I moved here just under three years ago, for a lot of reasons, some personal, some professional, some political. Adaptation hasn't been easy though the problems I've had didn't correlate too well with the ones I though I'd have.
For one thing, I never had a panic attack of "Oh my god, what have I done!!" like I expected.
I think it might be worthwhile to talk about the experience since it's plain talking to others that mind is anything but unique.
I had originally planned to stay in the USA a few more years and work, but when I came over in September 2010 and lived in my completed house I decided to go ahead and do it, since as a software contractor I had a good chance of eating into my savings if jobs got harder to find. I have been here since 11/10 and not been back. I built my own house (you can see it on the banner here, with the gold balconies: http://namlongcantho.com/vn/) so didn't have to deal with finding accommodations, which is a big obstacle for many.
I'm focusing on the cultural adaptations, though, not the bureaucratic ones like visa renewal.
Number one: cigarettes. Among Vietnamese men over a certain age or in a certain class, smoking is nearly universal. See two or more men having coffee or noodles and you will always see the pack with the lighter. It would never occur to anyone here that some people don't like the smell. I'm allergic to the smoke and have had headaches that left me unable to work for a week or more. Men will light up right under a no smoking sign, in an air-conditioned room. It's not rudeness, it's not that America Joy To Annoy, it's simple unconsciousness.
Number two: that unconsciousness, particularly on the road. We've had a dozen very close calls with motorbikes zooming in front of us, no attention paid, no glance in the rear view mirror, charging out onto the road without a care, and, yes, we have seen corpses in the road. And it shows up in many other ways .. not putting things back where they found them, as in leaving barbells strewn all over the floor at my gym, walking though a closed door and leaving it agape.
Number three: a really really rotten attitude toward animals. Vietnamese see an animal, they kill it. Maybe to eat it, maybe for the fun of it. We have had two dogs stolen in three years, one right in front of the house by a guy who threatened to murder our housekeeper if she didn't get away from the dog. Dog restaurants are everywhere and there is no supply other than stolen pets.
I don't mean to imply from this sequence of peeves that there is nothing good about living here. There is a lot. But this thread is about the problems.
Now, specifically Cần Thơ ... we live in a middle class neighborhood in Cái Răng, and would expect something like a middle class experience in the USA. It isn't like that. Thieves walk down the middle of the street, heads rotating, looking for things to steal. Screaming children play in the street. And throughout the city the accents are so variable that it's plain most people in the city aren't from the city, they are from elsewhere, moved here for work and where in Hà Nội there is one accent, two people in CT might have been born mere kilometers apart yet sound as different as two unrelated languages. Even when you have a pretty good Vietnamese vocabulary, it can be very hard to understand people.
But this is where I live so I have to make do.
Adapting to Life in Cần Thơ and Việt Nam
Hey Chris,
Interesting read for someone thinking of moving to VN. Allow me to provide some personal insights into some of your adaptive challenges.
As an ex-smoker I can see why you might be annoyed, but you are right, different culture and different attitudes. As you know it wasn't all that long ago that the US has begun to challenge locations for smoking and there are still many places, mainly south of the Mason Dixon Line, that still allow smoking just about everywhere.
As far as the apparent unconscious approach to everyday affairs I can say this is not a phenomenon limited to Vietnam. I've seen it in many places in Asia, North Africa and I've even seen it in NYC so it can be viewed as a human problem hehehe.
That's pretty weird about the dog though, but having lived in some rural parts of the US I can say the same thing about country folk here in the good ol' USofA. And speaking of drugs and thugs, have you ever been to Camden NJ after dark? Yike!
I am definitely interested in learning more about the pet peeves so I can get a reality check on my thought process so I hope you pardon my critique as it is more a personal gut check than anything personal towards you or anyone's legitimate cultural complains.
Al the best my friend
Well as I said, this was a list of the biggest challenges for me, the ones I hear most echoed by others. I never meant to imply that they're problems unique to Vietnam ... like before 1974 and secondhand smoke, anyone who didn't want to be around smokers was regarded as a kook.
Later I'll make a point of listing things I do like about living here, but the point of this one is the adaptive challenge.
I mentioned the vast variation in pronunciation here .. while I can converse with my neighbor even about abstractions, we have a workman who may as well be speaking Finnish for all I can tell, I can't understand one word he says. And I studied two years before moving. Four years of high school German over 40 years ago, I'm still fluent. Five years of Vietnamese and sometimes I don't even recognize it.
Then again, yes, I've heard people from the rural south in the USA who were incomprehensible, too.
Welcome to Việt Nam!
When I first came, I was exactly like that. All uppity and shocked that no one follows laws, rules, order. Things were like the "wild wild west". Well, considering that within a generation ago, there were artillery shells, bombs, machine guns all over the place, I can see how things just up to snuff with America.
After I see so many people do "stupid"/"unsafe" things, I just say "This is Việt Nam!" You gotta say like in a way you're proud of it. When you go through some sort of culture shock, you say to yourself "This is Việt Nam!" When another Expat goes through it, you comfort them by saying "Welcome to Việt Nam!"
ChrisFox wrote:Well as I said, this was a list of the biggest challenges for me, the ones I hear most echoed by others. I never meant to imply that they're problems unique to Vietnam ... like before 1974 and secondhand smoke, anyone who didn't want to be around smokers was regarded as a kook.
...
Living in the Northwest probably had a lot influence on you. The West Coast literally eradicated smoking thanks to California leading the charge. I had a good taste of the Puget Sounds and let me tell you, those people know how to manage the environment! And there are tons of laws to protect...the..uh...Marbled Murrelet (a bird), Chub (a kind of fish), and even the Oregon Silverspot Butterfly. So you can bet if the West Coast states can protect animals and vegetation, they can sure provide for a place you can breath fresh clean air.
You got spoiled ChrisFox!
When I see some poor guy with one leg and no hands, I think "my country did this." When I see a little kid with a deformed hand (like the one lives next door) I know "my country did this." I live with the shame of that even though I was active enough protesting it to get into trouble at school.
But when a girl comes barreling through an intersection on a motorbike and we miss killing her by centimeters, and she turns around in response to our yelling to give us a look that would not be out of place on a terminally bored cow, no, we didn't do that. When I'm stuck on a escalator that takes three minutes to get to the top and nobody is moving, I wonder how long it would take after the power failed before they resumed the walking they were doing before they stepped on it. I've seen bodies in the road in pools of blood next to mangled motorbikes, while other 'bikes caroomed recklessly as ever around the corpses.
Yes, you're right, a lot of it is catching up. When I used to see the neighbors' người giúp việc carry a pile of styrofoam across the street and dump in it the grass with a thúng rác no further away I had to remind myself what America was like before Lady Bird Johnson got us all thinking about litter. Or how recently in America a smoker would light up in a crowded elevator, smirking at the discomfort he was causing.
So I went out with a stick and a plastic bag and cleaned up the street myself. I paid some guys in Phú Quốc to gather and burn the junk on the beach. It looked nice for a few days. The neighborhood has stayed nicer because the người nước ngoại led by example.
I admit, it's a struggle. There's the way I want myself to feel and there's the way I react and they're not as congruent as I would like. There is a goodness here, a generosity of spirit, that I really admire and appreciate but it overflows into a superciliousness when I expect seriousness. I could name a million other things like that.
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