Gee, But it's Great to be Back Home.

After a month in Vietnam, I'm back in the good old P.R. of China, my adopted home! And let me tell you, after the kind of life I've become accustomed to, I found Vietnam downright strange.

Culture shock began right across the border. I'd caught a mini-van into Hanoi, and right away I could sense something was different. The atmosphere inside the van was comprised of some clear, odorless gas. I've got to tell you, breathing in something you can't see or taste - inside a public vehicle no less - is pretty unsetting.

I went to a restaurant in Hanoi; it was also filled with the same translucent gas. For the first time in recent memory I could both see and smell my food. It was only after eating that I began noticing a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was twitchy, irritable and restless, as if I was missing something on a cellular level. I went to an Internet cafe (also filled with the transparent gas), and did a Google search on my symptoms. Would you believe it? I got 25 pages describing mine as symptoms of nicotine withdrawal! Guess it just goes to show that you can't always trust the Internet - I don't even smoke!

I noticed that nobody in the Internet cafe was smoking, despite the fact that they were all well over 11, and realized that nobody on the bus had been smoking either. Man these people must really must be poor. Note to self: bring a few cartons of Pandas on next trip!

I'd thought that because Vietnam was south of China, I could just get by with a polyglot of southern-accented Putonghua, but my attempts at communication got me nowhere fast. So I decided to spend a couple of days in Hanoi studying the language before moving on. And that's when the real trouble began. One morning I went out to practice my newly learned phrases, and discovered how truly rude the Vietnamese really are.

That morning, I'd approached a woman in the market, and in my newly learned Vietnamese, said "Hello." She replied "Hello." I stood there smiling mutely, waiting for her to compliment me. Nothing, nada, zip. So I continued. "How are you?" "Fine, thank you." she answered.

Now, back in China, I can barely get past "hello" in Mandarin without having the person I'm speaking with respond with an encouraging "Wow! You can speak our Chinese. You are great! How is it possible that white person has managed to properly pronounce the words ni hao? The folks in Wuhan aren't going to believe this!"

But this Vietnamese didn't seem to realize that the appropriate response to any initiation of communication from a white person was abject obsequiousness. I thought maybe she was just having a bad day, but I tried the routine on a number of different people, and always with the same response.

"Excuse me," I would ask, "where is the train station?" In China, this sentence usually elicits admiring sonnets of Shakespearean proportion. In Hanoi, all I got was the cold shoulder "Down the street, on the left," Or "that way."

And another thing about the Vietnamese is that they really know how to make a guy feel unloved. In China, I know that I'm welcome everywhere by the way that strangers take the time from their busy schedules to scream a friendly "Hello!" in my direction every eight seconds. Even if I'm just crossing the street against the light, reading on a train, talking on my cell phone or engaged in conversation with another person, I can rest assured in the knowledge that in any given minute at least seven people will shout out a friendly, fourth-tone "HELLO!" at me, even if they have to stick their head out the bus window to make themselves heard above the honking. It's comforting. Sadly, in Vietnam, the only ones who did this were young children and the sweetly retarded.

After four days in Hanoi, I was considering heading right back into China. But then I figured that maybe people were just naturally ruder in the capitol, so I decided I'd head south. My shakes were finally starting to clear up, so I took a train to the ancient city of Hue. (The train was also filled with that transparent vapor, but I guess I'd built up a tolerance for it.) The ride was nice, but I could hardly hear myself think over the near-silence. Vietnamese people must not have anything important to say to each other; when they have conversations, you can barely hear them talk even if you're in the same car with only four rows between you. I figure they all read lips or something.

Hue was pretty at least, but if anything the prettiness made the rudeness of the inhabitants even more pronounced. In restaurants, I was offered no encouragement when it came to using the provided utensils. Once I even feigned unfamiliarity, setting my chopsticks clumsily between thumb and forefinger before finally "figuring out" how to use them to put food into my mouth. Nobody even noticed! Maybe I was just fishing for compliments, but even after 30 years using chopsticks, how can I be sure that I've got the technique down except through endless positive reinforcement from natives? I mean, don't all non-Asians need to be told that, despite the burdensome handicap of our race, we've managed to master the rote mechanical behaviors of the other 50% of the planet's population? Sometimes I just wanted to stand on my chair with my bowl in one hand and chopsticks in the other, as if to say "Hell-o!? White person using chopsticks here! How about a little recognition? Hello?"

I got worried that maybe after a week away from the constant encouragement on my ability to make the long leap from fork to sticks, I was doing something so terribly wrong that my hosts were embarrassed to tell me. But nobody seemed to care.

And that brings me to another strange thing about Vietnam: I don't think the Vietnamese found me terribly attractive. They hardly even looked at me for more than three seconds at a glance. I mean, don't get me wrong; people made eye contact. But absent were those long, lengthy gazes that I've grown so accustomed to here in China, where grown men will swivel their heads 270 degrees as I walk by to favor me with a long, unblinking stare that, prior to coming to China I'd always assumed a person might reserve for never-before seen zoo animal. From the complete lack of bewildered enchantment they showed me you'd think the Vietnamese consider westerners to be more or less a part of the same species as themselves.

Anyway, despite the barbarically indifferent treatment shown me by the locals, I still think Vietnam was a pretty cool place. The beaches were very nice, though they really need to cover more of their sand with trash if they expect to attract tourists from the home country. And the food was delicious, though I was a bit taken aback when I ate at the same restaurant three days in a row, ordering the same dish each time only to find no noticeable fluctuation in quality, quantity or price from day to day (what was it Emerson said about foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds?)

So in the name of cultural exploration, I forced myself to endure Vietnam's abundance of consistently good food and clean, tastefully decorated, reasonably priced hotels. I was lucky in that most of the hotels I stayed in had CCTV9 (hard to find though it was, wedged between such usually unavailable in China "filler" channels as CNN, BBC, HBO and the Star Movie channel). Thus, I was able to keep abreast of important developments back home, like the fact that there is a bar in Shanghai where, on certain nights, visitors can see a black man who can simultaneously speak Chinese AND mix drinks.

So naturally I'm glad to be back in China. Crossing back into my adopted motherland, I breathed in a refreshing lungful of flavorful, charcoal-filter air, and was reminded just what a truly unique and profound individual I am when my first Mandarin utterance in nearly a month ("how much for a bottle of water?") moved a row of gawking beverage-sellers to tears. I knew I was finally home.

Joshua Samuel Brown - June, 2004 - www.josambro.com