15 Things about Vietnam #15 - The Street

Vietnamese cities are pretty crowded places and the majority of people who live in them aren't rich enough to afford air conditioning, so much of the basic business of life, and the equally important business of relaxation, tends to spill out into the street:

One thing you'll notice when you first arrive here is that at least half the basic economic transactions of daily life happen in the street. In the morning, middle-aged ladies assemble mobile kitchens and sell their wares, drive-by-style, to passing bikers:

At lunchtime and again in the late afternoon, the canvas awnings are rolled back and the aluminium tableware comes out: the street becomes an enormous open-air restaurant, through which various dogged parties pick their way, selling lottery tickets, snack-food and shoe shines.

As well as eating and drinking, a lot of general chatter takes place out of doors. Vietnamese streets endlessly fill and re-fill with half-busy people ever ready to crouch down and start a conversation - or just loiter generally minding each others' business:

Walking any distance along a Vietnamese city street is practically impossible for these and various other reasons. At your ankles there kids you want to avoid whacking into with your knees. Overhead there are low-hanging wires you want to avoid being decapitated by. And round about there are various fast-, slow- and non-moving objects that appear in your path at every turn.

For latter-day Vietnamese who don't have the tech skills to enter the growing market in online sales, the obvious thing to do is get their hands on cheap Chinese consumer goods, lay them out on plastic sheeting and try to interest the passing traffic.

Not that regular businesses have the luxury of off-street parking. In most parts of a regular Vietnamese city, motorbikes come to occupy at least half the space between street and shopfront that isn't occupied by people gabbling:

 

 

In spite of the inconveniences, Westerners tend to find it all immensely picturesque and it's actually a little bit interesting to consider the deeper reasons why.

My guess is it's partly because, at least in places like Australia and the US, a lot of us grow up away from the street, in the relatively sanitized private environment of the family home - since the 60's, with the luxury of a private bedroom and since the 90's with the special joys and miseries of the internet. Down the decades, the sense of physical separation between Inside and Outside has only increased; the more attention parents pay to shrill media messages about the terrors of urban living, the more reasonable it seems to quarantine kids from the evils of the street by providing them with access to the ersatz social worlds of the www.

The increasing separation between Inside and Outside that this leads to is well recognized and widely bemoaned. The aspect of the problem that is harder to think about is the way life has been drained bit by bit from what's left of the Outside - a general social process that has also been underway since at least the 1960's and is not just down to the way Western suburbanites raise their kids.

In downtown Melbourne, where your correspondent comes from, anyone who wants to buy or sell anything, in the street or anywhere else, needs to get a permit. Anyone who goes anywhere near food that is destined for the general public needs a diploma in OH and S. Security cameras (or armed guards) cast their unblinking eyes across every imaginable public space. Drinkers and smokers are alternately taxed death and told to pick up their game. And traffic is controlled to within an inch of its life by a system of fees and fines and ad campaigns which basically suggest that anyone who does anything against the rules is about to unleash a horror movie on himself and his fellow citizens.

If you ride a motorbike, you're pretty much told you're going to die: 

If you run a pub, your life turns into a red-faced affair overshadowed by menacing signage:

And if you generally loiter in the street or try to strike up a conversation with a stranger, you'll get the upside-down smiles and leave-me-alone looks that busy, anxious people tend to give anyone trying to knock them off their pre-established paths. Meanwhile, Sydney and its lockout laws apparently makes Melbourne look happy and fun.  

The catalogue of blandness could go on indefinitely and it would be naive to think that all the initiatives and campaigns and plans that brought about the General Reign of Bland were started by any particular group in society. Governments in Western countries realize that making things bland and regular makes them taxable; insurers insist that the possibility of accidents, seemingly of any minor mishap, has to be anticipated and forestalled; and corporations try indefatigably to corner (or create) markets in all the regularized goods and services that the bland logic of the system demands; acting on all of them, in more or less direct ways, are the opinions of concerned citizens who see particular problems and demand general solutions. The point however is this: taken together, all the general improvements lead Normal Western Humans to feel as if most of the colour has been bleached out of day-to-day life, and city streets in particular.

Now switch to the Vietnamese street, with its moveable feasts, its sprawling sales, its riotous motorbiking. Is it any wonder Vietnamese public space feels manifestly freer to Westerners than the places they come from?

Though some of the sense of freedom surely comes down to the sheer purchasing power of Western currencies (and some comes from sheer unconcern about the political limitations on freedom of speech and association that constrain the Vietnamese themselves), some of it comes from the fact that in Vietnam all of the semi-random encounters and ill-defined public semi-events that make for the fun of urban life are left to get by on their own, without being systematically improved, cleansed and certified.

Yet as fun as Westerners find the chaotic informality of Vietnamese urban life, it's doubtful whether most of them could really cope in the long run. However attractive Vietnamese street life can be made to sound by those who come to the place for 3 weeks, be warned that there are a raft of things that will get to you if you stay for 3 months or 3 years.

The noise of dense urban living will get to you. (As will the routine of good old-fashioned country living.)

The way Vietnamese treat public spaces like garbage dumps will drive you round the bend.

Above and beyond that, Vietnamese people's willingness to live life fully under the gaze of other people will seriously challenge your sense of ownership of your own experience.

Today, in the final installment in this series, a rough guide to the specific irritants and the wider psycho-philosophical issues that are in play in Vietnamese streets and in Vietnamese social life at large.

*

Let's start with the Vietnamese sense of urban space, the general sense of "there" that is manifest in the street and in a lot of other places as well.

Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that in Vietnam there are spaces within spaces. What to Westerners look like simple, indivisible segments of the urban landscape, in Vietnam are home to multiple forms of life, indeed to whole hierarchies of life.

An example. The area in front of the gate of a house in a regular Vietnamese city street, say 6m by 2m, has the same psychic dimensions as a whole street in suburban Australia or America. Like the latter, it can be divided and subdivided for functional or aesthetic purposes; it has its sunny side and its shady side, its corners in which kids and grownups can submerge themselves or show off what they’ve got.

Similarly, a recess in a Vietnamese city wall turns into a miniature barber shop when fitted out with a mirror the size of an A4 page, a chair, a barber and a (male) individual willing to have his crop tended within a metre of the passing traffic:

Step into the real undergrowth of Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi and you'll find a dense network of alleys - in the South called "hẻm", in the North "ngõ". Google maps don't display them and only true locals can guide you through them. Their defining characteristic are houses stacked on top of each other at irregular angles. Seen from above they are every cubist's dream:

Seen from below they're more for lusty social realists. The wider variety of alley make you want to open your shoulders and head for the horizon. In the smaller variety you have to be careful not to elbow roadside diners in the back of the head:

Out on the main roads, you need only look at the traffic to realize you are in a world governed by a more fluid spatial order. When the traffic gets jammed up, the bikes lurch forward foot by foot, their riders within arms length of each other. When thing are flowing smoothly, a strange imperative seems to govern the movement of everything: the imperative to shift into any vacant spaces. (In basic terms, everyone's always cutting everyone else off.)

What still surprises me is how few curses are directed at the owners of all the shiny new SUVs that are appearing each year by the 1000, turning loud, nippy motorbike travel into a vast feat of patience. When everyone rode or a motorbike 20 years ago, the limited available space on the roads was at least divided democratically (the majority got the majority of the limited space). Nowadays driving a motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi involves the majority watching Vietnam's vulgar middle classes hogging as much space as they dare:

*

Constraints of space apply as fully within the family home as they do in the street. Normal Vietnamese boys and girls bunk two, three or four to a room. Again, it's only the rich who can afford to provide their kids with separate bedrooms and even if they do, the bedrooms often don't have intervening doors: Vietnamese parents expect to be able to keep an eye on what their offspring are doing at all hours of the day and the night.

Much of this will no doubt change as the country gets wealthier, but what it means in basic terms is that Vietnam is just setting out on the historical path that Western countries have been headed down for the greater part of 150 years - the path that leads to bringing up children with a demonstrative sense of individuality given physical scope to develop in a private space of its own.

We are talking about the creation of the nuclear family as the normal unit of immediate social life - something which to many Vietnamese still seems like a desperate invention. In the countryside, where 65% of Vietnamese still live, extended families are the norm; houses are often home to three or four generations or several branches of the same family. In big cities, the price of housing keeps many couples living with their folks for most of their married lives. Traditionally, the Vietnamese norm was to "làm dâu" - after marriage, women lived with their husband's folks. If they can handle the blow to traditional male pride involved, some men nowadays choose to live with their wives' folks ("ở rể").

For Westerners brought up in individualized compartments, what it means for all living space to be by definition small and inter-generational can be hard to comprehend. For kids it doesn't just mean sharing with siblings and cousins, it also means sharing with granny and being constantly under granny's now watchful, now solicitous gaze. That this is an intense experience is undeniable, not least because most Vietnamese kids don't just look up to their grandparents or enjoy being spoilt by them the way kids do in the West, they honour their grandparents as if they were half way to being gods. (See 15 Things about Vietnam #12 for a proper run down on Ancestor Worship.)

Clearly for the longest time it was economics that limited the amount of space normal Vietnamese allotted to individual family members or separate social purposes. For most of its history, to be sure, Vietnam has been a poor, agricultural nation. As in agricultural societies throughout the world, big families were the norm because having extra children meant having more hands on deck at harvest time; everybody's life was caught up in a deeply communal enterprise (rice farming) which almost never left farmers with enough money to build big houses.

Culture, however, plays just as important a part here. Having the whole family under one roof in fairly cramped conditions actually makes a deep sort of sense when it's your ethical duty to repay your aging parents for the trouble of raising you by tending to their needs in old age and worshiping their spirits in the central room of the family abode when they pass to the other side. And that, by and large, is still the way the Vietnamese see it.

The abstract question which life put to Vietnamese people - in the past and to a much greater extent today, when the drive to individual self-definition is becoming an ever more forceful part of the culture - is how to maintain a minimal sense of personal autonomy when masses of relatives surround you at home and even bigger crowds of non-relatives continually form and re-form in front of your nose when you walk out the door.

The answer lies in the creation of spaces within spaces.

Here's the key: space in Vietnamese terms is something that comes to be defined mentally rather than physically.

We are not talking here about any sort of high-powered intellectual feat, but an average everyday exercise in slipping into available spaces and spinning whatever extra space you need out of the space between your ears. Just as there are two ways of living a long life – by kicking yourself to be healthy every day of the year in the hope you’ll live to 100, or by making the individual moments of your life swell and distend – so there are two ways of living at ease with the physical limitations of human bodies: either you can thrash out more space for yourself, or you can extend your sense of your space out to infinity, however physically limited it might be in point of fact.

Vietnamese seem to have mastered the latter trick and can seem slightly uncanny to individualistic Westerners who've lost it or never had it in the first place. And the arrangements they come to inside and outside the home - the fact that half of Vietnamese life is lived at or close to the threshold where the relative privacy of the family home becomes absolutely public - is testament to the achievement.

When you're in Vietnam you'll obviously have to adjust your individual spatial settings. At the most basic level, expect to be interrupted - expect interlopers of various kinds to insert themselves into spaces you might have thought you were occupying exclusively. If you go traveling with certifiable Vietnamese folk, expect to have to share a bed with two or three of your fellow travelers (of the same sex). And don't expect them to understand whatever urge you might have to isolate yourself from your fellow human beings, even if it's just for an hour or two. Indoors and out, expect to find yourself retracting a little when you're confronted with a world of other bodies unselfconsciously occupying confined spaces en masse. As a pedestrian, enjoy the slightly miraculous effect of stepping out in front of a fast-moving stream of motorbikes and watching it part to make space for you. And if you're on a motorbike yourself and stuck in traffic, don't expect anyone to apologize when the rear-vision mirrors of other bikes clack against yours in the booming huddle at the lights.     

*

A second condition of urban life that locals adjust to easily is noise - an issue that may or may not reduce you to tears of frustration when you first arrive.

Basically, we are talking about the possibility of ear-splitting public or private activity taking place in your immediate vicinity any day of the week, at any stage between the hours of 5am and 11pm.

In big cities - and in a lot of smaller towns too - you will have to put up with heavy-duty building activity. Vietnam is in the process of urbanizing at a cracking pace and that fact is reflected both in its city skylines and in the basic conditions of everyday life. Urban real estate markets are booming and anyone with spare cash is improvising some sort of box-shaped add-on to existing buildings

Or indeed going the whole hog and building his own skinny stack of boxes:

Let's put it this way, none of the owners of any of the boxes worry too much about their neighbour's rest and repose as they go about entering the real estate game. In Vietnam you will get no warning whatsoever if your neighbour decides he wants to play around with a hammer drill on the other side of your bedroom wall.

If you're living in an apartment block and there are Vietnamese families on any of the surrounding levels, don't be surprised if dull thudding noises start up at 6 in the morning. It's probably not the builders. (They'll start at 7.30.) It's Vietnamese housewives using blunt instruments to prepare the day's lunch.

Out on the town, the performance is repeated in various forms that will amaze and disturb you. Some shopping centres direct a permanent stream of heavily-amplified spruiking into the street - something that sounds like a kind of lengthy verbal rendition of a car-crash. Plenty of electronics retailers send a kind of lurid backbeat blaring into the street until late in the evening for no other purpose than to attract attention above the roar of the traffic. Even Vietnamese street hawkers are armed with amplifiers nowadays. Gone are the days when they had to use raw lung-power to advertise their wares; nowadays their repetitive recordings ascend far into the stratosphere and penetrate the walls of expat garrets as surely as the noise of building work.

When you first arrive in Vietnam you might start by thinking that this kind of behaviour makes a mockery of all those notions of community that pretty much define Vietnam in the eyes of the world - and in the eyes of many of the locals too. The Vietnamese have always prided themselves on their ability to take concerted collective action and the fact that they (some of them) banded together to fight off large armies of ruthless invaders is thought by half the world to prove this. So how can they start bashing the walls at 6 in the morning in brazen defiance of any notion of communal peace?

The third morning in a row when you get woken up, tired and emotional, after 4 hours of sleep by copious local racket is the moment when you swear that the Vietnamese collective ethos is a sorry myth.

At some stage you need to face reality though: the locals' tolerance towards noise is so high that the racket creates little disturbance to anyone but you. The fact is the Vietnamese can sleep through anything. Unless she's fully aware that she has sensitive foreign neighbours, the woman wielding the blunt instruments in the flat above yours will assume she's not disturbing anyone. Even if she is aware, she might think racket is something that foreigners in Vietnam have to put up with. (In which case you are really in the Scheisse.)

When I first moved to Vietnam, I had to contend with a phenomenon I came to call the crazy chipmunk music. It took me several weeks to work out that the tinny kids' voices haunting my morning dreams were coming from a local primary school that was using some sort of cartoon soundtrack to gee up the 6 year olds as they filed through the gate in the early morning haze. Either that or some of older ladies doing their stretches in the park were doing something en masse with helium. . .

As I'm sure you've gathered by now, the day begins early in these parts of East Asia; the racket of daily life is not only loud racket, it is racket that starts up shortly after dawn. 5.30 in the morning is to your average Vietnamese what 7.30 in the morning is to your average Westerner; it's the time when many rise, when some have already risen and when only night owls are still fast asleep.

Ho Chi Minh himself, when he was being fêted by the French media in the 1950's, used to hold his press conferences at 6, after doing his morning stretches, writing several letters and washing his safari suits by hand. No doubt the gentlemen of the Parisian press thought he was a man of stern habits. But to Vietnamese he would've just seemed like a regular kind of guy.

It is not clear to me where this tolerance to noise actually comes from and Westerners tend to assume that it has something to do with the noisy disturbances of the War. This seems unlikely for sheer demographic reasons. 60% of Vietnamese alive today were born after 1975. Which means the majority have had no direct experience at all of the saddest and loudest event in modern Vietnamese history.

My suspicion is that the whole thing again has to do with cramped living conditions, which require Vietnamese to sleep and to retain their waking poise through the wildest dances of hell. Perhaps what goes with the habit of operating normally within severe constraints of space is a certain psychological reflex to "retire within yourself", rather than letting yourself be over-stimulated by the noisy, hyperactive world around you. The mental spaces the Vietnamese create for themselves to escape the tight physical spaces they inhabit would on this theory also be quiet spaces into which they can gently step back, in the midst of overwhelming domestic racket.

It will be interesting to see whether as a Westerner you can acquire something of the same mental knack, given that you were probably brought up with a bit more peace and quiet. Actually converting to Buddhism for the sake of acquiring the knack is probably a bridge too far, but my sense is that's the surest way. Buddhism drives the art of maintaining your poise in difficult conditions to a pinnacle of philosophical perfection. No wonder it remains popular in Vietnam - among busy city folk as much as anyone.

As a Western visitor confronted with extreme noise, you might be able to ask the locals to tone it down a bit. But a lot of the time you simply won't be able to create what might seem to you to be sane, peaceful conditions by asking the Vietnamese around you to adjust their behaviour to your needs.

My main practical advice to expats would be - when choosing an apartment in Vietnam be very careful. Go for out-of-the-way places that have a no-dogs policy and preferably as few Vietnamese families as possible; one of the side-effects of the locals' adoration of children is that they let their kids scream and play with brazen electronic toys at all hours of the day and night.

To begin with, serviced apartments catering mainly to foreigners (including the noise-averse Japanese) are probably better than big blocks with lots of Vietnamese owner-occupants. The proprietors of serviced apartments tend to be more aware of Western sensitivities than regular folk. In big blocks of flats with lots of Vietnamese families, the only thing standing between you and surrealism is the demure secretary of the body corporate.

If you want to go part of the way down the Buddhist track, then start by trying this exercise. Stand in the street and eyeball the motorbikes, the building works, the crowds. But listen only to the live column of your own breath as it passes from the inner recesses of your head into the depths of your lungs. See if you can spend five whole minutes paying attention to the moving column alone - not to your thoughts about the moving column - not to thoughts about anything other than the moving column. If one day you can do it for 5 minutes, then the next day try it for 10 minutes. After a month or two you will hopefully have created a little gap between yourself and the wider realm of Vietnamese Racket.

And if none of that works? Find yourself an eco-resort and get well away from the Vietnamese street on a regular basis. Buy some heavy-duty earplugs. Look up the marvelous recordings of raw fan noise on Youtube and plug yourself in when the street is giving you the irits. Try and laugh a little at the way the Vietnamese sleep, or even kind of bask, amid The Racket - it sure beats crying and gnashing your teeth.

* 

After space and noise issues, the next thing you're going to have to cope with is the mess.

Normal Vietnamese seem to be willing to turf their garbage just about anywhere, either on the assumption that someone else will clean it up later, or on the assumption that it doesn't matter if someone else cleans it up later or not. Again it seems strange that such an obvious tragedy of the commons should unfold in public space in a country where the demands of the collective still trump the needs of the individual in most of the everyday affairs of life.

The problem, unfortunately, is more complex than a lack of everyday environmental awareness on the part of normal Vietnamese. Again it's grounded deeply in economics - modern economics this time. The growth of a local plastics industry has been one of the success stories of the past 25 years; Vietnamese plastics producers compete bravely in the international market, supplying half the known world with packaging and plastic sheets. They also supply the local market with more plastic than the Vietnamese know how to use.

Buy a plastic cup of sugar-cane juice from a street seller and she will put it in a plastic carry-bag, even if you want to drink it on the spot. Buy two cups and she'll put them in two separate carry-bags. (Say you don't want them in bags and she'll look at you as if you're telling her to go hang.) The same goes for just about all Vietnamese street food - in fact for anything you buy anywhere in Vietnam. While you, I'm sure, will do your best to find a bin for the excess polymers - and, of course, feel bad about their existence in the first place - most Vietnamese will just leave them in the gutter. If they've bought their sugarcane juice to drive away with, truck-drivers will hurl the empty plastic cups unceremoniously out the window of the truck while speeding along the highway.

Sounds hairy? The situation is even worse at Vietnamese tourist spots.

The Vietnamese tourism industry has been contracting solidly over the past couple of years for a number of reasons - partly as crazy Vietnamese visa rigmarole keeps putting people off, partly because Russian tourists are doing less of this as the value of the rouble drops:

   

but mainly, I would guess, because of all the stories that circulate online about the filthy mess on the beaches.

To be sure, old-fashioned Vietnamese hospitality and the universal allure of tropical pleasure continues to attract plenty of Westerners.

To be sure, among their number are a few weeping blonde ladies trying to clean up the mess one piece at a time.

But unfortunately the number of locals who picnic in the sand and then leave their garbage behind is much much larger than the number of weeping blonde ladies in this world.

Of course, life hasn't always been this way. Before the creation of the plastics industry, the Vietnamese used banana leaves rather than lunch-box sized polystyrene boxes to transport food from A to B. In the grim old days of post-war rationing, people queued for hours with string bags in their pockets and carted the shopping home on foot. It's just possible that Vietnam's love affair with plastic also has psychological roots in people's desire to consume to excess as a way of covering over the memory of past austerity; surely there's no better way of marking to the rest of the world (or yourself) that more bountiful times have arrived than toting around every single thing you buy in its own individual plastic package?

In a couple of respects, the problem isn't quite as bad as it looks.

The Vietnamese might seem to make a horrible mess of the curbside restaurants that line city streets, however the plastic wrappers and chicken bones they turf under the tables aren't necessarily going to end up in the local canal. Part of the messy, underpaid job of waiters at curbside restaurants is to sweep up the wrappers and bones at the end of the night - not least because the curbside restaurant is often on the front pavement of the owner's house. In effect what diners are paying for is the old-fashioned pleasure of mucking up a bit - all in all, a harmless pastime.

Similarly, although rubbish collection in Vietnamese city streets and alleys might seem unsystematic (each household leaves its rubbish outside the front gate of an evening - in individual plastic bags of course!), what doesn't work formally is made to work informally in a rough and ready way. Large numbers of the urban poor in Vietnam make a living (a very modest one) recycling anything that can be recycled. You can see them going through the rubbish rescuing bottles and cans, or, more often, hear them wandering the streets crying "Ai vé chai" ("Who's selling bottles?") in a strangely plaintive tone - buying old newspapers, plastic containers, aluminium cans and scrap metal for a nominal price and then selling them on to middle men for a tiny profit.

One thing can be said about recycling in today's Vietnam: it's a noble profession plied with dignity and great physical endurance - almost exclusively by middle-aged women.

Vietnamese environmental issues in general are something it would take an entire new entry to introduce. Luckily, the work has already been done for me in Bill Hayton's Vietnam, Rising Dragon (2012). Much of Hayton's focus in Chapter 8 of this sterling volume is on Hạ Long Bay, a fantastical tourist destination on the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam's North East:

 

Hayton makes it clear that Hạ Long Bay is being rapidly spoiled by over-development. Everything that shouldn't end up in the bay seems to end up there, including the coal dust from nearby mines. The waters of Hạ Long, though still a fairy-tale emerald colour, are fast turning into a lifeless toxic sludge.

One of the facts that Vietnam, Rising Dragon digs up: in the year that French film director Regis Wargnier used Hạ Long as a backdrop to his wet green romantic epic Indochine (1991), 100,000 tourists came through each year. Nowadays it is upwards of 1.4 million. Though the management board insists that tour operators cart the tourists' crap away, they don't provide onshore facilities for them to actually dispose of the crap, so most of it ends up just where you'd expect.

The waters of Hạ Long were once transparent in many places all the way to the bottom. Stick your arm in them now and it will disappear just above the wrist - into hell knows what sort of emerald-brown bilge.

Vietnam, Rising Dragon makes it clear that foetid beauty spots are just the beginning of Vietnam's environmental problems: over-fishing is a serious issue along Vietnam's coasts and over-harvesting of tropical hardwoods is a serious issue in the highlands. However, the trickiest issue is not that the central government is unconcerned or unwilling to put stricter environmental laws in place. The system-level issue is that stricter environmental laws are hard to enforce. Strongly worded policy issued by the Ministry for Natural Resources and the Environment is not enough to stop the activities of unscrupulous loggers or wild-life traders targeting unscrupulous local officials with kickbacks. So the tropical human ecosystem of graft, geisha girls and gaping hilltops continues to flourish.

30 years of war certainly changed the face of Vietnam - the Americans notoriously dropped more TNT between 1965 and 1975 than the Allies did in all of Western Europe during WW2. However, the fact is 30 unbroken years of intensive economic development have probably done more to change the Vietnamese Image of Nature than a decade of aerial bombardment. In the olden days (before the 90's), Vietnamese kids were taught to think of their beautiful, hardy little country as having "biển vàng và rừng bạc" - golden seas and silver forests. The moist-eyed slogan has been dropped in recent years as the country confronts some of the unintended consequences of growing wealth and prosperity: deforestation, over-fishing, uncontrolled pollution of waterways, city smog. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City don't yet give you that horrible day-is-night feeling that Beijing does:

But the press dutifully reports stories of toxic waterways and of whole suburban neighbourhoods contaminated with heavy industrial chemicals and the general public dutifully read them and worry. Even the most casual visitor to the Central Highlands can't help noticing that whole provinces have lost the covering of tropical forest that tourist brochures display with such thoughtless abandon.

The Vietnamese have always had a highly refined sense of artificial nature - the interesting, beautiful and (to Westerners) plain weird ways in which Nature and Art can be made to twist each other into interesting shapes. So you'd hardly expect them to drop the idea of harnessing the natural world to the cart of human improvement - either from a cultural or economic point of view. 

However if they want to have a habitable world of Nature for more than another 30 years, then they're going to have to make some changes. Cutting down on plastic and blowing the tops off less mountains would be a start.

*

We're a long way from the Vietnamese street where we started, so let's go back.

While Vietnam has set off in a rush down the path of economic development in recent decades, it's not yet that far advanced.

Likewise, while the urban environment has been rendered a little more regular to make it safe for tourists and to provide basic amenities to the tens of thousands of Vietnamese who move to cities every year, it still contains a lot of the free-form modern urban culture that died long ago in Western cities as they were given over to large-scale commercial spectacle and sanitized, essentially middle class forms of leisure.

The parting advice of your correspondent, as he closes off this 15 part series, is to enjoy the Vietnamese street while it lasts. Above all: enjoy the fast-paced way Vietnamese life shapes itself into informal street scenes. Drink in the street, eat in the street, throw the scraps under the table and watch and listen as the Vietnamese do the same. And make sure you take in plenty of thick black coffee in the early morning breeze, not just late night beer and petrol fumes.

As with Vietnamese traffic, my general advice when it comes to the Vietnamese street is to throw yourself into it - seriously practise living with the noise, try to restrain your tears when you see the Vietnamese hurling their trash out their car windows, get used to living at close quarters with man, beast and fowl: maybe with time you'll even start to enjoy some of the higher-level discomfort that comes about when established boundaries between Inside and Outside start to shift.

If, inwardly or outwardly, you find yourself screaming at the Vietnamese to shut the hell up and leave you alone, then remember: You can always go back to having a room of your own with a high speed internet connection and the imaginary connection it gives you to the rest of the world - the real connection it gives you to some of your deeper desires - once you're safely back at home in the West.

Streets the world over are becoming strange places within the great encampment of the planetary economy: at their worst a kind of no man's land between the interior world of electronically-mediated desire and the ever-distant places and experiences that are the shady objects of the desire.

Vietnam seems determined to join the great encampment and what that means in broad terms is straightening out many of the ways of bent experience. Let's hope that, in doing so, the chaotic ways of the street will be given a general tidy, rather than improved, cleansed and certified in the dull relentless way streets have been in most of the Western world.

Whichever way it goes, the whole process will take a while and there will always be throwbacks.

These are what are still there for your general delectation in the Vietnamese street. So pull up a plastic stool, take a deep breath and orient the general human unit upwards and outwards. . .

15 Things about Vietnam #9 - Haggling

Haggling is a basic fact of economic existence in Vietnam. All Vietnamese accept it and some actually enjoy it. Reacting to it with irritation or moral outrage is counter-productive and culturally naive.

If you want to go shopping in Vietnam, you are going to have to learn to haggle.

If the business of haggling seems essentially dishonest, or if in practice it makes your blood boil, then - don't go shopping in Vietnam. Or maybe don't go to Vietnam full-stop. Or, if you absolutely must go and you really want to go shopping, then go with some Vietnamese friends and get them to buy your stuff for you, preferably when you're out of eyeshot of the vendor.

For your day-to-day needs, haggling in Vietnam can, sort of, be avoided. If it's toothpaste you want to buy, then go to a supermarket. If it's a tv, then go to a big electronics retailer. In both places a fixed price will be displayed on the item, so there'll be no need to eyeball a salesman at close range or put up with him craftily misunderstanding everything you say about payment and price.

However in most locations where buying and selling occurs, haggling can't be avoided. It can't be avoided at markets. It can't be avoided at small shops. And it definitely can't be avoided when organising a ride with a motorbike taxi-driver (aka a Hondaman) or being fined by the police for a minor (or imaginary) traffic violation.

To your pain, you might also find that Vietnamese people who consider themselves your friends will want to haggle with you over any costs you incur together. Even dividing up the electricity bill in a shared house might involve a degree of hard-bargaining which in your friend's mind will in no way detract from his warm feelings for you.

If a Vietnamese person, friend or foe, tells you a price that you know is a lot more than the going Vietnamese price, it doesn't always mean they are trying to rip you off. They might think of it more as an invitation to start haggling; and they almost certainly assume that because they're comfortable with haggling, then the rest of the world must be too. So be prepared, above all with the facts - make sure you have a rough idea what the going Vietnamese price is and consider beforehand how much you're willing to pay: that is, how much you're realistically willing to cop, not how much you'd like to pay in some sort of Vietnamese-themed fantasy land of fairytale cheapness. Last off all, take a deep breath and - put in an opening bid.

Whatever you do, don't take the inflated prices as a personal affront; they are offered to all Western tourists and to most Vietnamese who aren't regular customers as well.

Put in your opening bid - that's right: come back at the vendor with a price that is below the going price and then try to get things to come up to a rough median. And if the vendor won't wear the rough median? Then walk away with nary an angry word. This will hopefully have an instant effect: the vendor will consent to begin haggling from scratch. If you're lucky, the Hondaman who has just been demanding $10 to drive you 1km down the road will come chasing after you, offering a much better price because in reality he needs the fare. Your stiff resistance to his ludicrously inflated price has convinced him that you have a grip on reality too.

Remember, last of all, that successful haggling takes patience. There's no way you're going to get a fair price out of a regular Vietnamese street vendor and be on your way in 30 seconds. More than that, successful haggling requires an ability to be (in Western terms) a little bit shameless. Street vendors who feel you're getting the price down too close to the going Vietnamese price will surely try to mobilize their best weapon of attack - the Western buyer's sense of cultural embarrassment. This is usually fairly easy to do - upon hearing your latest, perfectly reasonable offer, the vendor will start shrieking in Vietnamese as if you're trying to perpetrate a crime. (This usually has a multiplier effect: other street vendors and various other bystanders come running to the scene and some of them start shrieking too.)

Now your haggling skills are being severely tested. Ignore the bystanders and repeat the offer you just made (the one that started off the amateur theatrics). Don't be afraid to raise your voice and use your hands.

If you're planning a longer stay in Vietnam, you might want to add some Vietnamese terminology to your haggling repertoire. When the little old lady proposes a price you know is an outrageous multiple of the going Vietnamese price, smile sagely and say "Xạo bà cổ" - "You're making stuff up, old lady". (Of course, you'll need some help from your Vietnamese friends to get the accent right.) Or try out a different phrase: "bị chém đẹp". "Bị chém đẹp" means to have your throat cut "the beautiful way". Get the accent right, and you'll knock the old lady's socks off. She might even give you a discount.

Doesn't sound too difficult? Does it even sound that different from the sorts of bargaining that Westerners are perfectly happy to enter into over house prices or salary packages? Let's not pretend that Western economic ethics are all that different, let alone more high-minded, than Vietnamese economic ethics. (Let's also not forget that in Mediterranean Europe haggling is a habit, or a past-time, just like in Vietnam.)

Across the board, you might find that Vietnamese go in for moderately sharper sales practices than Westerners. Plenty of Vietnamese see outright lying about their products and services as legitimate if it helps them to make a living under difficult conditions - and normal economic conditions in Vietnam are tough. Vietnamese real estate agents, for example, tend to be real bottom feeders - even worse than what you get on the East Coast of Australia and the West Coast of the US. No matter how specific you are about what you're looking for, most will show you anything they have on the books, lie about its price and features, then try to heavy you into renting it.

But whether this kind of behaviour suggests that Vietnamese, when operating in market places, are more comfortable than Westerners with commercial dishonesty is arguable even at the best of times. In the West, you might say, there's a serious possibility that commercial rip-offs will be exposed by the media; there are government agencies and consumer advocates whose job is to investigate complaints and, in the case of serious fraudulence, there's the law. None of them are foolproof ways of preventing rip-offs. But they probably strike fear into the hearts of many potential rip-off merchants.

The set-up in Vietnam is a bit different. The Vietnamese press sometimes reports major rip-offs that have obvious effects on the health of the general public or lead to the financial ruination of war widows. But with less institutional arrangements in place to alert the world to the activities of ripoff merchants, there are inevitably quite a few more ripoffs. Buyer be doubly beware.

*

Markets, according to some guidebooks, are a beautiful and lively manifestation of Vietnamese urban culture. But don't go to them if artificially inflated prices are going to get on your nerves. Often the best thing to do at a Vietnamese market is just wander and look. If it's the meat section of the market you're visiting, leave any moral presuppositions you have about food and food preparation at the entrance. The Vietnamese sell fish and poultry live. They also sell the internal organs of beasts and fowls by the bucket:

In big Vietnamese cities there are two types of market - the tourist attractions selling snacks and knick-knacks:

and the suburban places that cater mainly to locals:

You can expect to have the sh*t bargained out of you in both locations unless you know what you're doing.

Don't be fooled by Western blog material about the authenticity of Vietnamese markets. The picturesque poverty and bad smells often hide some unlikely stories. The hearty middle-aged women sitting on miniature plastic stools slicing up pork chops, with blood up to their elbows, can be expert price gougers, forcing primary producers to sell for a song and end users to pay three times over. As messy and poor as the denizens of a Vietnamese market can look, their hard labour often brings in 10 times the wage of lowly government officials. All Vietnamese market goers know this - and use it to inform their haggling practices.

Lastly, don't think you can escape the necessity of haggling if, stepping out of the market, you go for a walk along one of those classic rows of Vietnamese shops that are all selling the same thing.

To newcomers, they represent one of the economic mysteries of Vietnamese life; intuitively, you'd think it was poor business strategy to have all the fan-shops or lock-shops in a city set up next to each other with nothing at all to differentiate product-range. Apparently, the arrangement works for the Vietnamese though. (Apparently the idea is that if everyone in a city knows where all the fan-shops are then there'll be more sales of fans than there would have been if there were one fan shop in every district.)

The arrangement doesn't work so well for Westerners in search of bargains. As the prospective owner of a new fan - and a competent haggler capable of putting into practice all of the wise advice contained in this blog-entry - you might think you could get one of the fan shops to sneak a sale off its competitors by undercutting them on price. Surely such markets work in the buyer's favour?

Not if there's solid collusion between the fan shops. With a tacit agreement on price in place along the fan-strip, everyone's free to charge you what they like, no matter how good your haggling skills are.

*

That might be the rough deal as far as haggling goes, but what about Vietnamese attitudes to money in general? What you'll probably notice when you first come to Vietnam is how much Vietnamese like to talk about money. Generally speaking, it isn't considered rude to talk about how much money you have or how much you paid for stuff. Among Vietnamese nouveau riche it's considered compulsory, as it is among nouveau riche people pretty much everywhere in the world.

To open a conversation with a stranger, in Australia people start by asking what job the other guy does. As a follow up, you ask what suburb he lives in - which of course is code for how much money he has. (In Melbourne of course you also ask what school the other guy went to - which is code for how much money his parents have.)

All this is completely different in Vietnam, where you will be asked openly by complete strangers about four things: how old you are, whether you are married, how tall you are in centimetres and - how much money you earn per month. (In everyday Vietnamese: "Một tháng b'nhiêu?")

If a Vietnamese stranger asks you this last question, it doesn't mean he is sizing up how much money he can take you for. (Occasionally it might mean that.) In Vietnam, asking a stranger about his income is just a way of showing friendly interest; it's actually an attempt to be polite, rather than aninfringement against etiquette.

Of course, there are more and more Westerners in this world who don't have any sort of old-fashioned middle-class inhibitions when it comes to talking about money. As far as I could tell from my most recent trip back to Sydney, the favourite topics of conversation in middle Australia nowadays, in descending order of interest, are how much people pay for their (a) houses, (b) cars (c) designer jockstraps (d) pets' physio. I'm guessing thing are equally grim in most corners of the Western world.

Put it this way. If, as a Westerner, you grew up in the sort of middle class home where mentioning the price of things or asking people how much they earn was considered boorish - then you're in for a shock in Vietnam.

Put the shock in cultural context. Educated middle-class Vietnamese tend to know that Westerners are uncomfortable talking about certain details of their lives. However there are plenty of not-so-middle class Vietnamese who will ask you straight up about the contents of your bank account or your weight in kilos. Don't hold it against them; most of them are fully convinced that they're being the most amiable people in the world.

15 Things about Vietnam #8 - Idealizing The West

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:

Don't be surprised as a woman or a man if Vietnamese pay you wild compliments on your long legs and don't be frightened if they want to touch your "high" nose, pat your blonde hair or gaze for several moments into your blue eyes.

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.

If having porcelain skin has become an increasing obsession in recent times, it's because tv and the internet have exposed the Vietnamese - not just to Western body images, but to neighbouring Asian societies where the white ideal reigns supreme. Korea and Japan are the other places Vietnam gets its modern ideas about itself from. Both produce a vast range of skin-care products that supposedly put the white ideal within everybody's reach; the fetish for whiteness is the result of a new-fangled marriage of traditional aesthetics and modern consumerism, rather than the subtle re-emergence of old racial stereotypes.

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.

Whether or not they come with high ideals, when Vietnamese arrive in Australia, what they tend to notice first is that the weather is grossly inclement for half the year. Then they notice that everyone lives strangely cut off from each other in vast suburban dormitories. When they start getting out and about, they see that half the population is clinically obese, and that the beautiful bits of cities are where other people live - the places where to begin with they themselves can barely afford to travel by bus or buy coffee. . .

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. . .