Vietnamese idealize Westerners in many unpredictable ways. They think that the height, fair skin and long noses of Westerners are vastly enviable. Some of them also fondly imagine that Western societies are comfortable, safe places to live, that a Western education is a ticket to knowledge and success and that public institutions in the West are run for the public good in a spirit of Enlightenment and efficiency.Let's start with the way the Vietnamese see Western bodies.
Younger Vietnamese women nowadays worry a lot about being short and they yearn to have fair skin and "high" noses. In the hope of attaining these things by artificial means, some of them get around in monstrous 4-inch flip-flops and apply vast amounts of skin-bleaching lotion to their bodies on a daily basis. As soon as they can afford it, many have surgery to add a little something their small, flattish noses.
Inevitably what they do on top of all this is look up to Western women for having the attributes of contemporary beauty they feel they lack. And they praise, and sometimes chase after, Western men who have the attributes too.
If you go to the supermarket in Vietnam and you're more than 5'8'', don't be surprised if the Vietnamese around you start spontaneously going "Cao!" ("My she's tall!") when they see you. Try to get in the spirit a little if they want to nestle against your ribcage and have their photo taken:
Guys, if Vietnamese women do any of these things to you, it doesn't mean they want to have your babies, it probably just means they're frankly surprised at what they're seeing.
Girls, if a 55 year old Vietnamese man with a crooked smile turns his head through a full 180 degrees to look at you as you go past in the street, it doesn't mean you have a stalker on your hands, all it probably means is that he's seeing Western Woman, live and in motion, for the first time.
Question: how did things come to be this way in Vietnam? How did Western body types, and Western faces, come to be so widely idealized? Part of the answer lies in the way Vietnam has opened itself up to the world since the early 1990's. Hollywood, women's magazines and the advertising industry have been beaming images of Western glamour into the country for more than 20 years now and all the imagery is associated uncritically by many Vietnamese with wealth, success and comfort. The more long-legged models Vietnamese people see on Western catwalks, the more buff bodies they see applying deodorant to capacious Western armpits, the more they have come to admire these things in Western visitors to Vietnam. And the more they've tried to re-create their own bodies in the same image.
Part of it though has nothing to do with chasing after the physical attributes of Western glamour. Vietnamese are not inclined to admire the white-ish complexion of Westerners because they've started secretly looking down on their own yellow-ish skin again, the way some of them did when Vietnam was a French colony. The reason they idealize whiteness is because they've always idealized it. In Vietnam, and in most of East Asia, very fair skin has been considered beautiful throughout most of history. No amount of socialist messaging about the beauty of manual labour has rid the Vietnamese of their ideal image of female beauty: a woman who has never had to do hard physical work in the sun.
This doesn't mean that Vietnamese find Westerners universally attractive or Western bodies universally enviable. There are a host of things about Western bodies that Vietnamese don't like or simply don't get - things that for Westerners themselves are normal but many Asians find positively ugly.
Because Vietnamese men hardly ever go bald, Vietnamese find male baldness quite troubling. On the other hand, they find general hairiness a real eyesore. (Male chest hair is not a sign of virility, it's a sign you are "chưa tiến hoá hết" - not yet fully evolved). And while some amount of blubber on a man is a sign that he has, in some sense, "made it", plump Western women are viewed with a mixture of pity and fear. (On the other hand, the way Western girls expose their skin to the tropical Vietnamese sun, letting it go an aggressive rosy hue, is just plain stupid.)
Vietnamese agree that Westerners who come to Vietnam tend to dress appallingly; they don't cover up enough of what isn't worth seeing about their bodies. To a normal inhabitant of Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, a half-drunk Australian wandering round the backpacker quarter of the city in a wife-beater and board shorts is a figure of nightmare. Girl backpackers with their muscles, their manly posture and their Asian-inspired gap-year hairdos are exotic in a bad way. . .
Although younger generations of Vietnamese might be slowly changing their minds on the issue of tattoos, older generations are still pretty much stuck where Western parents were 30 - 40 years ago: tattoos are trashy, especially on women.
Most of the younger generation would never get a tat for fear of scaring off a potential employer or starting their mothers howling at the moon.
So if you're a Vietnamese boy from a normal family and your girlfriend has a tat, then if you have any intention of taking her home to meet the p's, you know you're standing on the stairway to hell . . .
Tomorrow I'll talk about the funny ideas Vietnamese have about Westerners and money. But for today let's talk about the picture Vietnamese have of Western society in general. Needless to say, it is a very rosy picture. Which often works in Westerners' favour when they go to Vietnam. And which often works against Vietnamese who go to Western countries.
Vietnamese idealize Western education to the point where any higher degree will make you an attractive member of faculty at a Vietnamese University. Unfortunately, they also idealize Western education to the point where Vietnamese international students find it difficult to recognize the deep flaws in the Western universities they spend small Vietnamese fortunes enrolling in.
Let me talk for the time being about Australia, which (depending on the value of the Australian dollar) is where most Vietnamese international students aspire to go.
To be sure, your average Australian university lives up to standards of professionalism and organization that most Vietnamese universities fail to meet. And to be sure, the outright sale of degrees is rare in Australian universities - much rarer than in the darker corners of the Vietnamese university system. But none of that changes the basic facts (a) that academic standards have been on the slide in Australian universities for decades; (b) that a whole lot of purely vocational subjects have been lumped in with more academic offerings to give them a veneer of intellectual respectability; and (c) that over time the whole process of acquiring a tertiary education in Australia and the wider Western world has been subject to a sort of galloping inflation: Australian universities increasingly make their money providing higher and higher degrees that are of little intellectual substance (and often of little practical substance) to local students who need a degree to compete in the job market - and to international students whose main aim has little to do with education and much more to do with getting a ticket to stay in the country.
This system is not exactly designed to rip off international students. But because the universities are obliged to pretend that the main purpose of the whole process is education, rather than immigration, two big issues tend to get swept under the carpet: firstly, the fact that migration to places like Australia is getting more and more difficult by the year and secondly the fact that an expensive Australian university degree doesn't necessarily help you migrate to Australia anyway.
Specifically, a large number of Vietnamese students choose courses in fields that are on the Australian government's list of priority professions in the hope that at the end of their three-year degree they'll be able to slot neatly into a job - only to find three years later that their field of choice has slipped off the government list. And while many internationals enjoy being beyond the range of parental supervision, real liberty is out of the question. All but the super-rich can afford to devote themselves to study without working on the side, so Vietnamese internationals, like those from other countries, often work long hours for unscrupulous employers who pay them half the regular Australian wage. Then there are the language issues. To cope with the practical challenges of living in a strange new place, a lot of Vietnamese internationals spend their whole time surrounded by other Vietnamese internationals. In three years of university study, their English often ends up getting worse.
On top of it all is the psychological pressure applied by parents and relatives to stay and start a new life - the perceived shame associated with going back to Vietnam if you fail to make your way. Given the vast sums Vietnamese families shell out for Australian degrees, and the vague hopes some of them have about moving the whole family over in the long-term, stress levels among international students are often very high indeed.
Education is not the only thing that recent Vietnamese arrivals to Australia have slightly naive ideas about though. Most Vietnamese back home who are thinking about joining relatives in Australia imagine that Australia is not just an affluent country (which compared to Vietnam it is), but that the wealth is spread fairly evenly and hard work is all you need to get your hands on some of it. Many recent migrants are urban Vietnamese who don't realize that, in making the move to Australia, they are swapping a solid spot roughly half way up the Vietnamese social ladder for an uncomfortable spot close to the bottom of the Australian social ladder. The perceived glamour of moving to Australia, which of course only applies in the Vietnamese social universe, is all that counts. The intense lack of glamour of actually living in Australia is something they willfully ignore.
Then there are the Vietnamese back home who are interested in politics (often the ones who are down on the Communist Party) who tend to have a range of fixed ideas about Western society ranging from the mildly unrealistic to the wildly fantastic. To a certain sort of Vietnamese mind, the West is not just affluent, but deeply meritocratic. Western governments (on this picture) provide generously for their citizens' health and education. Elderly folk enjoy comfortable pensions and unemployed folk get generous government assistance. Western-style politics across the board is deeply liberal - a career in government is open to talent and personal idealism, plus Western constitutions afford formal protections to freedom of speech and association which play themselves out every day of the week in substantial political words and deeds (for instance in the freedom with which anti-communist Vietnamese can now start denouncing the ills of Vietnamese communism). Western political parties provide a veritable festival of political diversity; they compete for the votes of the citizenry in free elections whose results are not subject to manipulation by the rich and powerful, or any other sort of systematic distortion.
Unfortunately what this picture turns out to be is an upside-down image of what is lacking in Vietnam. Vietnam is not (yet) particularly affluent. Wealth and power (above all government connections) enable people in Vietnam to corner the best jobs and the most lucrative economic opportunities. The Vietnamese state keeps a moderately tight rein on public opinion and it provides little in the way of old-age pensions or universal health care. It actively directs the press. It monitors the internet for subversive activity. And if it doesn't like the sort of association or speech you are going in for, it will tell you in no uncertain terms to go home and put a sock in it.
The great age of freedom, justice and universal prosperity are clearly yet to dawn in Vietnam.
But unfortunately they are yet to dawn in places like Australia either.
You don't have to be Max Weber to see that the main feature of Australian politics are out-sized party machines operating in a media-dominated political landscape where people are encouraged to engage in politics purely at the level of spectacle. Behind the scenes, money flows readily into the war-chests of political parties from a range of sources - all of whom expect their interests to be looked after once their preferred candidates get into power. Indeed the state itself covers the cost of political parties - with the vast majority of the funding channeled directly into the two main party-machines.
The most practical application of Western freedom of speech seems to be people getting absurdly hot under the collar; judged by everyday political life , liberal democracy looks to be less about letting the people choose their political representatives, and more about letting them explain what a gutful they've had of everything to various professional rabble-rousers and pollsters. And while Asian Australians seem to be better represented in public office than Asian Americans, that doesn't stop ordinary Australians making active use of the right to free speech to tell them to go back to where they came from on a regular basis.
As for generous education and welfare provisions, it's easy enough for migrants to see that plenty of the schools they send their kids to are dysfunctional and unemployment benefits deliberately meagre. To a potential Vietnamese migrant back in Vietnam, $180/fortnight seems like a fantastic sum of money - it's an average Vietnamese monthly wage. To an actual Vietnamese migrant paying $A prices in the heartland of the $A, it's barely enough to cover rent.
Even compared with Communist Vietnam, everything that takes place in public space seems weirdly over-regulated; there are traffic lights every 50m and the CBD is just an ugly and enraging series of traffic filtering devices; if you can't work out how to use the hi-tech ticketing machines on the trains, you get heavied for 15 minutes by security personnel carrying truncheons. Buy a car and double park it for two seconds and they'll sting you for half your monthly wage (a vastly distressing situation for Vietnamese - for whom double parking is truly a way of life). Try making any adjustment to the house you're living in and you'll need a lawyer to deal with six months of bullsh*t from local council. Try starting a small business and you won't need a cart, a couple of glass cabinets and some piping hot edibles, as you do in Vietnam, you'll need a Masters in tax law and an advanced diploma in OHS.
These are only small exaggerations of organized public craziness in one particular Western country. The point though is this: if you've lived most of your life in Vietnam, the reality of organized Western-style public craziness can make the standard Vietnamese way of regulating human activity in public space (i.e. to frame general laws and then sort out specific difficulties by handing a kickback to the guy who hands out the permits) seem rational, efficient and fun.
None of which is to say that Vietnamese don't often find it worthwhile to stay in places like Australia if they can wing it. Some of the hopes and idealism they bring with them are surely vindicated in the long run. Compared to Vietnam, Western schooling methods are relatively open-minded, the urban environment is a hell of a lot cleaner and the level of outright corruption in the legal system fairly minimal. At the most basic level, staying and successfully winging it means being able to send money to poorer relatives back home.
What the slightly exaggerated picture does suggest though is that a lot of scales fall from Vietnamese eyes once they reach the West. Many international students end up staying in Australia by finding the money to pay for further degrees in quasi-technical subjects they are totally uninterested in. Many recent migrants end up accepting a life of menial labour and in the nastier corners of Australian towns and cities they resign themselves to living the life of second-class citizens. Being taunted every now and then by suburban rednecks for speaking their native language is something they get used to. Naturally, it's their kids they see as the real beneficiaries of their brave move away from Vietnam - at some indefinite point in the future.
If everything goes pear-shaped, then most of them can of course try their luck in Vietnam again. Australian university degrees do sometimes open up careers for international students back home. If they can bring enough of the cash they earn back to Vietnam with them, all those half-sad Vietnamese girls painting nails 70 hours a week in the suburbs mightn't regret their four years in Australia too much.
Going back to Vietnam first and foremost means trying to make good lost opportunities. If you've been in Australia for four years, those are four years you haven't been able to cultivate the sorts of connections that are vital to building careers back in Vietnam. For girls there's an extra dilemma. The pressure Vietnamese put on their daughters to marry in their mid-20's is intense, so unless said daughters come back to Vietnam with a nice Aussie boy, they might feel their four years downunder have made a mess of their marriage prospects.
Last but not least, going back means facing the music from all the friends and relatives who naively assumed that a country which produces so many tall, fair, long-nosed people must be some sort of social paradise.
How can it be that returning students don't grow taller, whiter and longer in the nose during all those years in the other place?
A lot of the time all they seem to bring back is attitude.
This in the end might be the bitterest drop that remains in the cup of Vietnamese internationals coming back from the West: the mild aversion they find themselves feeling to the messier features of Vietnamese life - to the noise, the crowds, the barnyard manners, the chaotic informality and sheer tackiness - in short to all the stuff that tall, fair, long-nosed Westerners tend to idealize when they come for their gap-year adventures. . .
Yeah, I saw lots of Westerners out in public in Saigon dressed the way I would if I was doing laundry in my own basement at 5 o'clock in the morning.
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