Ế // Unsold Zine

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Acknowledgement Ế is an offspring of More Than Love on the Horizon (MTL), a multimedia project by Vietnamese‐American artist Genevieve Erin O’Brien that seeks to explore new approaches to LGBTQ visibility. MTL is part of the American Arts Incubator Project. Ế is supported by Nhà Sàn Collective, ZERO1, and the US Embassy in Vietnam. Many thanks to Nguyễn Quốc Thành, Genevieve Erin O’Brien, and Đinh Thị Nhung for their respective contributions.

The QT3.14 Team Ian Quee Quyên Quyên

Editor, designer, artist, and writer Editor, display planner, artist, and writer

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Hello, We are QT3.14 (“cutie-pie”), and this is Ế // Unsold, an art and literary zine.

Is an ‘unsold’ zine unsellable or not for sale?

Does being ‘ế’ mean ‘not good enough marriage material’ or ‘rolling our eyes at marriage’?

Realizing information is often commercialized and gender norms quietly dictate our behavior, we had the idea of making a free zine.

Free as in it does not cost you, our readers, a dime.

Free as in there is no imposed narrative across our stories, sketches, comics, dreams and low-resolution photographs.

Free as in we frolic outside the gender binary.

Free as in we create our own playground, and there are no parental editors telling us how to live.

We are self-indulgent kids, but is that such a sin? To satisfy our pleasure and sustain the play mindset of a child?

If you have ever felt lost in a poem, painting, some fleeting image in your own head in your own home

come play with us

draw, write, do nothing imagine

make a world Note on translation: some pieces in issue 0.9 were translated and some were not, due to our own inconsistencies. And whims. And time limits (we conceptualized and executed this zine monster in 10 days.)

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Table of Contents 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 9

Bordello Acquired Taste Lecture Notes Spring in Paris Noon Walk Đi Trưa Vigilance Selfie, Serious Matter (Selfie, Chuyện Nghiêm Túc)

11 13 14 15 17 19 21 22 23

Bildung (Trưởng Thành) Nudged on (by My Id) Lost Pixels Một Pietà Của Riêng Áp Phích #1 (Affiche #1) FLOTUS Lồn Khít On Le Mépris (1963) Inaudible Voices

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ME, BUCHAREST, JUNE 2015

Bordello Ian Quee 1

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Acquired Taste Ian Quee

David texts Kim every morning with a heart emoji. She never replies, but David tries to be fine with this.

It’s only been 3 months, and maybe it’s still too early to tell what this is yet. On this “anniversary”, Kim insists that they eat out with her best friend Tammy. Once there, Kim springs to life and embraces Tammy, pecks on her plump cheeks, and mouths “meine Liebe Tammy”. They giggled; souvenir from a semester together in Hanover.

Tammy eats, and chatters, and chortles, and jokes that Kim has been dating the same type of guy since college.

David laughed aloud, then asked Tammy, “What kind of guy? No really, what kind? What the fuck did you mean by that? There’s a type now? Tell me RIGHT FUCKING NOW!”

David walks Kim back to her complex that night.

He has to watch her nape for 30 silent minutes straight.

Kim knows what her beau is thinking. Her twenty-orso exes have told her the same tale already, always after fights: David is a 7-year-old again, stumbling through his lines on that elementary school play. His mother walks out of the auditorium when David had started his musical bit. He watches her nape fade into the fire exit. She waits for him in the lot, half a ciggy in hand, but says not a word during the drive home.

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David wouldn’t talk to Kim for another 2 days.

Waking up without a text message, she steps out in her balcony and breathes in the dewy morning air. On the 3rd day, Kim finds herself sobbing in the middle of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when it is revealed that Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey had a tragic history. Suddenly, Kim receives a call from Tammy. The two share apologies and words of support. Towards the end, they call each other “Schatzi”, and Kim clutches her phone in tender silence, listening to her own heartbeat going erratic before Tammy bursts into fits of laughter. Kim tries to match the enthusiasm to no avail. Hanging up, Kim screams. She thinks to herself, “It’s happening again.” Kim composes 5 different drafts of a text to David, each one with fewer swear words than the last. She prays he doesn’t take this as a chance to bring up his sob-story of a childhood again. His and at least twenty others’.

But right now, crying at 2AM on a weekday once again, Kim is more than willing to take that risk. “Send”.

David is in his underwear, scrolling through Return of Kings and debates whether or not to click on the article, “How to Defeat the Mother Hen Cockblocker and Keep the Hot Friend”. Kim’s message pops up on his phone.

The first phrase is, “I miss bae can u cum over?” Reading it, David can’t help himself from grinning. He closes the Return of Kings tab and replies with a flurry of eggplant emojis.

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Lecture Notes

Quyên Quyên

M slips into the wide wide water, wild wonders, chance, changing seas. What to do? Unmoored freedom comes in waves back and forth, recession, a mobius path – further further. Into a large eye, glittering and wet, all open and sad and hollow negation. Dream expands in the first rain of april, no desire, horizontal and vast, all blue, no truisms, soaked hair and cold sleevelessnesses. M drifts as an old dream.

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Spring in Paris Ian Quee

I remember you in the backstage. You weren’t beautiful, so they made you play with the support cast while your peers played the main roles, the prima donnas, the Virgin Maries of their own individual immaculate tales. But I guess you didn’t mind too much, did you?

You would joke that the spotlight never flattered your sunbaked complexion anyways. You would undersell yourself because you had an underbite and a pinched nose and eyes too slanted and hair wiry like bamboo roots and a few extra comfort kilos.

But in that secluded corner behind the black curtains, you smiled and danced in my arms like I was already yours, and I was. You wore your charm openly.

That made my mind go blank. I wrapped my arms around your form, so you purred.

One time, you snuggled onto my laps and told me that you didn’t love me like you did yesterday. I placed my hand on your adorable flushed cheeks and wiped away your tear with my thumb, so slowly, almost meditative. I smeared it in a circle, playing with the texture and consistency. Your warm breath spiced with a hint of salt rattled my insides. We held each other, your face in my chest, drenching it with each teary hiccup.

It took you a month to part way for good. I went on to date a Swedish chick. She was taller and a better kisser. She loved me more, also. We didn’t last either. On a good day, I still think back to fooling around with you behind that drama production’s curtains. Other than that, you rarely cross my mind.

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Noon Walk

QuyĂŞn QuyĂŞn

the cafe operates normally because it is tuesday and things go normally on a tuesday no one spots the bird falling the carp stranded mute drama streams of pedestrians, Guston soles eyes on the excavator the shadow of tall things

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Đi Trưa

Quyên Quyên

quán cà phê hoạt động bình thường bởi vì hôm nay là thứ ba và các thứ hoạt động bình thường vào thứ ba không ai thấy con chim đang rơi con cá chép mắc cạn kịch tính câm dòng người đi bộ, các gót chân Guston mắt dán vào xe cẩu tự hành bóng đen của những thứ cao

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Vigilance

Ian Quee

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Quyên Quyên Selfie, Serious Matter (Selfie, Chuyện Nghiêm Túc) Digital 2016 Old selfies fill me with nausea and laughter.

Các bức selfie cũ làm mình buồn nôn và buồn cười.

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Quyên Quyên Bildung (Trưởng Thành) Digital 2016

Seeing and taking a picture of this scene, I thought of how we treat each other. Often in the name of tradition and education, we kill and devour.

Cruelty does not require a machete and boiling water. Sometimes it comes in the form of speech. Bursts of fear and hate, inscribed in a facebook comment or hurled on the streets. Sometimes it comes in the form of speechlessness. (Noiseless silencing.)

This headless pig is my spirit animal. Make no mistakes, I also identify with the butcher at times. Like many, I am not clean.

Thấy và chụp lại cảnh này, q nghĩ đến cách chúng ta đối xử với nhau. Hay nhân danh truyền thống và giáo dục, con người giết và ăn thịt nhau.

Tàn nhẫn không nhất thiết phải là dao và nước sôi. Đôi khi nó là lời nói. Những nỗi sợ hãi và căm ghét, ghi trong ô comment facebook hay văng ở ngoài phố. Đôi khi nó chẳng là lời nào. (Chặn họng trong im lặng.)

Con lợn mất đầu là “spirit animal” của q. Đừng nhầm, nhiều khi q cũng giống người giết thịt. Như nhiều người, mình không vô tội.

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Nudged on (by My Id) Ian Quee

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Lost Pixels Nguyễn Quốc Thành

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Ian Quee Một Pietà Của Riêng Digital 2016

I believe in the divine, but not scripture. I believe there are powers that hide in plain sight that, by sheer scale, reduces everything we ever hold dear back to sniveling nothings, rodents in the hands of an unknowable morality. However, these powers are not of a godly birth, but rather artificially assigned by people to people, in this eternal dance to cheat death through procreation. I believe in lust, lusting, and the dissolution of ourselves in lust.

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Quyên Quyên Áp Phích 1 (Affiche #1) 39 x 27cm, marker on paper, photographed with a lamp behind the face, tweaked with photoshop 2016 “not all women have pussies, [and] every single one can define ourselves beyond the genitalia we are born with” – Favianna Rodriguez “không phải phụ nữ nào cũng có pussies, [và] bất cứ ai cũng có thể định nghĩa bản thân vượt khỏi giới hạn của cơ quan sinh dục mà mình có từ lúc sinh ra” – Favianna Rodriguez

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Ian Quee FLOTUS Digital 2016

I am a sucker for confident women. Their “flaws” their own strength. They command absolute devotion and worship. What of confident men? I’m not thinking about that. Something becomes different if it’s done with masculine intentionality. Something becomes a turn-off.

Well, what if a woman is confident in a macho way? Can one really tease out pure confidence from machismo?

Again, I’m not thinking about that. Hard to think with my oxygen supply short, with her stiletto digging into my throat. Throttle your pony, mistress. Harder.

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“Hùng” Lồn Khít Digital 2016

“...Mình ước có một ngày, chỉ một ngày thôi, mình cúi đầu nhìn xuống và thấy cả một khe thung dưới đó, với một hạt đào bé nhỏ ngước lên. Không biết mình sẽ cảm thấy thế nào? Nhưng chắc mình sẽ thấy hồi hộp lắm.”

* Submission from Bàn Lộn-Vagina Talks, an art community project in which everyone is invited to express creatively their definition, feeling, and experience of vagina or their conversations with vagina.

Bài gửi từ Bàn Lộn-Vagina Talks, một dự án mời mọi người vẽ hoặc sáng tạo các cách biểu đạt khác nhau để bày tỏ định nghĩa, cảm xúc, suy nghĩ, trải nghiệm, hay những cuộc nói chuyện với cơ thể.

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On Le Mépris (1963)

Ian Quee

A woman cheats on her man, is that truly so bad?

In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece, Contempt (Le Mépris), we witness a couple’s progressive estrangement as an alpha male enters the picture. I would argue, that the husband “losing” his wife isn’t really a bad thing.

To me, Contempt is a burning indictment of the notion that one human can possess another. So Paul losing Camille to an “alpha male” isn’t reflective of his failing as a male, but is rather a rejection of the traditional view that women are trophy and possession. Paul’s value is not lessen by Camille leaving, but is kept intact by the film’s internal logic, which sets up artistry and integrity as the central value. In this world, the philistine is the odd one out, no matter how confident he is in his own anti-intellectualism. “I have a theory about the Odyssey. Penelope has been unfaithful.” So as the thief sees criminals every corner he turns, Prokosch sees accomplices in everything.

Paul isn’t passive; he eschews the neanderthal-esque trappings of a patriarchy.

Though her story ends tragically, it is a mistake to stick to the narrative that poor, vulnerable Camille is taken advantage of. Her actions and decisions are very precisely planned, and she is sharply aware of the consequences. In short, even if one does not agree with her, one must concede that Camille is an entity with distinct agency. Paul, being the modern man that he is, understands this, and refuses to engage in any form of mate-guarding.

He accepts that things end, which is part of the beauty.

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Inaudible Voices

Quyên Quyên

Paul knocks on the bronze female torso three times, twice on her breasts and once on her pubis. He considers the echoes and coolly concludes she sounds different in different places.

The bronze statue is not the only female site of violence in Contempt. Camille gets slapped in the face for being disrespectful to her intellectual husband, and it is noted that the physical abuse has occurred several times. Later, at the peak of Paul’s frustration with Camille’s cold shoulder, he grabs her by the neck and cries, “Tell me or I’ll hurt you.” Throughout the film, besides a few tantrums and scowls, Camille remains broody and quiet. Susan Felleman notices the issue of Camille’s lack of speech or her lack of sincere speech, and aptly turns to Sarah Kofman’s Freudian analysis for clues.

“Because woman does not have the right to speak, she stops being capable or desirous of speaking; she ‘keeps’ everything to herself, and creates an excess of mystery and obscurity […] Woman lacks sincerity: she dissimulates, transforms each word into an enigma, an indecipherable riddle.”1

Felleman, Susan. “Chapter 4: Survivors of the Shipwreck of Modernity.” Art in the Cinematic Imagination.

Austin: U of Texas, 2006. Print.

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We keep wondering why Camille cannot simply articulate her source of contempt for Paul. But she refuses to be clear, probably because she hardly knows what articulation or clarity looks like. “Why don’t you say anything,” Paul interrogates only when things get sour, at which point Camille has already given up on self-explanation. “I don’t have anything to say,” she curtly responses. In her world, no one truly cares about her opinion. Instead men stereotype her as the “very beautiful wife,” the “typist,” the simple blonde woman trope, or the one who desires the expensive apartment. Even when she tries to read and grasp the sphere of her male superiors, she is stuck between the ostentatious and erotic Roman art book that belongs to the crude American producer-dictator and the more slender but much denser book on Lang’s films. She flips through the former in Prokosch’s garden and glances at the latter for several seconds in her bathtub. Nothing about the rich or intellectual man excites her. Camille is fed up.

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Even Francesca, the supposedly brainier female, does not wind up in a much better place. She is more loquacious but what comes out of her mouth is not her words but the translation of the male wisdom frequently released among Paul, Prokosch and Lang. Francesca is a beautiful polygot but her role in the film is predominantly extra. She is Prokosch’s sidekick, a combination of assistant, mistress and slave. She physically bends her body for Prokosch to scribble on her back and quietly sobs after an unshown incident at his house. Camille incredulously points out to Paul that Prokosch literally kicks Francesca.

Not to mention the nonchalant way Paul makes a pass at her when she is vulnerable and in tears. Highly intelligent and hard-working, but after all, she is merely a “woman” who quits crying and feels better after a clever man like Paul tells her a funny Ramakrishna story. And playfully pats her butt.

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Godard shows a lot women’s suffering but the issue most talked about in the film is the plight of man.

Paul invokes Dante, “Notre joie metamorphose vite en pleur jusqu’à la mer se renferme sur nous, “/”Our joy quickly changes into tears which mount till the sea closes in upon us.” Lang quotes B.B. (Bertolt Brecht, not Brigitte Bardot although that would have been interesting): “Chaque matin pour gagner mon pain, je vais au marché des mensonges”/“Every morning I go to earn my daily bread, I go to the market of lies.” The intellectual men seem to understand very well their situation and resignation, and they discuss it endlessly. What the women think about their stifled situation remains a mystery. The film closes with the open sea, a hint at Ulysses reaching Ithaca after his long stormy voyage, and the male director’s voice commanding, “Silence.”

Note: Revision Between the reviews often published for some external reason, and the prose poetry sitting in a dark room somewhere on my laptop, I wonder where my authentic voice is wiggling. To search for a space where my voice feels entirely mine. Personal and comforting. Unless authenticity is an illusion.

Doubt After putting the period at the final sentence of the review, I was assailed with old doubts. Is this good writing or just complete ramble? Also how does this fit a supposedly queer zine? How quyer is quyer? These questions tired me out, so I ended up pulling a Camille, went out and read in the sun instead.

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Ian Quee grew up in Huế, where the

waters smell of perfume and the girls are born graceful. He loves making zines, having worked with Vănguard, Hanoi Panic, and Tuyền từ Quêêr, as well as on his own original booklets. These days, Ian is an acolyte of the arts, scholar of psychology, enthusiast of dank memes. He helps with editing and designing Ế. Ian also writes and does art for QT3.14.

Twitter @HienADay

Quyen Nguyen is adrift. Born and raised in Hanoi, she is currently studying comparative literature and art history at Stanford University. Her interests include moldy books, post-war art and poetry, translation, water and all things effervescent.

She is ½ of the zine duo QT3.14. Ế is their first collaboration.

IG: instagram.com/ qqquyennn

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Contributor Credits Original photo (front cover) by Genevieve Erin O’Brien Lost Pixels (page 14) by Nguyễn Quốc Thành Inaudible Voices screenshots (pages 24 and 25) from Contempt (1963) Lồn Khít (page 21) courtesy of Đinh Thị Nhung, anonymous author, only goes by “Hùng”.

Colophon Typefaces used are Candara by Gary Munch, Impact by Geoffrey Lee, and Minion Pro by Robert Slimbach. Layout done in Adobe Indesign CS6. Art made digitally with a (sadly discontinued) Wacom Bamboo, in Photoshop CS6 and MyPaint. Art also done traditionally with ink and markers on paper. Most photos taken with an iPhone, some with a DSLR camera, others are screengrabs. Partly written and designed in Hue, but mostly Hanoi. Printed in Hanoi, April of 2016, at a nondescript shop, on nondescript paper. Available online at ISSUU.com. Made possible through oh, so many emails.

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