, here's my first time in Southeast Asia, which felt like a kind of homecoming. But I'm also going to do it with somebody who is also Asian, who has actually been to Southeast Asia in the past, but would be there with me, right. And I really want to share this experience with somebody.
He and I were progressively becoming better and better friends as the trip was coming closer. I think for me, in terms of at least people that I know and myself included, that, you know, queer relationships are really fluid and they can sort of navigate and move from being platonic to being sexual to being romantic to being platonic again. And I think that the ways that we were communicating, I have progressively become more and more physically and sexually attracted to him again and romantically attracted to him. Because when I was living in Tucson, there was this other person I was dating and things with him didn't really work out.
And I wanted to be fair. And so I remember at one point revealing to him that my feelings for him, romantic feelings had sort of resurged. So after I told him he went silent for a week before he told me that like this took him by surprise. He said that he doesn't know what to do with my feelings. It was still like four or five months before we were supposed to leave on this trip anyway. So I was like you know, this is great timing that I brought it up. But let's just give this person some breathing room. We didn't talk for a month. I finally decided two months before we were supposed to leave on our trip.
Again, I hadn't heard from him at all and I decided to reach out and I said, you know, hey, hope you're doing well, I just want to know if we could check in about Southeast Asia. And he responded with, hello, you know, it's nice to hear from you. Hope you're doing well and said general things like how he's doing. I hope you're okay. And he said, you know, honestly, I thought because of how our last conversation went, I thought that you had made your own plans. So I made my own plans as well. Because of how our last conversation didn't go so well. And I said to him, our last conversation didn't go so well, but I also- this is the reason why I want to check in right now, because I want to sort of track where we're at. I don't I don't know what is going to happen. So I wanted to, like, talk to you first before making any sort of decisions. And I guess for him, he didn't need to, like, have a conversation with me to sort of make that decision. He just decided to make it on his own. So he had sort of planned his own trip already through Southeast Asia.
Because we had already bought our tickets, we were still going to land in Bangkok together. So he said that at least for the first week before he splits off to his part of his trip, you know, that we can meet up and hang out there. And so that was sort of the compromise that we came to. And as time got closer to our trip the conversation was very light and very flirty and and very friendly again, and I told myself this time not to sort of play into it, right.
[sounds of airplane]
And we end up meeting at the Bangkok airport after a long flight, exhausted. I actually land first. And he comes- his flight comes in two or three hours later. And so I'm just waiting for him because that was sort of the plan. It was nerve wracking because at some, even though our trip was not going to be the way that we had originally planned, I still was going to see this person. And I had to really confront the fact that, like, I'd still, despite everything, had some kind of attraction or feelings towards him and was probably reading into it too much. But, you know, feelings are feelings, right? And sometimes you have to just deal with them until they dissipate. I remember looking up and seeing this person with salt and pepper hair, black jeans, but this time a bright green sweater on. It was him. It was really friendly and we hugged. And and in that just brief moment, it felt like anything was possible. Again.
We ended up going back to the apartment that I was subletting to drop off my things and to hang out for a little bit and grab some food, relax, catch up a little bit. I just remember feeling like overwhelmed with like a kind of like attraction towards him, you know, I remember, like walking in to the apartment and for better or worse, the dangerous part was like, you know, hoping that like maybe like some intense, like, romantic thing would happen and we would make out. And, you know, at one point we were both really tired. So we, like we’re on my bed and both, you know, just resting. I just remember like wanting, hoping, thinking, thinking again about like the time he was in my bed in Berlin. We were making out. He pulled down his pants and showed me his cock, giving him head, being inside of him. And I remember coming together and I remember the moment that he was saying, you know, like, it feels so good. And now it's like him in bed, his back turned toward me. Nothing happened. It was like very platonic, very, you know, it was like two siblings in bed. That's what it felt like. That was the vibe, on his part.
We get up to go to, you know, to a restaurant to grab some food to eat. We were sitting across from each other. No jokes, no sort of innuendos about, like, sexual desires. It was a thai meal and utterly quiet. He was- I was facing the kitchen. He was facing the window. And he he didn't really ever look at me. We got coffee, we walked back to the sublet and he called the taxi. And he talks about how he needs to cut his hair. And I had my clippers with me because I would be cutting my own hair. So I offered to cut his hair and I saw in his face that he was very tempted or very quick to take me up on that offer. And I was excited about it because even if it was a nonsexual act there's something very intimate about cutting someone's hair and running your fingers through their scalp. I can see that, so close, so close to saying yes, but then ended up not doing it and took a taxi and left.
[sound of woman singing in Bangkok]
I was fearful and I felt this, I was like this there's going to be this impending loneliness it's just going to just attack me at some point. And I remember telling myself, like, it's going to be OK. You have to learn how to deal with when it comes up. And that feeling never came up. I had made a plan to travel to five different countries, and I really wanted to go to just the brown countries, Thailand first, then headed over to Malaysia. I went to Indonesia, Cambodia, and then spent my last month in Vietnam. And I think that, you know, in this space where in theory, I should feel the most alone, because here these two romances that didn't work out and now I'm traveling this country by myself. But I was never lonely, you know, and I was, like, really powerful. Panama and Berlin were really beautiful trips because they were trips in which I was testing a part of who I was, right. I was trying to figure out who the person I wanted to become and to the person that I thought I was. Southeast Asia felt like here all these things that I felt about myself. And I want to share this this moment with somebody else who understands what it's like to have to be in this country or in the space in which you get to for the first time, for me specifically, be ubiquitous.
You know, while I was there, being on the dating apps as well and just matching and talking to tons of people, and I remember thinking to myself, this is what it must feel like to be a white person in the U.S. You can just log on, have an expectation that you'll be able to meet some people and talk to some people. It doesn't have to go anywhere. But you know that when you log on, you'll have options available for you. People will be messaging you. People will be matching with you. And to experience. I think, a kind of ease. Being in Vietnam was really beautiful because I was able to walk down the street and not have anybody look at me because I was just there. I was just anotherVietnamese face in the crowd. And what was even more exciting is that people did look at me. For the most part, it was maybe because they thought I was attractive or because they saw something about me that, you know, seemed kind of interesting. [distant drums and singing]
And I think that part of my trip through Southeast Asia, the thing that I realized was that the way that I live my life and learning how to make peace with being alone is that I will always be perceived as a foreigner wherever I go. And I and I haven't felt that kind of like intense loneliness I felt in Berlin, that I felt for a lot of my life. Honestly since then, it feels like it's transformed in some way.
Kaitlin:
This episode was produced by Nicole Kelly in collaboration with Vinh Paul Ha. The song you're hearing right now is by L.A. based ghost pop band, Bitter Party.
Vinh;Paul:
Yeah, okay. Yeah. So self-love is fucking hard. You know what self loves is? It's a work in progress. It's every day.
Kaitlin:
The heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi, Chiquita Pascqual and me, Kaitlin Prest. It is a production of Mermaid Palace and is distributed by Radiotopia. The Heart is now more than 10 years old, queer and feminist institution that once in the long past went by the name of audio smut.
If you like this show, tell your friends. Leave us a review. Tweet about it, please. There are lots of people out there who would love to listen to the show who don't know about it yet. You can follow The Heart radio @theHeartRadio on Instagram. You can follow Mermaid Palace and check out our other bad ass shows @MermaidPalaceArt. And you can follow me, @KaitlinPrest. The Heart is a proud member of Radiotopia.
[contemporary band plays, upbeat but melancholic singing]
