Trái Tim Sư Tử

VietPride越南骄傲节创始人Tam的自传。

Heart of a Lion was published on July 30 2014, the result of a collaboration between activist and Fulbright scholar Nguyen Thanh Tam and writer Nguyen Ngoc Thach, both Vietnamese and born in 1987. The first draft of the autobiography was written by Tam in English, then translated by Thach to Vietnamese, licensed and published in Vietnam. Heart of a Lion is a chronological narrative of Tam’s transnational life events on the backdrop of economic and social transformation since the late 1980s. The book is unique as it portrays the Vietnamese society at the time very few writers have written about and the ways in which a young queer person from a working-class family, Tam, navigated and thrived. The story touches on many contemporary issues, including sexual orientation and gender identity, traditional gender roles and gender inequality, the intersection of individualism and collectivism in the Confucian society following the historic Doi Moi policy in Vietnam in 1986, transnational migration, upward mobility, and intersecting identities in the time of globalisation. Another feature of the book is that one of the 8 chapters is dedicated to the inception and development of the first gay Pride in Vietnam which Tam started in 2012 and has since been in the international human rights spotlight. In the first three weeks following its release, 2000 copies have been sold in Vietnam with its market mainly comprising people in their 20s or early 30s. The book is a nice blend between individual and societal elements, as C. Wright Mill said, “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both”.