Giving Thanks for Families, Privilege and Service

There we are! There were ETAs, research Fulbrighters, embassy officals and representatives from NGOs and other American Programs in Hanoi.

Traditions can’t last forever – it’s simply impossible. Things change and the road of life can very quickly lead to new places and lands where just about everything seems a bit off kilter. I knew when I signed up for this sojourn that the holidays would be different and that 23 years of traditions were going to broken.

What was strangest about this Thanksgiving wasn’t the heat or the sun or the geckos and palm trees (though it was unsettling) – it was the obvious lack of holiday spirit. I am in the Southeast Asian tropics in a land that has no religion *according to the government* (except that fact that nearly everybody is Buddhist – but who’s keeping track?) – so what did I expect?

I knew that these things would be absent but I didn’t realize how crucial they were to the holiday – or at least my perception and experience of the holiday. Without the excessive commercialization of Thanksgiving (and by default Black Friday and Cyber Monday) and nobody else around talking about it I honestly forgot. My calendar said November 22 but it sure didn’t feel anything like Thanksgiving – it felt like some random obscure day in summer.

Luckily for me the US Ambassador wouldn’t let us Fulbrighters forget about Turkey Day and he invited us all to the Ambassador’s Residence in Hanoi for a feast.

It was off the chain! So freaken good, I swear I ate ambrosia and now I know how Zeus felt. The real turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes so creamy and smooth it is making me drool all over again, the sweet potatoes, roasted veggies, bread and real butter! I simply don’t have words. Then there was dessert and it was a pie ménage à trois – apple, pumpkin and pecan. We had slices of all three served à la mode with homemade (I will type it one more time in caps and bold, italicized and underlined as it deserves it’s justly big to do) HOMEMADE FRENCH VANILLA ICE CREAM. That means somebody went and bought vanilla beans and cracked many eggs taking just the yolks and heavy cream and churned and churned until perfection was reached and the Gods smiled! All of us provincial folk were smiling too! I have many pictures from the dinner below.

The US Ambassadors residence. It's amazing and so pretty. It was an old French villa and the interior is spectacular. A grand staircase, glass elevator, marble floors, gilded walls, fretted ceilings and high empire crystal changeliers. It was a dream. I would love to live in a place like this someday... keep on dreamin'.

The offical china and seal of the United States of America. Rimmed in gold with royal blue the state china and silver were exquiste. This is the seal from the charger - yep it was so fancy that we had CHARGERS. I love chargers I really do.

My offical setting and plate full of scrumptious food.

My name card with the state seal and the dessert spoon. We also had dessert forks. So classy I was simply in heaven!

Me and Justin. He is the ETA who is farther east of me toward the ocean also in the Mekong Delta. He is wearing the traidtional Vietnamese ao dia.

Our TEFL teacher Andrew, me, US Ambassador David Shear and Justin in the dining room after dinner.

What I am most thankful for is all my families. First, my blood family who would go to the ends of the earth for me and I for them. They are all part of me and serve as the super-steady foundation upon which I have built my life. Secondly, my PhilaU family. Not only did they propel me through college and many have become close (and best) friends but I continue to lean on them and my advisors who are still in my corner. Thirdly, to my newest family – my Fulbright family. First of all these guys are awesome and I am privileged to have met 14 other absolutely inspiring, articulate, funny, incredible and selfless scholars and humanitarians. These people will rule the world and there dedication to causes ranging from justice, education, scholarship, business and medicine are truly awe-inspiring. I am blessed to even be included in this group and I look up to them and admire their grace and courage under the cultural firestorm that Vietnam, that teaching English in provincial Vietnam, can be.

I am  also thankful for is something that has weighed on me ever since I alighted my plane back in July and that is my privilege. Being a member of the privileged class (i.e. white and male) in America affords me the opportunity to never consider or discuss it if I don’t have to. To be frank I didn’t. I knew I was blessed but I would never have described myself or my family as privileged. But my family is privileged and thus so am I.

Some of this privilege is not something I (or they, or anybody) can control. Primarily being white and being male. I see my students, especially the girls facing sexual obstacles that will dog and hinder (and in some cases prevent) their career paths, that once (if ever) launched will mostly be halted when they have children that they are expected to bear and raise. The other great privilege of my life in monetarily. We are not rich by American standards – at best we are upper-middle class. But compared to my students I am dripping in wealth. In Vietnam community college students are seen by society as a failure (by not scoring high enough on the college admission test for university) and are thus expected to have little prospects for future success. But more then anything what this does is it limits their future access. A bulwark fortified by the fact that since most are farmer’s children and spend time outside to earn a living they tan and are darker (here whiteness or lightness is prized and deemed desirable/beautiful/sexy, etc.).

At the end of the day my privilege granted me access – access no doubt expanded upon by my diligent hard work. But things like my parents buying a house in Brighton and thus me attending one of the best public schools in the country. And have two gainfully employed parents with secure jobs in corporate America allowed me to skate and compete. Credentials that helped me gain admission into a good private university on a generous and sizeable scholarship. A university that recognized my passion and academic acumen and granted me endless opportunities to study, research, present and study abroad for a year – and graduating without a dime of debt. Those decisions and my success in PhilaU put me on a plane to Vietnam as a Fulbrighter and now I am applying for medical school.

I couldn’t even begin to describe any of this to my students, it would blow their minds. But being here – especially in Cao Lanh has made me very aware of my privilege and my access. For that I give thanks.

Finally, I am most thankful and proud that I have used 24 years of hard work, privilege and academic excellence to spend this year in service. Giving back to the wider world and meeting all these inexplicably wonderful people is the greatest blessing of all. A toast to humanitarian service!

One other note – I won my first badminton game! Yep I won, I won, I won, I won… Yippie! I beat my host who was stunned to say the least. I had many good shots and hustled my tall lanky behind around that court. By the time it was over the unanimous expression on men’s faces was “oh snap the whities got dope skill – fo’ shizzle”. OK so maybe not fo’ shizzle but that was the mood. Of course it was damped by the fact that I had to ask if I had won (they all speak Vietnamese – I just knew I was doing well. After losing for three months straight I just assumed they were cleaning the court with me).

In all honesty things have been very tough here and emotionally I am on the edge. My goal for this blog was to be honest – in the entirety of that definition. A majority of these past post have been honest but they are my colorful rose-tinted humorous versions. Next week I will try to be brutally honest about my emotional existence in the hollowed depths of stage 2. But for now I am going to let the Norman Rockwellesque atmosphere pervade for at least one more post.

Coming Up for Air

Last week was not my best by any measure. I fell really hard into stage 2 and by the middle of the week I felt like there was rock bottom, fifty feet of crap and then me. I started the week by receiving less then stellar news from home and then throughout the rest of the week ran smack into the realities of Vietnamese management (i.e. I swung by the department office to pick up my materials for class and everyday there were no copies made, in fact nobody can find the email with the files. What ensued was something that in hindsight I am sure was comical and would have been perfect for the Lucy Desi Hour).

My co-teacher and I decided to halt the lessons in their textbooks and have a very frank, honest and slow review of how to study for this class, the materials we provide them weekly and Basic English. We reviewed the parts of speech, had them diagram sentences and find the parts of speech, worked on the pluralization of nouns, pronouns (both subject, object and possessive), verbs (modal, auxiliary, transitive, intransitive, imperative and phrasal) and noun phrases. We also reviewed phonetics and the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) and did many exercises in these topics. As a native English speaker the last time I diagramed a sentence was in middle school and I lived in absolute terror to diagraming (the terror has since subsided) and I never learned the IPA.

Thus large parts of this lesson were taught by my fabulous co-teacher Co Dung who was able to put both her masters and bilingual fluency to work (Co = the title given to a female teacher in Vietnamese. I am Thay Tyler). Co Dung and I planned this lesson very carefully so that all our classes completed this lesson in the same week – a week we both thought we would be here in Cao Lanh to teach. That turned out to be incorrect. On Wednesday night the director calls to tell me that he and Co Dung have to go to another town in the province to grade something and I would be on my own with a helper for Thursday’s class. I spent Thursday morning in hard-core prep mode learning numerous parts of speech and exceptions, phonetics and a whole linty of rather obscure things I never knew about my language.

I am happy to say the class went super well. Teaching this lesson Tuesday and Wednesday and watching Co Dung deliver the verb section and walk the students through the tougher points really helped me work with the students. They were open and we had some fun (a few times at my tongue tied expense). It made me realize how far I have come since August and how far they have come since September. It was such an uplifting and gratifying class. The thing about Vietnam is that it can thrash you around so violently that you wonder how to put yourself back together. At other times, and sometime within the same breath, it can catapult you above the clouds and for me at least I realize that I am doing some good and doing my job for Fulbright and my students. I went to bed that night imbued with the feelings of successfully sowing seeds and serving my students and my country. It was one of my best days as a teacher so far and really did a good job of kicking the crummy start of last week in the ass.

The other thing that kept me going was my trip to Vinh last weekend to see Amanda, the Fulbright ETA at Vinh University. Vinh is in central Vietnam in the part of the country wedged between Laos the South East Asia Sea (or China Sea – depending on your druthers and worldview). Vinh is 500ish miles north of HCMC – a map is below.

Vinh is marked with the A. I live near Long Xuyen about 147 km southwest of HCMC (way at the bottom of the map).

At first glance Vinh is huge by comparison to Cao Lanh and Vinh University is Titanic compared to Dong Thap Community College. I have included pictures below.

On Friday I traveled and met Amanda after her class. We wend to the most bougie western grocery called METRO and went nuts. We got food for dinner and I bought McCormack oregano and Honey Bunches of Oats to bring back to Cao Lanh. That night it just poured – central Vietnam monsoon style – and central Vietnam is famous for its deluges. I was getting the full Vinh experience!

We cooked bruschetta, penne pasta with crème sauce with bacon and tomatoes and fried green beans (in the rendered bacon fat) with caramelized balsamic vinegar. I am such a foodie and that along with this impending holiday season the two hardest things to bear have been not having access in Cao Lanh to foods that used to be staples and not having the facilities to cook the way I used. I was not prepared for such a drastic difference and coming to terms with my reality has really dragged my soul down. But Amanda and METRO came through and we just cooked the night away and got caught up. The next morning we made bread pudding in her rice cooker (where we made the pasta the night before) and used the rest of the cream, cocoanut milk, Vinamilk (something similar to but not the same as milk), and almonds for the top. It was good and my stomach held up to two cream-based meals!

Later that day we wend to a temple at the top of a mountain and then just went café to café talking and drinking. It was so much fun and was the kind of quality family time I needed. We could make all our funny, snide, cynical, sarcastic, witty, etc. jokes interwoven with cultural references and never need to explain them.  And talk as fast as we wanted and not stop to replace potentially complicated words for easier smaller ones.

The temple at the top of the mountain. It was a wonderful day (by wonderful I mean cool thus I didn't sweat and I needed my fleece jumper).

Me and Amanda at the big drum.

The interior of the temple.

The path leading to the temple.

A sliver of Vinh visible through the pine trees.

This week is a short one for me at Cao Lanh as I am flying to Hanoi on Thursday to attend a Thanksgiving Dinner given by the US Ambassador at his house in our honor. I can’t wait and there will be more ETAs! More of the family!

Have a good week readers and Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!

Two Weddings and an Itsy Bitsy Tenny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini

It’s been 11 days since my last post…what can I say? Let’s just chalk my lackadaisical blogging up to a busy schedule trying to plan lessons, speaking clubs and movies nights and DTCC is fixing it’s internet and power situation last week. Thus my Internet was rather touch and go. Excuses aside this post is about last week (this week was not a good week by any measure – and I right now I can’t blog about it or I will just start raging).

Last week I went to two weddings that couldn’t have been more antithetical. To start I attended my director’s younger brother’s wedding in a neighboring province. When I write attend a wedding I didn’t attend the actual wedding were the two singletons ‘lose their freedom’ and become bonded in matrimony. Rather I attended, what we in the US would call the reception. In Vietnam only very close family attends the wedding ceremony where the two are legally united, everybody else goes to the reception, except that it’s called the wedding. Thus in a Vietnamese wedding there’s only a reception and no wedding – does that make sense?

Cultural vocabulary aside this wedding was rather small. It was held in front of the bridegroom’s familial home under tents. It was very nice. You sat at large tables and they served you a large meal with as much alcohol as you could keep down. The bride and bridegroom spend their wedding going table to table making toasts and looking absurdly happy.

Another major cultural difference is the bride’s attire. Rather then wearing a white dress this bride wore 3 different dresses throughout her wedding. First a hot pink dress, followed by a tangerine orange and then a canary yellow. These dresses – like most formal gowns here in the provinces and less so in Hanoi in HCMC are about 10 – 20 years behind the fashion curve. I don’t know much about woman’s fashion but these 3 dresses left me with only one thought. “PROM DRESS ALERT PROM DRESS ALERT”. The cuts and styles are exactly what you see 16 and 17 year olds wearing to proms – overly sequined and glittered bodices, fluffy tulle skirts with some hot glue gun action and absurdly saturated hues. Sensory overload – Yikes!

A few days later I attended the wedding of one of my adult students from the college. Like the previous wedding nearly the entire teaching faculty of DTCC vacated campus at 11:00 am in the afternoon and in this case we all drove to the center of town to the 3-star hotel. I had just seen a Vietnamese wedding and I thought I knew what to expect – wrong!

Upon parking the bike I joined a huge greeting line snaking its way toward the balloon-draped door. When I reached the couple I didn’t even recognize my student – I only knew it was her from her white dress. Without her glasses and with (lots of) make-up, jewels, an up-do and white dress she was a completely different woman. After congratulating her Mr. Hung and I went to the ballroom and passed under a heart shaped arbor and into a massive ballroom packed with 400 people. There was a stage, laser light show and miles of tables.

After sitting down I just watched as more and more people kept coming in. At one point I could have sworn that there was a clown car parked outside the door with wedding guests instead of clowns. Finally the wedding started and the ballroom (which had AC!) went dark and on stage a dance number commenced with huge silk fans and slowly made its way down the center aisle. Then in the traditional step-pause-step-pause cadence the bride's family, groom’s family and finally the wedded couple themselves were all escorted down the aisle to the sounds of Yanni’s “Santorini” – yes Yanni – and nearly 15 minutes later the parents and the couple were at the front on stage. Being a foreigner I was in the back so I couldn’t see very well but on either side of the stage there were what I thought were ice sculptures. Well imagine my surprise after some mumbo-jumbo Vietnamese somethings to see champagne come squirting out and run down the tiers of stacked champagne flutes. It was like one of those Ferrero Rocher commercials that they play around Christmastime but instead of gold wrapped chocolate hazelnut truffles it’s French bubbly. Then the couple started to spin on the stage. Yep it was a rotating stage (Les Mis style) and the spotlights beamed from above as they were twirled around and around like a new Lexus whilst surrounded by the champagne orgy. Then tons of balloons fell from the ceiling and confetti cannons lining the entire room were fired. Just to finish it off fireworks came flying up from the stage masking the entire front of the ballroom in a wall of blinding white light. Upon the pyrotechnics I let out a yelp and jumped from my seat. I was also looking for the nearest exit as the combination of falling confetti and flamers didn’t seem like the safest idea.

I was so flabbergasted and stunned I couldn’t even make sense of it – especially coming from the homespun wedding a few days earlier. It was beautiful and massive. But between the silk fan show, laser lights, political convention-style balloon drop, confetti cannons, sparklers and champagne fountains with the rotating stage I felt like I was living some Vegas-style Liberachi fantasy or nightmare depending on your sense of style. For all its obvious bravado the hedonic garishness of excess overshadowed the event and the couple. Like the other wedding the couple spent the entire time going table to table and with 400 guests that took them nearly three hours.

Coming off the wedding highs I attended a birthday party of one of my adult students. This dinner party at a local restaurant – like most parties – drifted into all the Vietnamese speaking Vietnamese. When this happens I just turn inward and allow myself to drift off until I am spoken to. In this state of la-la-land the ambient music of the restaurant caught my attention. It was a techno song, but it was really familiar. I am not a techno fan so I just ignored it, but it kept growing on me and gnawing at me. So I tried to figure out what it was. YMCA? No. It’s Raining Men? No. ABBA? No. I Will Survive? No. Last Dance? No. For the life of me I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then it struck me like a lightening bolt. Itsy Bitsy Teeny Wheeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. Yep. In the middle of the jungle I was clobbered with a 1960’s hit, WTF?!

I have written here about how Vietnam can sneak up on you and throw you off your saddle. Well it turns out American can as well. Nothing quite like being thunderstruck by your own culture. I would have thought that 24 years of practice would have enabled to handle situations like these better. Apparently not – what is Vietnam doing to me?

Come Again?! The Verbally Insane

It became very evident to me last week that my last blog post and the one prior to that was something of a downer, so this week I will try to brighten up this space with just a little humor.

English is hard. As a language it has so many exceptions to every rule that there are hardly any rules. On top of that there are spelling differences and in some cases entirely different meanings for words in BrE (British English) and AmE (American English). For good measure toss in colloquial complexities, accents and the many varieties of English (i.e. formal English, academic English, spoken English) wrapped up with a healthy shot of pop culture slang and internet verbiage and you have the wonderful quagmire of a language that I am tasked to teach. Luckily all the foibles of English are excellent fodder for some delicious and sidesplitting moments. Here is just a smattering of some of the confused and nonsense sentences I have encountered.

“Thanks for the massage.” (Real meaning = “Thanks for  the message.”)

“Me and my friend want to do you.” To which I said “Oh dear!” (Real meaning after further discussion = “Me and my friend want to do something with you.”) All that confusion and blushed cheeks over two words.

“Are you died?” (Meaning “Are you on a diet?”) – This came upon refusing a rather sizeable quantity of beer.

(Pointing at a young girl) “This is my dog.” (Meaning “this is my daughter”). I know the feminists are just raging right now.

“You are a lunch today?” (Meaning “You had lunch today?”)

“I will drink you.” – to which I just had many witty unchristian responses that I kept dutifully suppressed with an ambassador-like decorum. (Meaning “I will telephone you to go out for drinks).

“I learned English very poorly.” (Meaning “My English is bad.”)

“You fat much.” (Meaning “How many kilos do you weigh?”)

“You are remember?” (Meaning “Do you remember me?”)

“Do you hot head?” (Meaning “Do you have a fever?”)

“Do I wrong?” (Meaning “Am I wrong?”)

(Using a poor online Vietnamese-English translator) “Did you run around naked yesterday?” (Meaning “Did you stay at your hotel yesterday?”) – I openly laughed at this as it caught me off guard and it took a few seconds to regain my composure.

“You are a chicken.” (Meaning “Do you eat chicken?”)

“I prefer to study English, what she has helped not you agree? I thank her.” (Meaning “I prefer studying English with her. She is helping us. Do you agree?”) – credit for the gusto to tackle such a complicated thought – but it was lost a bit in translation.

“I don’t English.” (Meaning “I don’t speak English very well.”)

“I want to be a count.” – To which in a moment of witty verbal diarrhea I said, “Honey, you’ll need a time machine and a countess.” – it fell flat. (They were trying to say, “I want to become an accountant.”)

“I want to kill her.” – The joys of love! He meant to say, “I want to kiss her.” Two tiny letters define the line between lust and premeditated murder. What’s the expression “Love and hate are horns on the same goat”. After all the opposite of love is not hate it’s indifference.

“Sit on me.” – I said no to that. They meant to say, “sit with me.”

“It’s getting winterier.” I had to have them repeat this a few times because I couldn’t understand the last word – turns out it’s not a word! They meant to say, “it’s gonna be winter soon.”

“Dance on me.” (Meaning “Dance with me.”). Just like the suggested awkward sitting what’s up with the confusion between on and with. It really makes a difference.

“Eyes her good.” (Meaning “Her eyes are beautiful.”)

“Late me.” (Meaning “I will be late”.)

“She is an apology” – Huh? (he meant “she apologized”). Ah yes, the tricky past tense.

There are two however that really stand out from the rest. The honorees into the Verbally Confused Hall of Fame. Drum roll please...

“Your lap is just beautiful. I really love it” – I was mortified when I heard this and didn’t know what to say…I squeaked out a weak thank you. That night I realized she meant to say, “your laugh is just beautiful. I really love hearing it.” So awkward in the moment – so weird.

A student came up to me in class and said “I have an issue with continence.” To this I very quietly said that I was not the person to talk to and that they should see their doctor. They had a puzzled look…I then realized the error. They meant to say, “I have an issue with consonants”. Oh vey!

It should be noted that these go both ways. One of my ETA friends was regaling me with a story about one of her classes. Somehow the term “manual labor” came up and the students inquired what this meant. In an attempt to be clear, short and simple the ETA responded. “it's a hand job.” Well the students immediately burst into laughter and dove into the gutter. The ETA tried to fix the error by clarifying “it’s a job you do with your hands” which only made things worse. The joys and pitfalls are so numerous that every class is a real adventure. God bless the English for English! It’s such an amusing language. I am going to a wedding tomorrow so I will blog about it next week.

Have a good week readers.