“Love is just a little bit of death in the heart/For how often can one love in certainty that love will be returned?” - Xuân Diệu
In Vietnam, Xuân Diệu is considered a highly celebrated poet, whose innovative writing style and collective body of work left an indelible mark on the country’s literary landscape. In particular, Xuân Diệu’s influence in Vietnam reigns over the realm of romantic poetry, to the extent that he is still dubbed there “the King of Love Poetry”. Though he spent decades composing countless works about intimacy, passion and longing, Xuân Diệu kept much of his writing gender-neutral and lived a highly secretive personal life, concealing his sexuality and relationships with men for the entirety of his career.
Xuân Diệu was born Ngô Xuân Diệu on February 2, 1916, in what was at the time French Indochina and is present-day Vietnam. More specifically, he was born in his mother's hometown of Gò Bồi in Phước Hòa Commune, Tuy Phước District, Bình Định Province, but according to Vietnamese tradition, only the hometown of one’s father can be counted as the hometown of a child. As a result, Diệu’s official hometown is often listed as Trảo Nha in Can Lộc District, Hà Tĩnh Province, the village of his father. In actuality, he lived in the Tuy Phước District until he was eleven years old, when he traveled southward to continue his studies in the coastal city of Quy Nhơn.
In 1936, Xuân Diệu enrolled in the Lycée Khải Định in Huế, where he received his baccalauréat a year later. While there, he met the young poet Huy Cận, who would influence his life greatly, becoming his lifelong friend and for a time, his lover. Both men left for Hanoi and in 1938 started living there together at 40 Hàng Than Street, where they would remain for two years. While in Hanoi, Xuân Diệu began studying law and joined the left-wing Self-Reliant Literary Union (Tự Lực văn đoàn), a group founded by Nhất Linh that was comprised primarily of young Vietnamese writers who were educated under the colonial education system and were thus well-versed in both Vietnamese and Western literature. By publishing popular, entertaining romance novels alongside satirical works criticizing contemporary society and French leadership, the Union established itself as a powerful platform for Vietnamese intellectuals and helped many creatives make a name for themselves. Xuân Diệu himself was introduced to the public by another group member and fellow poet named Thế Lữ, who presented Xuân Diệu as an up and coming “wunderkind” with “a radiant and ardent soul living in gentle yet sensual, passionate yet impulsive verses.”
In September 1940, when Japan invaded French Indochina, many members of the literary group began diverting their attention and creative outputs entirely towards politics. By the end of the year, Xuân Diệu himself departed Hanoi, leaving the Union and Huy Cận behind to go work as an official in the city, Mỹ Tho. Shortly thereafter, many of the remaining members of the group in Hanoi were arrested by the French and imprisoned in the remote Sơn La Prison, marking the official demise of the Self-Reliant Literary Union. As a result, when Xuân Diệu returned to Hanoi in 1942, he found that most of the writers with whom he once fraternized had either disappeared, drifted apart, or joined the newly formed Việt Minh independence movement, an anti-colonial resistance led by the Vietnamese communist revolutionary, Hồ Chí Minh.
For the next two years, Xuân Diệu attempted to pursue a full-time writing career, before finally conceding to join the revolutionaries in Việt Bắc (Northern Vietnam) in 1944. While there, Xuân Diệu opted to write in support of the independence movement rather than engage in combat on the front lines. In his 1992 memoir, entitled Cát bụi chân ai, writer Tô Hoài recalled that it was during this time in Việt Bắc when Xuân Diệu engaged in several same-sex encounters with his fellow comrades, including with Tô Hoài himself. Hoài reminisced: “Tenderly, fondly, Xuân Diệu held on to my wrist, caressing it up and down. Our eyes locked in affection…Xuân Diệu loved me.”
According to Hoài, several seemingly heterosexual men engaged in sexual activity with Xuân Diệu during his service with the revolutionary forces, but because he was the only one perceived as homosexual, Xuân Diệu was the sole individual punished. Hoài recalls one night in particular when Xuân Diệu was reprimanded by military commanders:
"Xuân Diệu just sat and cried. Who knows whether…a bunch of other guys had slept with Xuân Diệu or not; naturally, nobody admitted it. I was also silent as a clam…Nobody specifically mentioned these episodes [of homosexual love], but everybody raised their voices, raised their voices severely, harshly criticizing his ‘bourgeois thinking, his evil bourgeois thinking, which needed to be fixed.’ Xuân Diệu sobbed and said, ‘it's my homosexuality [tình trai]...my homosexuality,’ choking on his words with tears flowing, but not promising to fix anything at all.”
In 1954, after Hồ Chí Minh’s national independence coalition gained victory, a perhaps shaken Xuân Diệu returned to Hanoi and to doing what he loved, publishing works both as a poet and as a journalist. Two years later, possibly in an attempt to thwart rumors of his homosexuality, he married 27-year-old director Bạch Diệp, one of North Vietnam's first prominent female filmmakers. Their relationship, however, was never consummated and the pair ultimately divorced after just a couple of years. Bạch Diệp went on to remarry another man, while Xuân Diệu moved alone into an apartment right above the house of his former lover Huy Cận, who, perhaps in his own attempt to conceal his sexuality, had gotten married to Xuân Diệu's younger sister, Ngô Xuân Như. The complex relationship dynamics that arose from this setup certainly must have been hard on Xuân Diệu, who never remarried or took on another long-term partner.
From 1955 to 1958, Xuân Diệu then became embroiled in the notorious Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair, a cultural-political movement in North Vietnam that focused on fighting for freedom of speech, creativity and human rights. After the First Indochina War had ended in 1954, several reforms enacted by the new administration in power led to disastrous outcomes, and as a result, numerous dissenting voices arose now demanding the freedom to criticize the recent wrongdoings. Dissenters included the likes of Vietnamese poets Lê Đạt, Trần Dần and Hoàng Cầm, who forged a movement that called for a major government overhaul, causing a rift between themselves and writers who were now pro-government. Xuân Diệu, alongside Huy Cận and several others, decided at this juncture to take the pro-government stance, and in May 1958 Xuân Diệu published a scathing essay accusing Lê Đạt, Hoàng Cầm and Trần Dần of "capitalistic individualism," and of "attempting to poison our atmosphere of prose and poetry”.
Leading up to the Vietnam War, Xuân Diệu continued to write political pieces, particularly in support of the communist efforts against the United States and Southern Vietnamese forces. He also leaned heavily into other writing-related projects, translating the works of a variety of foreign-language writers, for example, including the likes of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, and Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Xuân Diệu also published his first works of literary analysis throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which he explored the cultural significance of classic Vietnamese poets like Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương.
In fact, throughout his lifetime, Xuân Diệu was an incredibly prolific writer, producing over 450 poems, as well as short stories, notes and essays, though he didn’t necessarily publish much of his work when he was alive. He released two major poetry collections, Thơ thơ in 1938 and Gửi hương cho gió in 1945, while his only published short story collection entitled Phấn thông vàng came out in 1939. According to literary critics, Xuân Diệu’s writing is considered the pinnacle of French-influenced Vietnamese poetry, heavily impacted by the work of French poet Charles Baudelaire, while aspects of his poetry have often been compared to the works of French authors such as Anna de Noailles and André Gide. Xuân Diệu’s writing style, meanwhile, draws much inspiration from Romanticism and frequently makes use of symbolic imagery and multiple poetic devices. Frequent themes and subjects in Xuân Diệu’s writings include longing, loneliness and existential dread, while the speakers in his poems tend to express pessimistic views towards love as well as a fear of disappointment.
It is often these exact themes that those studying Xuân Diệu’s work cite as sources for the poet’s concealed sexuality, since homosexuality at the time was deemed a deviant illness and was looked down upon by much of Vietnamese society. Though many of Xuân Diệu’s poems are centered around love and romance, they are usually gender non-specific. According to Trần Văn Toàn, however, an Associate Professor of Modern Vietnamese Literature at the Hanoi National University of Education, there is ample evidence of same-sex romance in Xuân Diệu’s poems. Trần Văn Toàn explains: “For example, in the poem Với bàn tay ấy (With That Hand), which was dedicated to Huy Cận, the couplet ‘with your hand holding mine / the pain of my days subsides’ has the sentiments of a lover’s sweet nothings. An intimate atmosphere permeates the poem.”
Another notable poem of Xuân Diệu’s that is often cited as proof of his homosexuality is Tình trai (Male Love), a poem written in praise of the passionate relationship between the French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. In it, Xuân Diệu writes: “I remember Rimbaud with Verlaine/Two male poets, dizzy from drink/Drunk with strange poems, in love with friendship/Contemptuous of worn out forms, abandoning familiar ways/With parallel steps they tread their journey home/Two souls with flowery fragrance fresh/They go—weak hand in strong/Sharing love songs in breezy mists/They speak nothing of yesterday or tomorrow/Forget painted lips and colorful shirts/Ignore concerns over heaven and hell!/No negotiation possible, they love each other.”
While there are many elements in Xuân Diệu’s poetry and writings that allude to his sexuality, Xuân Diệu himself lived an otherwise secretive life, and most of the information garnered regarding his personal matters and relations comes from his acquaintances and confidants. While he was alive, Xuân Diệu certainly–albeit painfully–grappled with his ‘condition’, but perhaps never came to a resolution, considering that homosexuals in Vietnam during his time were extremely marginalized and often demonized and punished. Phạm Khánh Bình, the co-founder of Hà Nội Queer, a community organization working to empower the LGBTQ community in Vietnam, elucidates what it would have been like for a homosexual in Vietnam during Xuân Diệu’s time: “Before, the word ‘same sex’ didn’t exist, they [homosexual people] were referred to as ái nam, ái nữ [lit: hermaphrodite]. And it’s in my understanding that people view it as something unscrupulous, deviant, debauched, or even perverted. So there’s no doubt that LGBT people back then would feel suffocated, especially when your own identity is seen as something sick, something sinful.”
Most certainly, one of the most impactful same-sex relationships that Xuân Diệu experienced in his lifetime was the brief period during which he resided with fellow poet Huy Cận, from 1938 to 1940. While the details of the nature of their relationship have never been outright confirmed, most Vietnamese and Western sources depict it as both an intimate friendship as well as a romantic partnership. Huy Cận in fact wrote about his time living with Xuân Diệu in his poem Ngủ chung (Sleeping Together), from his debut collection Lửa thiêng (Sacred Fire, 1940), which seems to corroborate that the pair were likely lovers. Another potential love interest that played an important role in Xuân Diệu’s life was the poet Hoàng Cát, to whom he referred by the endearing term "em" (the common second-person pronoun for women in a heterosexual relationship) in a farewell poem he wrote when Hoàng Cát left for the front lines in 1965. Hoàng Cát was in fact much younger than Xuân Diệu, and in a 2013 interview, mentioned that he was aware of Xuân Diệu's affections towards him but could not reciprocate them, for he "did not love Xuân Diệu in the way that men and women love one another." Such anecdotes, revealed only after Xuân Diệu’s passing, help shine a light on his romantic poetry, revealing that perhaps much of Xuân Diệu’s writing on longing and disappointment were coming straight from his own heartfelt experiences and missed connections.
During the last two decades of his life, Xuân Diệu became an advocate for younger writers. In 1961, he wrote the book, Conversation With Young Poets, in which he doles out advice to the youth as both an experienced writer as well as an enthusiast hoping to ensure that Vietnamese poetry would flourish well into the future. One anecdote highlighting this period in Xuân Diệu’s life comes from Trần Đăng Khoa, who recalled that when he was ten years old he started to garner attention for his skillful poetry, and Xuân Diệu himself personally went to meet him, offering to proofread his first poetry collection. Xuân Diệu continued to mentor Trần Đăng Khoa as the boy grew up, helping to shape his writing style and technique. By the time Trần Đăng Khoa had become an adult, he returned the favor in a way by visiting the aging Xuân Diệu at his apartment in Hanoi.
On December 18, 1985, Xuân Diệu died at his home from a sudden heart attack at the age of 69. At the time of his passing, Xuân Diệu’s lifelong friend and former partner Huy Cận was visiting Senegal and demanded that the funeral be postponed until he could return to Vietnam. To his dismay, the funeral occurred without him, but was attended by many prestigious Vietnamese artists at the time, including Xuân Diệu’s ex-wife, Bạch Diệp. Xuân Diệu’s body was ultimately laid to rest in the Mai Dịch Cemetery, located on the outskirts of Hanoi.
As is often the case, after his untimely passing, Xuân Diệu's unique literary voice began to receive more accolades and the considerable impact he left on modern Vietnamese literature became all the more appreciated. In 1996, for example, Xuân Diệu was posthumously awarded the Hồ Chí Minh Prize, an honorary award given by the government of Vietnam in recognition of cultural or scientific achievement. In 2016, the country held a massive ceremony to celebrate what would have been Xuân Diệu's 100th birthday, an event that was marked by the recital of one of Xuân Diệu's most famous poems, Vội vàng (In Haste). Meanwhile, a memorial hall dedicated to Xuân Diệu was erected in his home village, and to date, numerous roads and streets throughout Vietnam also bear his name.
One of the more complex legacies of Xuân Diệu lies in the fact that several of his poems, including Đây mùa thu tới (Here Comes Autumn) and Vội vàng (In Haste), are regularly included in official literature curriculums taught throughout Vietnamese high schools. These public institutions, though teaching romantic poems by a gay author, instead impose a “standardized” viewpoint on the students, and Xuân Diệu’s love poems are consequently taught en masse exclusively through the lens of male-female heterosexuality. In fact, many of Xuân Diệu’s romantic poems are cherished to this day by all kinds of people across Vietnam, and he is often dubbed “the Vietnamese King of Love Poetry”, regardless of whether those people acknowledge his work as being potentially written about men. This goes to show that perhaps, Xuân Diệu’s powerful poetry transcends sexuality, and his work’s deep emotional vulnerability resonates with all readers, beautifully depicting the complexities of human relationships and the universal yearning for love and connection. Still, Xuân Diệu's quiet ability to explore his own sexuality vis-à-vis his writing and furtively scatter themes of same-sex love and desire throughout his poetry was a groundbreaking feat during the conservative era in which he lived, and for that–in addition to his literary brilliance and the rich legacy he left behind–he is worthy of our love.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Jamieson, Neil. “Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam.” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 1992, pp. 71–134. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40860398. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40860398
McHale, Shawn. “Vietnamese Marxism, Dissent, and the Politics of Postcolonial Memory: Tran Duc Thao, 1946-1993.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 61, no. 1, 2002, pp. 7–31. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700187. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2700187
Pham, Linh. “In Xuân Diệu's Tender Poetry, a Reminder to Love Honestly and Courageously.” Saigoneer, 2023, June 22. https://saigoneer.com/trich-or-triet/25618-in-xu%C3%A2n-di%E1%BB%87u-s-tender-poetry,-a-reminder-to-love-honestly-and-courageously
Riley, Grant J. “The Names Behind The Hanoi Streets: Xuan Dieu.” Chao Hanoi, 2020, March 25. https://chaohanoi.com/2020/03/25/the-names-behind-the-hanoi-streets-xuan-dieu/
Rogers, Destiny. “On This Day December 18: Xuân Diệu, King Of Love Poetry.” Q News, 2021, December 18. https://qnews.com.au/on-this-day-december-18-xuan-dieu-king-of-love-poetry/
Vinh, Nguyen Quoc. “Mutant Bodies And Transpositional Movements of Homosexual Feelings in Vietnamese Literature From and About the French Colonial Period (1858-1954).” Talawas, 1990, January 1. http://www.talawas.org/talaDB/showFile.php?res=1055&rb=0503
