grown-ups in revolt
GISELLE AU-NHIEN NGUYEN IS A LATE-STAGE REBEL.
In the past year, I’ve gotten my first tattoo – and then five more – and my first facial piercing. I’m 30 years old. You might be wondering why I’m behaving like a teen when I’m old enough to be a parent. Well, bear with me – it’s been a long journey.
Growing up in a conservative Vietnamese family, my sisters and I were taught that tattoos and piercings were the domain of Bad People, and if we ever got any, we’d be written off the family tree. Earlobes were fine – my GP dad took to my sister’s with a piercing gun when she was only a few months old, and mine when I was 10 – but anything else was a big no-no. As a kid, I thought people with metal in their faces and ink in their flesh broke into houses, punched puppies and never ate their vegetables.
My sister was the first to get a tattoo. A tiny Picasso dog on her upper thigh. When she got a bigger piece in a more visible location, she kept it from our parents for months. Eventually she showed them, and our mum gulped and left the room. For 20 minutes we could hear her prayers, and when she came back, tears glistened in her eyes. “It’s OK,” she said, even though it obviously wasn’t. I wondered if I would ever do the same, even though I had so many ideas. As a person who’s been anxious all my life, I worried about the permanence of such a decision – about whether I’d regret it – and I worried, most of all, that my parents would hate or feel ashamed of me. Many of my friends didn’t understand this fear – “You’re an adult,” they’d say incredulously – but a big part of my family’s culture is about parental respect, and I couldn’t figure out how to balance my own desires with my devotion to making my parents happy.
Finally, on a trip to Canada last year, I decided to go for it. To be honest, it wasn’t the best experience – it was rushed and turned out looking not much like what I wanted. So I did what I’ve always done: I turned to my mum. I was surprised at how gracious she was in talking to me about it, and calming that little voice in my head that I couldn’t get to shut up. Weirdly enough, she was the one who taught me to embrace the imperfection.
My mum is a Buddhist, and she tells me all the time that nothing is permanent. It might sound weird that that was a guiding part of my decision to alter my body with ink that is literally permanent, but it’s helped me learn to take more chances. The fact life is fleeting is way more uplifting to me than it sounds. It’s taken three decades for me to be comfortable enough to do things that feel radical – to make my body really my own in the face of expectations from other people – and it feels pretty awesome.
Six tattoos and one piercing on, my folks are not stoked with my decisions, but accepting my agency over my own body has been a learning curve for them, and I’m grateful for it. They’ve seen that no matter what’s on my skin or my face, I remain the same principled person, and I hope they keep that in mind whenever they see someone else with tattoos or piercings.
As for me, I like having little bits of art on my body – even that first tattoo that made me anxious for months. Waiting until I was older to take the leap has meant that I’m more sure of myself and what I want, and that’s powerful.