Antidote to Burnout

Tet Parties

My Tết holidays this year were enjoyed in Dắk Lắk Province at the home of my Vietnamese friend's parents, introduced in this previous posting.  A subsequent posting presented their home as a typical rural Dak Lak house.

Since the Tết Nguyễn Đán season is all about the gathering and visiting of family and friends, we spent many hours at parties before and after the first day of the lunar new year (7 February in this year 2008).  The pre-Tết parties were more lavish large affairs, with a variety of food.  On Tet (the first day of the lunar new year) and the days after, individuals travel around to the homes of relatives, friends, and neighbors.  Since everyone is on the road, dropping in at random unannounced times, the visiting parties are much shorter and don't involve much food.  There are always a beer or two, or a glass or two of rice wine, followed by liters of green tea.  Available at every home, and usually only during the first days of Tet, is a platter of watermelon seeds (hạt dưa) and ginger candies (mứt).

Vietnamese crack open the seeds with their teeth at a rate of one every 5 or six seconds, leaving the shells on the table or the floor.  Since no sweeping is done in the first days of the new year (in order not to sweep out the good luck of the new year), the result is a huge pile of shells on the floor.  I never did get the hang of cracking and extracting the seed in one smooth motion like the Vietnamese do.

The big pre-Tet parties were the real peak experiences for me.  They were opportunities to meet the extended family and friends in one or two parties so that I had familiarity with them in advance of the smaller after-Tet visits.

Since these parties involved over 30 people at each, all of the furniture is removed from the sitting room, and multiple dining mats are put down to receive the food.

Most of these large gatherings used propane gas burners for hot pots of broth, in which the various meats and vegetables were cooked.  I particularly liked the fish and the various pork innards.

Like most Vietnamese meals, the food is very healthy with well-balanced portions of vegetables and grain (rice, of course) to offset the meats.

The guests sit down cross-legged on the floor in a circle around the perimeter of the room.

The younger women and the children sit in the adjacent room.  These were the women that prepared and served the meal.

The great-grandmothers join the men in the main room.  Most of the men are 35 or younger, members of the Vietnamese baby-boom beginning in 1975.  There are very few great-grandfathers remaining in these families.  The ancestor altar always features the portrait of the grandfather or great-grandfather husbands of these grandmothers.  There are also few family members my age, including women.  It turned out I was the second oldest male in the room (at age 61), which was a shock to me since I constantly live under the impression I am still in my thirties (and not out of vanity -- I just continue to think that way -- I still haven't grown up psychologically -- and all of my Vietnamese friends are in their late 20s or early 30s).

I also had the realization that these families came from the northern province of Nghệ An, the birthplace of Hồ Chí Minh.  The men my age might have fought in the American War (my friend told me his father did at the tail-end of the war on the nothern side (he is five years younger than me)), and certainly the grandmothers would have experienced to some degree the French and American Wars.  Like many Vietnamese (and many American veterans), they don't talk about the war years.  On the whole, in my opinion, the Vietnamese are very present and future oriented, and optimistic that the new year brings good luck, so they don't dwell on the past.  When meeting new family members and friends, they would ask where I was from, and the answer that I was an American always brought big smiles and handshakes.

It certainly helped that I was able to keep up with all of the toasts and chugging of beer.  Getting right down to it, the food is only a companion to the real event -- the beer or wine, and the toasting for good luck.

I was down at the "young end" of the party.  The young man next to me is a medical doctor.

No one seems to get really drunk at these events, and Vietnamese do not seem to get belligerent at all when they do have too much to drink.  The smiles never end.

All of these parties end with relaxing around pots of green tea

while the younger women clean up the aftermath on the grass mats.

I am very grateful to my friend for inviting me to his parent's home, where they accepted me like a member of the family.  Even though we do not speak a common language, there was no barrier to the hospitality and love they extended to me.  And these are all people of great humor and sociability -- I was proud to be accepted among them.

Response to life in Viet Nam

Chris Harvey at Charvey in Vietnam reminds us of the secret to successful life anywhere, but especially while living in a different country and culture than one's home town.  It seems obvious but we too often forget that our own attitudes toward people reflect back to us in how those folks respond to us.  His Aunt Jackie had the best comment with the universal truth to " Treat others the way you wish to be treated."  This is an important reading for all of us living as expats in countries like Viẹt Nam.

Over the past ten months here in TP. Hồ Chí Minh, I have been surprised how laid back I have become about what would be perceived in San Francisco immediately as rude behavior.  It isn't really rude behavior or arrogance.  There are just so many more people here in constricted space, so someone is more likely to cross you in unexpected ways.  But I rarely see bad intent in those actions -- more likely it is not paying attention, and we all suffer that at times.

The Golden Rule works both ways.  I am sure my change in response is a reflection of the general friendliness and "live and let-live" philosophy of Vietnamese people around me.

A morning in the park....

Charvey posted about the large park with sculptures in the midst of downtown Sài Gòn a couple of months ago, so we finally followed up with a visit.  Frankly, the noise on our hẻm (lane) has started to get to me, so I needed to find some peace and quiet somewhere last Sunday morning, and this park seemed like a good opportunity.  This park is called Tao Đàn Park (also shown on maps as Công Viên Văn Hóa), and is located south of the Reunification Palace.  The park was not as quiet as most parks since it is in a very urban setting, but it did put me at ease for a couple of hours.

Charvey posted some great photos of the sculptures, so I won't focus on that here -- I was primarily attracted to the various ways Vietnamese use the park.  One of the sidewalk cafés in the park offers an opportunity to contemplate the sculptures with a cooling drink.


Judging from most of the houses in my neighborhood, Vietnamese houses don't offer much space (or sonic peace) at home.  Therefore Vietnamese seem to flock to the parks for a change of pace, a chance to find some relative privacy, or just to find space for recreational activity.

The boy and girl scouts movement seems to be very active here in Ho Chi Minh City, and there were many groups at various locations around the park.

Meanwhile, their families were enjoying the sidewalk cafés.

Other families were touring the sites in the park,

including this replica of a Cham tower located close to Nha Trang (according to the 2005 edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam).

Young couples found places to sit and talk quietly.


While the world leaders are meeting in Hà Nội for APEC this month, HCMC will be hosting an APEC Trade Fair in the park, and workers were preparing pavilions and gateways.

Meeting the future of Việt Nam....

Back on 2 September, I wrote about my frustrations in not having friends here in Việt Nam to communicate with.  I received some very supportive comments to that posting that I appreciated very much.  However, I obviously had to be the one to take action and find a way to develop some conversation partners.

Charvey had the best suggestion, seconded by Jon Hoff -- attend the "English Conversation Hour" at 8:00 a.m. at the large youth center in downtown Saigon.  So I did today -- there were 500 Vietnamese young people there (plus a few older citizens), and me, the one non-Vietnamese person there.  There was no leader -- everyone just distributed themselves into conversation-sized groups and started in.  The conversation "hour" lasted until 11:00 a.m., though, which is a lot of talking.  I wish there had been some mechanism to encourage the shifting of participants every half-hour or so -- there was some shifting in of new people into and out of our group, but I spoke with many people in our group the entire three hours.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed this gathering very much.

These young people seem to take the importance of learning English very seriously.  Many of them told me that speaking English fluently was imperative for advancement in their careers.  It certainly takes a great deal of motivation to give up three or four hours on a Sunday morning to come in and work hard trying to speak a second language.  Most of them said they come every Sunday even though the conversation topics are somewhat limited to what people can ask, and are therefore repeated over and over.  Many of the students came from living places far out in the outer reaches of HCMC (there is a large university in Thủ Dức, a suburb of Sài Gòn, but still within the city limits of TP. Hồ Chí Minh.)

Although this group of Vietnamese is probably not representative of the population as a whole (being mostly university students), they impressed me for the future of Việt Nam.  They were lively and gutsy individuals and weren't shy about jumping into the conversations.

I am sure there will be some good friendships developing with some of these young people.  I am looking forward to working hard to earn their friendship.  Some said they will help me to learn Vietnamese, too -- I need all the help I can earn.

Looking to global voices beyond my postings...

The value of any blog often lies in the comments available at the end of each posting.  It is the interaction between blog author and readers in the form of reader comments that amplifies and clarifies the author's ideas expressed in the blog posting.

The posting below on "A Rice Cracker?" is a prime example.  Click on the Comments button at the bottom of the posting and you will find 13 comments that offer far more than than the original transfer of ideas I expressed in the posting itself.  Many of these commenters have much more developed ideas than I have about this subject, and many of them write much better than I do.

This is why I love writing and reading blogs so much -- I especially respect and enjoy good writing and insightful ideas, even though I struggle at both myself.

For a moment in time here online, I have met some new friends with ideas to compare with mine.  Even though we may not meet again online for a long time, they have helped me to clarify my ideas, and I have learned a little bit about them, although it is such a small sampling that there is no way to picture these new friends accurately at all.  It helps to point the way, though, to their blogs where a better but still fuzzy picture begins to emerge about a person.

As more and more foreigners (both tourists and expats) flood into and multiply in Viet Nam over the next few years, these topics will become even more important.  Many of these new foreigners will be insensitive to the Vietnamese society and people, which will lead to misunderstandings and resentments.  Therefore discussions like this might help a little bit in providing resources to tourists and expats as they prepare to travel through or live and work in Viet Nam.  Mark just published an article on the Harvard Law School blog Global Voices (Vietnam page) that summarized  for us the sensitivity and humility foreigners bloggers should consider in observing and writing about Vietnamese life.

I give thanks to Mark for writing his article and for him and all of the commenters on my posting below for enriching our understanding of these ideas and for the beauty and intelligence of their writing.

A Rice Cracker?

D. has posted a provocative thread of ideas on his blog VA to VN entitled "Everyone's an expert" (5 September 2006).  He points us to the website Ethnically Incorrect Daughter, published by what he describes as a "conflicted Vietnamese adoptee."  He writes,

"One of her posts spoke about how some ex-pats return from a stint abroad with a greater sense of "understanding" of the foreign culture than they truly have obtained. It was a riff off of this post from What Happened to Your Hair? These two posts stirred within me a latent impression of a few of the expat discussions on blogs and forums. It seems everyone thinks they're an expert - be it from two weeks or two years in a foreign land, all the while living high on the hog......It's wholly presumptuous to think that you've done anything other than scratching the surface of a culture and a society when you don't (1) speak the language (2) look like a local - even a fat V.K. doesn't cut it - and (3) earn a living like everyone else. It's great that you've used your passport, it's great that you've learned to order beer in a foreign language. But, for god sakes, realize that hundreds of thousands of other people have done this - they're called immigrants. They just don't blog about it."

D.'s link to the posting on the blog What Happened to Your Hair? is entitled "The Rice Cracker" on 26 August 2006, written by Kev Minh of Seattle -- here is an excerpt:

"What is it with white American males who travel to a foreign country and come back presuming they "know" a whole culture? Are we to believe that these men are outfitted with an osmosis/camouflage gene that allows them to travel to a foreign country and soak up its essence and blend into the native surroundings in order to fraternize with the locals? Then, they return home, book and movie deal already in hand, to write and speak extensively about their exotic adventures and proclaim their expertise in the field? Of course, I'm being facetious, but do notice that I am denigrating a certain annoying characterstic called "White privilege". In the White privilege paradigm the tendency is to speak one's mind as if it were the bible-truth, without reservation or qualification, and convince oneself that apologies and concessions are for weaklings."

Well, that thread of ideas has certainly caused me to reflect on my own motivations and identity as an American blogger writing about my observations in Viet Nam.  Here's my starting point:
1.  I am a white American male.
2.  I have been in Viet Nam now for seven months, but have not yet returned to America, so that makes me an expat at this time.
3.  I don't speak the Vietnamese language or any language other than English, but I am currently trying hard to learn Vietnamese.  It appears that this is going to take a very long time, but my current intentions are to live in Viet Nam for a long time.  In the meantime, I can definitely order beer (bia) in the Vietnamese language.
4.  I definitely don't look like a local, but I have made a choice to live among locals rather than the expat areas of Ho Chi Minh City.  My Chinese-Vietnamese wife looks like a local, but the locals recognize her easily (I don't know how) as a Việt Kiều (an overseas or returned Vietnamese).
5.  We do and don't earn money like the locals -- there are many Vietnamese real estate developers in this rather closed market here, and we are trying to compete or work with them.  Typically, developers work for nothing until an income stream from their projects comes online.  For us, it appears that this will be several years from now if all the risk factors fall my firm's way.  In the meantime, we live off savings.  Therefore we try to live at the same economic level of our Vietnamese neighbors.
6.  I don't have a book or movie deal in hand, but I do enjoy publishing my experiences and observations in my blog.

I definitely feel that I have achieved some understanding of the circumstances and culture of Vietnamese life, and I enjoy offering my observations for the possible benefit of those who will follow me in the coming investment rush to Viet Nam.  But the longer I am here, the more I realize how much more I have to experience and learn.  I have come to understand that it would be presumptuous to think that I have done anything other than scratch the surface of the Vietnamese culture and society.  But I want to try to understand as much as I can.  My real fascination with Việt Nam is its people and their friendliness, and with their culture and approach to life.  There is much for me to learn here.

So do I stand on "White privilege"?  Preya raised a similar question last March in her blog Dreaming of Hanoi.  My answer then, as it is now:

"If one grants that a westerner's base motives for going overseas are at heart a search for validation of western culture over other cultures (even if this is mostly subconscious to us), then the opposite might be gained in the course of living in an overseas culture -- we learn things about other peoples and their cultures that open new perspectives and appreciations for us.  What we learn strikes out what we thought we knew or hoped we would find.  Ideally, the new balances out the old preconceptions.  I am not saying this is true for everyone who visits overseas cultures, but I am striving to make it true for me."

Yes, I do tend to offer my experiences and observations on my blog without enough reference to "reservation or qualification".  I assume too often that most readers will read my "about" and "essential" postings to understand my privileged background and put my postings in the context of that background and current stated intentions.

But I think Sume of the blog Ethnically Incorrect Daughter has a good solution -- she wrote in a comment to Kev Minh's posting: "Why not take them head on, pick their opinions apart, point out the flaws and show them for the experts they're NOT? At the very least, make it known that their's is not the only opinion out there."

I might not like it, but I hope I would learn from the experience of others challenging the gross generalizations to which I know I am prone.  I hope that these challenges would come from Vietnamese people themselves.  I attempt to ask questions and try out my ideas on the Vietnamese around me, but they too reflect a limited cross-section of the population and culture.  I am sure I could learn a lot about Vietnamese life and culture from reading Vietnamese blogs if I could read Vietnamese.

As for immigrants not blogging about their experiences, I suspect there are some that do.  We need to find them so that we can better understand what they think about their adopted land and people, and thus we learn about ourselves as we meet them.

Neighborhood breakfast stand....

Noodlepie has the street stand food scene in Ho Chi Minh City well covered in his blog archives, although he no longer blogs from Saigon.  Think of a particular Vietnamese street food you might be craving, look it up in his handy archive catalogue, and read and see the places he recommends.

There are tens of thousands of street food stands in HCMC, and he has found some of the best.  But almost all of his picks are accessible to main streets and can be found fairly easy by others following up on his recommendations.  Beyond the main streets, however, there are many more stands set up every day to serve the local neighbors far from the main streets.  Some of these stands offer very good food, but it would be so difficult for others to find them that it is no use to catalogue them.

As shown on this aerial photo, there are thousands of houses in the large blocks in between the main streets.

These houses are accessed by narrow lanes (hẻm) snaking through the block, with many dead ends.  Even on a dead end, though, there is significant traffic of local people due to the high density of population in each house.  Neighbors set up food stands (or other commercial stands) to cater to the local neighbors.  My neighbor five doors down the hẻm provides cà phê drinks and delivers them door-to-door.

My breakfast every morning is obtained at a small soup stand operated by a family in the front yard of their home.

It is rare to have such a front yard in HCMC, so this family uses the space to good advantage -- they operate the soup stand every morning from 0600 to 0900, and park motorbikes for staff of the nearby hospital during the day.

Their courtyard is a relaxing place in the morning, and I enjoy seeing and greeting the soup sisters and the regular customers every morning.

I can make Vietnamese greetings, but can't go beyond there yet with the language, which makes me and my neighbors frustrated.  The soup, however, is very good and makes up for it. 

The soup sisters make a different kind of noodle soup every day, rotating among seven kinds of soup during the week.  One day it is the national soup, phở, the next a beef stew, and on other days it is a variation of hủ tiếu , a pork noodle soup.  My favorite is hủ tiếu nam vang, a Cambodian variation on the basic hủ tiếu with the addition of a shrimp, quail egg and some pieces of liver.  The soup below is bún bò Huế, another favorite of mine, because it has a large variety of different vegetables among pieces of beef.

These soups have the added benefit of being very well-balanced meals, since there isn't too much meat, and what there is is usually pretty lean.  There are lots of vegetables and just enough rice noodles to fill you up.  And the cost is certainly reasonable -- 10,000 VN đồng (US$.62) includes a hot Vietnamese coffee.

The soup sisters take very good care of me and make sure I get a little extra portion of everything since I always drain the bowl.

This is a family operation.  These two sisters are the primary servers, and there are two others in the house making cà phê and tea drinks.  I can't say that they are actually sisters -- it may be that some of them are wives of sons in the family, which would be the normal family situation here in Việt Nam.  As should be expected, there are also many children in this family house.

Again: It takes a village....

Last June, I posted that the "village" consisting of all of the people living on our hẻm (lane) nurtured the teenagers on the streets so that there was very little of the teen-age gang crime prevalent in American cities.  The residents of Vietnamese neighborhoods or villages watch out for the kids on the streets and offer guidance when needed.

This extends to child care also.  Although there are many child care centers and people that provide day-care in their homes, many families cannot afford these services.  Our neighbor family is one of them.  The husband works the early morning shift, and the mother works a late-evening shift.  Many other neighbors support them by watching over their toddler during the day.

The 13-year old girl across the hẻm walks the child up and down the hẻm for hours every day, and the single-woman store-keeper across the hẻm is often entertaining the child.

These people aren't paid for their babysitting -- they just enjoy participating in helping this child grow up.

This child (about thirteen months old now) is a very happy child, and always breaks out into a smile when she sees this tall westerner out on the hẻm.  She should start talking soon, and will have many neighbors to help her learn verbal skills quickly.  This must be why Vietnamese are such verbal people -- they grow up from childhood speaking with elders and constantly talking and bantering with neighbor kids.  And although most of the neighbors have television sets, there seems to be little dependence upon them as surrogate babysitters.

There might be some downside to this, though.  I note that the neighborhood kids and unemployed older adolescents never seem to want to venture out of the hẻm.  In talking with some of them, it seems that they may get downtown once a year, but they have no desire to do so.  Their mothers and grandmothers also don't seem to want to go beyond the neighborhood market.

The social dinner....

Whenever I have dinner with a Vietnamese group, I always think of the very articulate words of Mark in the now inactive blog Six Months in Hanoi.  Mark wrote eloquently about social groups here and here in Viet Nam, and although he qualified his comments as being limited to his experience with gay groups, I have found in my experience (and questioning of Vietnamese) that they apply to the general run of Viet Nam groups (but not including business groups) as well.  I encourage you to click on to his words, because they offer a rare explanation for Vietnamese social groups and behavior.

Our Vietnamese-American business partner arrives back in Saigon every six weeks or so for a couple of weeks, and always begins the tour with a dinner at his favorite Vietnamese restaurant across from the hotel in District 3 where he always stays.  I have met some of the people of his group a few times now, but there are often new people as well as those who couldn't be there.  The dinner usually starts with only half of the group or so, and others drift in over the early evening.

As Mark relates in his blog piece, Vietnamese do not make introductions of new friends as they arrive.  I have made it my job to ask questions to find out who the newcomers are, and that helps me to make some participation in the banter.

They are a lively group, and the banter goes back and forth in Vietnamese.  Of course, I have no way to fit in.  Occasionally my wife will translate a few words in between laughs.  I am frustrated by the inability to communicate (but they try out a few words in English on me once in a while).  I still have a good time watching their facial expressions and gestures.  And I definitely enjoy the great Vietnamese food.

They are interesting people -- one is an attorney that publishes a law journal and has a construction contractor's license as well, and another has a PhD. from Harvard.  Another designs and crafts beautiful modernist jewelry.  All have several side business lines, such as partnerships in automobile franchises.

The highlight of the dinner is usually a hot-pot of soup in which various noodles, vegetables, and meats are fondued.  Here the men takes charge of serving the bowls of soup.

Meanwhile, there is a house electric piano player accompanying a series of Vietnamese singers.  However, they allow patrons to sing a few, and one of our friends has an incredibly beautiful voice.

The band works for tips from the dinner tables.  10,000 Vietnamese dong notes are wrapped around the stem of roses supplied in vases on the tables by the restaurant.  One of the bolder of our table partners takes responsibility to deliver the rose to the singer.

An outing with a large Vietnamese family....

It is a real treat to be invited to attend a large Vietnamese family function.  In this case, we also were able to experience a pure Vietnamese resort, which is quite a bit different from the resorts westerners expect.

I have learned from other Vietnamese families that it is common to hire a 45-person bus for  weekend trips to a Vietnamese seaside resort.  They fill them with their large extended family and friends.  Our family bus loaded at 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning and then drove through the night to  Phan Thiết and Mũi Né, where there are many western-style resorts.  Many westerners from HCMC like to go there on weekends.  We stopped to enjoy the red sand dunes, famous features in Mũi Né.

We also stopped for a seafood lunch together.

This family gathering was matriarchal in organization, rather than the patriarchal structure usually common to Vietnamese families.  Although we are meeting many young Vietnamese couples who live alone, the more common practice (due to meager finances as well as cultural tradition) is for the wife to live with the husband's family.  In this case, there are six sisters who all live in the same area of Saigon, and they organize many family events together.  As in all Vietnamese families, the focus is on the elders.  Here, the mother and father of the family (right and left in the picture below) enjoy the company of their large family with many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

We moved north up the coastal national highway to Phan Rang, from which we headed east to the coastal resort of Co Thich.  This is nowhere close to a five-star or any-star rating as resorts go, but Vietnamese love it because of its relatively low cost and set-up for large families.

The village is a collection of several individually-operated guest houses featuring very large rooms, along with some smaller rooms.  Our family fitted themselves into a room with about 10 double beds, while Hien and I occupied a one-bed room.  The showers and slot-toilets were down the hall.  This is the rather rustic hand or dish-washing area behind the showers.

A large center area accommodated large family self-made meals.

The sisters had prepared meal fixings in advance and brought it all with them on the bus.  In many respects, this was more like a camping experience.  Everyone pitched in to prepare vegetables (yes, I know it doesn't look like the men are doing much).

There are two primary attractions for this resort area -- the beach, of course,

and the complex of Buddhist shrines and temples on the hills above the beach.

There seemed to be about five or six hundred Vietnamese at this resort for the weekend we were there (I was the only westerner there), and most of them made the short trek up the hills on Sunday morning to pay their respects at the various prayer sites.

We managed to get in some relaxation time, though, at one of the many beachside coffee houses (bars).  Most of them had racks of hammocks available, and here is the nice relaxing view from a hammock, accompanied by an iced beer.

Language frustration...

I am growing increasingly frustrated at my inability to speak Vietnamese.  I want to be a sociable person in my neighborhood, but I haven't gotten past "Hello, how are you" yet.  Vietnamese people are very sociable people -- they love to talk.  They seem to value witty and poetic people, and the conversations lead constantly to laughter.  I would love to participate, but by the time my wife translates, the conversation has moved along -- sort of a "you had to be there" feeling.

When you can't maintain conversations, you don't make friends easily, which is killing me here.  Nevertheless, we have made a few friends, but my wife has to sustain the relationship.  The only respect I get is for eating everything that is put in front of me -- that has to be my contribution to sustaining relationships, and that has been effective for now.  But this is definitely not satisfying for me.  I want to pick people's brains.

Some people seem to pick up languages easily, but I am not one of them.  My wife speaks five dialects of Chinese as well as Vietnamese (with a Chinese accent) and of course English.  As she hears or reads a word she has not seen before, she commits it to her vocabulary immediately.  Nothing sticks for me.  I took a year of Latin in high school, as well as two years of French.  Nothing remains, and I got D grades in those courses while getting As and Bs in everything else.  I took a couple of years of Cantonese and a year of Chinese Mandarin, and nothing stuck with those languages either.

But I am now determined that I will learn to communicate in Vietnamese since we would like to live here for at least five years.  Vietnamese grammar is not complicated -- pronunciation seems to be the hardest part because of the tones and additional vowels like ư and ơ with tongue positions I am struggling with.  I have learned that I cannot depend on my wife for the correct pronunciation because of her accent, so I have found a good online Vietnamese language resource at evietnamese.net featuring native speakers for pronunciation practice.

When I was here in Saigon for a year in 1971-72, all of the Vietnamese construction inspectors and contractors I worked with spoke English very well, so I did not learn Vietnamese then as I should have when I was a young man with a presumably more pliable brain.  Today, that is not the case even though most students take English in school, and there are at least a hundred commercial schools in HCMC teaching business English.  But this is their country, and it is my job to learn to communicate in their language.

Working 365 days a year here....

Not me, of course.  This blog is about the antidote to burnout, after all.

But the vendors bringing by the food every day in our hẻm (alley) in TP. Hồ Chí Minh come by every day without fail.  The most important vendor to me personally is the bánh mi (french bread) woman.  She must be in her 80s and has severe cataracts in both eyes, but she has not missed a single day in the five months we have lived here so far.  She comes by rain or shine, and when it rains here, it really pours.  But she has a somewhat waterproof basket for the bread.  She even comes by on the national holidays.  And if we miss her on her first trip by at 0700, there are another 3 more times in the morning and a couple of times in the evening that she makes it by our house.

We see other Vietnamese people in their stores every day, too.  Some people really work hard with long hours in this country.  But there is still a large portion of unemployed people here that either cannot find work or do not want to work (assuming they have parents or someone else to support them).

Sociability and noise...

My blogger friend Virtual Doug and his wife have returned to the USA from Huê, Việt Nam.  He recently published a post comparing the noise of Việt Nam with the quietness of suburban America.  In addition to the millions of honking motorcycles in Việt Nam, he correctly mentions the "liveness" of Vietnamese houses due to their masonry construction of all hard surfaces.  I returned a comment that "There are many times when I look behind me in my own HCMC "tube house" to figure out where a voice is coming from, only to realize that it is my neighbor across the lane."  Sounds reverberate through our house from top to bottom and side to side.

The Vietnamese-American blogger Triet added a comment that "In Vietnam, people get home from work and live outside. They often sit outside in their hem (or kiet, since you're from Hue) chatting with their neighbors, watching the children play da cau or soccer. In HCMC, the streets team with youth going downtown to eat, or play.
Back in the states, things are quiet, because people stay home. The large streets, yards, etc. put distance between neighbors. Although they say "fences make good neighbors," I find myself sorely missing the personal relationships and experiences of sitting in the alleys..."

Mr. Triet is so right.  Vietnamese are very sociable people -- much more so than Americans.  They are very verbal -- they love to talk.  I think they are inherently more sociable by nature, but the environment also encourages public interaction.  Mr. Triet is also right that Vietnamese live outside.  Since there is relatively little space available in Vietnamese homes and there is usually heat build-up in them through the day, families spill out into the hems (lanes) in the evening where it is slightly cooler and they can socialize with their neighbors.

For some, though, the evening is also an opportunity for those that have them to crank up their karaoke players and practice their crooning.  Some of my neighbors are very good singers, and I enjoy Vietnamese music very much.  On the other hand, it adds substantially to the din of voices and motorbikes and food vendor calls and cooking noises in the hem.  As an experiment, I recorded a segment of time last evening from my chair in the middle of our ground floor -- you may need an audio player of some kind on your computer to play this, so try it:  Download Hem.m4a  Trust me -- the sound is actually much louder in reality than it is on the recording.

We have made the mistake over the past four months of spending our evenings in my third floor office watching TV or doing internet reading, or relaxing on our roof deck in the evening breezes.  As a result, we have not connected well with our neighbors (so I am afraid we may have become known as the snooty Americans).  For the last couple of days, I decided to sit outside the house on the hem after dinner for awhile, and we immediately were approached by a few neighbors for conversation.  Not that I could participate very well with my extremely limited Vietnamese capability (still working on it slowly but surely, though).  But I enjoyed the smiles and laughter while my wife translated some of the action.  There are quite a few babies and toddlers on our hem, so that is often the conversation starter.  Our neighbor's little girl adds substantially to the noise with her squeaky shoes as she is learning to walk.  We will be changing our evening habits now to participate in this intensive Vietnamese life.

It takes a village...

From my vantage point in the midst of a thoroughly lower-middle-class neighborhood of TP. Hồ Chí Minh, there is very little crime.  This is surprising since there is a large degree of unemployment, particularly among teens and young adults in this neighborhood.  Kids are on the hẻm (lane) all day.  They seem to be able to amuse themselves during the day without bothering the neighbors or getting into trouble.  They do not intimidate or threaten the neighbors.

A similar neighborhood in California cities like Los Angeles or Oakland would be rife with youth gangs.  Unemployed teens and young adults are very intimidating to neighbors in such areas.

What is it that keeps youth gangs out of the Vietnamese society?  (I realize that there are probably adult gangs for the business of drug trafficking or similar social ills)  I think the key to neighborhood peace is the cohesiveness of the "village".  Since most of the neighborhood family wives and mothers stay at home (except for daily trips to the market or other amusements), there is constant supervision of young people on the streets.  I have seen neighbor mothers take aside a neighbor's child when necessary for a long chat.  All of this takes place on the street or door steps since much of life in Việt Nam is lived outdoors.

I may be naïve, however.  I understand my isolation from Vietnamese society, including the neighborhood grapevine, because I do not speak or read Vietnamese.  There may be many stories about neighborhood crime in the local press, but these stories rarely make it to the English-language press (which most often consists of articles translated from the Vietnamese press).  However, the English-language version of the online Thanh Niên News, the online tribune for Vietnam's Youth Association, recently published an article headlined "Teenagers commit two-thirds of crimes in Vietnam metro".  This article points out gang-crime in HCMC neighborhoods carried out by homeless or runaway children.  Through separation from their families, they are no longer subject to the supervision of their neighborhoods, and they get in trouble.  The key quotation from the article reinforces my point:

"'There is a high risk that the city’s 3,000 children who have run away from home will take up crime,' Dung said, concerned. In Vietnam, where administration is subdivided right up to the grassroots levels, local authorities maintain records of all events happening in their area including children leaving home."

On the whole, however, this appears to me to be very rare in comparison with western societies.

When you fly into the HCMC airport...

Be sure to dress very well and be prepared to act like a celebrity when you arrive at the Tân Sơn Nhất international airport (SGN) in Sài Gòn.  In the picture below, you see the crowd that greets you after you clear passport control, baggage pickup, and customs, and then step out into the main lobby from the door on the right to find transportation.

You might as well step out with your hands raised in triumph since everyone will be staring at you from the spectator gallery lining the "runway" to local transportation.  You will certainly be judged on the appropriateness and fashion sense of your clothes and luggage.

I realize that most international airports have areas like this for people waiting for relatives to arrive out of customs, but I have seen none quite as staged as this.  It is quite endearing to see Vietnamese families united once again as overseas Vietnamese arrive back into "the old country".

Always a smile...

As we take our daily walk around Thành Phố (City) Hồ Chí Minh, we like to get off the smoggy main streets and head into the các hẻm (winding lanes) linking together hundreds of houses and families within the large blocks.  I am usually on the hunt for interesting architecture in the houses, but it is the families that catch my eye.  They almost always have a smile for the tall ông tây (Mr. West) walking through their neighborhood.

I am always too shy to photograph people, however.  In this case, though, this family (they do appear to be a multi-generational group) INSISTED that I take their picture, and I was only too happy to do so.  For Vietnamese, it is any excuse for a good laugh or a party.

As I walked away to continue my journey, I found myself surprised in the midst of a small graveyard surrounded by houses.

I hadn't noticed gravesites among the houses before, but since then, I have found several individual gravesites by houses along the lanes.  This neighborhood grew out of the fields that were here thirty or forty years ago, and built up around the gravesites often found in the fields of Việt Nam.