In 1945, Vietnamese poet Ngô Xuân Diệu penned these words in the foreword to his poem collection Gửi hương cho gió (Casting Fragrance to the Wind):
| I am a young bird from a strange mountain, | Tôi là con chim đến từ núi lạ, | |
| singing and playing with my itchy neck. | Ngứa cổ hát chơi. | |
| When the morning wind blows in the leaves, | Khi gió sớm vào reo um khóm lá, | |
| When the late moon rises, I brood over the blue sky. | Khi trăng khuya lên ủ mộng xanh trời. | |
| Perched on a branch, the bird longs for its brook— | Chim ngậm suối đậu trên cành bịn rịn, | |
| it will break into song and not know why. | Kêu tự nhiên, nào biết bởi sao ca. | |
| Its undulating tunes cannot make the fruits grow ripe; | Tiếng to nhỏ chẳng xui chùm trái chín; | |
| its carols cannot help the flowers bloom. | Khúc huy hoàng không giúp nở bông hoa. | |
| Nothing can be gained from the singing, and yet | Hát vô ích, thế mà chim vỡ cổ, | |
| the bird will burst its throat and heart to sing its best. | Héo tim xanh cho quá độ tài tình. |
Xuân Diệu’s life has been a my(th)stery , compelling us to reconstruct his life through his poetry and stories, all of which reflect his poignant longing for same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in the march of histories. The bird lamented on an ill-fated love, one which is deemed illegitimate, unacceptable, and unlivable. Although the bird’s song may have gone unheard in its own era, its echoes found resonance with a new generation of young queer artists in Southeast Asia and its diaspora. This form of affective resonance does not create a direct lineage but rather evokes an emotional connection with past queer experiences, shaping efforts to dismantle structures of domination in the present and envision different future possibilities.
Young Birds from Strange Mountains flock around the connections and divergences between gender and sexuality in the situated geopolitical histories in/of the region and how they flow through diasporic imaginings and frictions. Looking past and against the orientalist gaze and exoticizing trope, together with the contributing artists and cultural producers, we seek to reclaim the question: What does it mean for us to identify as Queer—or in other culturally specific terms like Kathoey, Bakla or Kwir—within the context of Southeast Asia, both in the past, present, and future? These multiple journeys fold in and out of an assemblage of different chapters: the communities’ archive, embodied promises, paths of faith, ancestral knowledge, and tropical technologies.
There can be no single answer; that much is clear. Rather, they/we engage with contested memories and spiritual attachments beyond conventional boundaries. They/we contort the common hetero and cisnormative narratives of the nation-state and Eurocentric knowledge through diverging paths of revisioning local precolonial mythologies, oral history-based storytelling, and reimagining archives. They/we dive into the messy realities of being and relating that are complicated by itinerant biographies, decolonial politics, and ever-shifting traumas of and desires for (not)belonging. They/we are queer of both here and now, there and then, as well as elsewhere and yet to come. Young birds from strange mountains do fly high, across and beyond boundaries of imagination.