Sojourning On

It’s time to ante up and put humor aside. Before I continue here it should be noted that some of the language used here is not pretty and is at best described as crude and unchivalrous. I am more educated and was raised better than that but sometimes an explicative is the only emotional utterance to truly capture the feeling.

Vietnam ain’t no joke and trying to function here in both a basic and professional sense is at times simply impossible. To start with I am tired, dogged tired – the way I felt toward the end of my undergraduate career. Part of it is my type A personality which pushes to make everything I do, every lesson plan, handout, homework, test perfect in both substance and aesthetics. The other part of this is that I am doing too much. 5 classes, 3 speaking clubs, movie nights and soft skill seminars have left me with practically no time to breathe.

I have gotten some of this under control by clamping down on the soft skill seminars after the disaster that was Public Speaking and backing off on the speaking clubs. These are just the adjustments to working but complicating this even more is the unfortunate and frustrating cultural mechanics. This can only be explained through a story.

To start I cut my Thanksgiving weekend in Hanoi short to return to Cao Lanh and administer an ESC for “staff”. I put staff in quotes because the club members are leaders of the local party, teachers at other colleges, business that support the colleges etc. This is part club and part let’s show off our ETA as Dong Thap Community College is the only institution in the entire province to have an ETA. It has tones from the scholarship donors that they are cashing in on what they pay for.

Well Co Dung and I spent hours planning this, finding articles, translating them, making games and the like. On my bus ride back from HCMC to Cao Lanh I was fuming. First I was tired. I had to leave my friends on a Holiday and return to do this pony show that I wasn’t interested in doing at all. Plus I was told that 58 people had signed up. The thought of managing and correcting 58 adults/donors was daunting. And it was set for 8 a.m. on Sunday – I was not a happy Fulbrighter. But I convinced myself that these feelings were childish and pathetic – so I shoved those honest reactions down and said this is your job, get with it. Well I get to the club and 6, that’s right 6 out of 58, just 10% of the club showed up. We waited and waited and nobody else showed so on with the overly planned show! It was such a farce, and I said on Monday to my director – no more! It was over planned and a waste of my time. If only 6 are going to come then what’s the point of bending over backwards killing my sleep-deprived self to plan a club for 60?

Well, the debacle of the staff ESC(English Speaking Club) was an omen. Later that week my co-teacher and I showed up to give an English Speaking Club on Healthy Life and zero students showed up. We waited and waited and finally it was called off. In the end it was realized that no students were available to come as the youth union had pre-planned activities that night. So why for the love of GOD was the ESC scheduled for the night that was planned well in advanced when NO STUDENTS WERE FREE???? After having a bitch smoothie (i.e. a smoothie over which you vent and unwind and bitch) I cooled off and said it’s Vietnam. The rubber stamp, last-minute dysfunction that I heard so much about from other ETAs.

Then a weekend passes and I think the abnormality of last week was just that a blip on the radar. WRONG! On Tuesday morning during my Vietnamese lesson a teacher walks in and starts talking with my director (who was giving me the lesson, but that’s beside the point). After a 10 minute undecipherable avalanche of tonal gibberish my director turns to me and says tomorrow morning you will only have 2 periods to teach. The dean wants to use four periods thus I just lost an hour of class time. What am I to say? Nobody consulted Co Dung or me and it’s a dean…so let’s just slash the piddle English class. Right?!

I put on my best ambassador smile (to mask my aghast and anger at being told what would happen to me and my students without input) and said sure I can work it out. So throughout the day Co Dung and I are communicating with the director reconfirming the start time for Wednesday. Wednesday arrives Co Dung and I show up at the new start time to accommodate the Dean. Well we got to the building and one of our students comes out and starting speaking to Co Dung in very fast Vietnamese and my only thought was “Oh, shit, what now?”.

Turns out the previous night the Dean chose not to use our period and didn’t bother to tell anybody – including Me and Co Dung, the teachers he usurped for his lecture. Thus that morning our class waited and waited and then left! So class was canceled. What is absolutely infuriating is that Co Dung or I weren’t consulted or acknowledged in this process. We are the only ones who can determine if we can skip to reduce class time (and we can’t) not the dean – who I have never met. Then he just decides not to show and not tell us so our students lose out. How rude, unprofessional and pathetic. You’re a dean – act like one, not a two year old in the sandbox. Not to fret this Dean will re-enter my story.

On top of all this I had a movie night last week where my host gets the movie (from nefarious sources but I don’t ask questions) so that it will have Vietnamese subtitles. The movie starts at 6:30 pm. At 6 I get a knock on my door and it’s Mr. Lam my director, not Mr. Hung my host. He informs me that Mr. Hung is having a party and won’t attend so he (Mr. Lam) is filling in. A party? A party? What! Any who I took a deep breath and said "give me 15 minutes to change and I will meet you in the lecture hall". I show up with my laptop which had an introductory slide show and Mr. Lam says "Do you have speakers"? To which I said, "why"? Now that may seem an unintelligent answer but this lecture hall has huge mounted speakers along the walls. Thus I assumed (since we did this for the last 2 movie nights) that we would use those speakers. Apparently nobody could find the cord so I raced to get my tiny speakers that I used for class. I plugged them in and was told that they were too weak – YA THINK?! On top of that nobody had the movie. At first they assumed I had it. Once they realized I didn’t own Rio let alone a bootlegged Vietnamese subtitled version and that Mr. Hung, who was throwing a party had it the light bulb went off. So 40 students and I waited and waited for somebody to retrieve the movie – nearly half an hour later it arrived.

That ended last week – two bombastic clubs, one cancelled class, one near disaster movie night and one imperious, pretentious dean with a Napoleonic complex. By this point it was clear to me that things were administratively falling apart and that the machine that is DTCC was breaking down. I was feeling more tired and resentful then ever.

Today, Wednesday I showed up in the office and was told that my class wasn’t on the schedule. Steam came out of my ears and through a clenched, passive aggressive smile and I inquired the reason why. Well that dean decided to cancel my class, this time without telling me or Co Dung (at least last time we were told – though not asked) so he could use our class time since he didn’t want to get up and give his talk in the morning. He marked off 4 periods and wound up only using 2 (he has a serious issue estimating time) so as I saw my students leaving I told my director to get them to class, Co Dung and I were teaching. Of course this meant they had no textbooks but we made do. Tonight was also the night when we were supposed to hold the ESC that was canceled last month. Like last month there were youth-union activities and thus no available students so nobody showed up – AGAIN. FOR THE SAME REASON. They had a month to get their shit together and they made the exact same blunder. OMG.

THE ADMINISTRATIVE INCOMPENTINCE IS STAGGERING. It’s like herding deaf blind cats. How does this place function as a business? If it were in the US or Australia or Europe it would have folded long ago. And this chauvinistic culture which enables (and to some degree encourages men) deans and others in power to misbehave and treat their colleagues like scum only makes it worse.

Beyond these professional challenges and being overworked Vietnam as a whole is just getting up in my grill. I am sick of the heat, the sun and the bugs (I have so many bites that my legs and feet look like a relief map of the Andes). I am sick of men acting like pigs and treating women like sexual chattels. I am sick of begin expected to join in on the jokes that are disgusting, brutish, slovenly and frankly backward. I am also sick, literally physically ill of the smoking. The men here chain smoke. They just light them up one right after the other and they don’t even think about those around them. They know smoking is bad – they all tell me they should quit and then offer me a cigarette and smoke three or four in a row. I HAVE A RIGHT TO CLEAN AIR. AIR THAT WON’T GIVE ME CANCER! At this point I just say I have work and I get up and leave.I am tired of being a zoo animal. I have lived here for 3 months and won’t leave for another 6 and still people stare and gawk and yell (tây, tây, tây!) at me when I walk to the market or bakery or store. It’s the same white guy you saw yesterday and three months before, just go about your day and leave me be.

The physical manifestation of this is constant. I don’t fit. I literally don’t fit in Vietnam. I am a square peg trying to be jammed into a round hole. I realize I am an ergonomic outlier but being constantly reminded of it grates on me. The doors are too short, the beds are barely long enough, sheets are too short, counters are too low, stools are too low, chairs are too low and too narrow (some have gotten stuck on my hips), I can’t sit at a table and get my thighs under it and the shower heads come up to my shoulders so I stoop down and become a contortionist to wash my hair and neck. All of these are near constant reminders that I don't belong here, in this place and only buttresses my emotional spiral.

This process is making me resent people, resent the culture that hinders professional expediency and logic, and resent Vietnam as an ambiguous unit at which I can direct my rage. It’s the holidays. I am alone, I am tired and the things that make me me are not here. I can’t cook (the counters come up to my crotch so it is super painful and the ingredients are so strange and dizzying it’s mind numbing), there’s no theatre, cinemas, or any form of entertainment and I have nobody to share this with who really gets it (i.e. a foreigner). All of this is just churning into a noxious mess and at times I want Vietnam to just melt away.

I am going to schedule more me time, more time to read my kindle and back off on the workload. Perhaps that will help. Or perhaps it’s growing pains? Right now to keep my sanity I have retracted and am focused on my students (who show up as the usual absentee rate is 2/3 of my class) and getting them to talk and have fun. The rest of it, the ESCs, movie nights, and other things are falling down my priority list. I have come to grips that I am allowed to vent, bitch and struggle through this. What I can’t allow to happen is for these knee-jerk reactions to be my final lasting impressions and I won’t let that happen. I just won’t live my next 6 months like this.

The next stage of culture shock is acceptance and I am so tired I might just roll over and give in. Do I have another choice?