Parallels

‘Parallel’ opens, and ends, with the news about the suicide of Asia’s gay icon Leslie Cheung. The novel tells the story of life, love, lust, illusion, and violence revolving three characters with common jobs and common lives: G.G, H, and Kan. Violence is ubiquitous: domestic violence, school bullying, animal cruelty; violence returns to incubate another life of violence. So is solitude, permeating every line. In addition to its ambitious experiment with language use and its erosion of grammatical order, it is the first literary work written about homosexuals in Vietnam that goes beyond presenting its characters as sex workers or drag artists – people solely defined by struggle.