15 Things about Vietnam #14 - The Chinese

The Vietnamese are deeply suspicious of the Chinese. Though no single country has influenced Vietnamese culture more than China, to suggest that the Vietnamese and the Chinese are basically similar or the same is one of the biggest faux pas you can make while in Vietnam.

To say that the Vietnamese and the Chinese have history - in the sense of having a well-known propensity to spar, scrap and generally hurt each other's feelings - would be an understatement. 

So here is the rough history. This will take about 10 hours, so if you find history a dull subject, feel free to have a break for today and come back later in the week for the last installment in this series.
  

The history lesson. So. The reason the Vietnamese and the Chinese are culturally quite close is that the Vietnamese cultural heartland in the area around Hanoi was a Chinese colony from roughly 120BC to 940AD. And because, once the Vietnamese finally kicked the Chinese out, they did something a little strange: they become more Chinese than they already were before.

The 1000 or so years that the Vietnamese spent under the Chinese thumb are what set up a solid foundation for a further 1000 years of hatred and resentment. As a Chinese colony, Vietnam paid lavish tribute to the Chinese Emperor: cartloads of silk, ivory, mother of pearl and sandalwood disappeared over Vietnam's northern border, and the wider population was forced to do strenuous amounts of unpaid labour for the general enrichment of the Middle Kingdom. Vietnamese rebellions against this state of affairs started as early as the first century AD and they are celebrated down to this day as heroic steps on the road to True Vietnamese Nationhood.

But beneath the surface - indeed on the surface a lot of the time - a huge amount of borrowing was going on; even though the Chinese ruled Vietnam ruthlessly for their own benefit, the locals didn't straightforwardly repudiate Chinese ways, they adapted to them and in many cases made them their own. Not the least of the cultural imports was Confucianism and the thing to remember about it, if you want to get your head around its influence in Asian history, is that it has gone through a series of slow transformations, starting out, in Confucius's day, as a kind of minority report on the ethics and politics of feudal China, slowly becoming a consistent body of philosophical ideas, then a blueprint to run a sophisticated feudal society, in the end becoming something close to a religion, with a lightly emphasized cult of Confucius and a heavily emphasized cult of classical Confucian texts.

Essentially it was in these last two forms that Confucianism arrived in Vietnam, along with Han Dynasty troops, who occupied the greater part of the Vietnamese cultural heartland in the Second Century BC. 

Han Emperors sent various officials, schooled in Confucian ways, to govern their fractious new dominion. Over the years, a range of Confucian institutions worked their way into the Vietnamese system. Full-blown Chinese ancestor worship became a normal part of Vietnamese life. The beautiful, elaborate regulation of works and days by customary ritual, which Confucius himself had perfected back in the Fifth Century BC, took on Vietnamese form. Plus there was the language: 70% of Vietnamese words come from Chinese and it was during Vietnam's days as a Chinese colony that the main work of linguistic assimilation took place.

A second rather large import was Buddhism, which again seems to have reached Vietnam from China, rather than its Indian heartland. After the Third Century AD, pagodas became normal features of Vietnamese villages and in them the Vietnamese gave Buddhism a warm-hearted Vietnamese twist. Monks read their scriptures in Chinese and took their general lead from the main movements in Chinese Buddhism, like Zen. The wider population accepted the Chinese forms and got on worshiping what they liked. To become truly popular in Vietnam, Buddhism adapted itself to the cults of various gods, spirits and natural powers that the Vietnamese had already been worshiping for untold ages.

 

For better and for worse, Chinese influence didn't let up though, even once the Vietnamese regained their independence in 938AD. Every couple of 100 years, new Chinese invasions were launched and promptly beaten back - at the cost of vast numbers of human lives. In the Eleventh Century, the Sung Dynasty tried its luck, in the Thirteenth Century the charge was led by the well-known right-wing dynasty of the Mongols, led by Donald Trump. However, the kernel of the grudge that the Vietnamese bear the Chinese down to today probably lies in the occupation of Vietnamese territory by Ming Dynasty troops between 1407 and 1427 - an episode that saw the wanton destruction of most of Vietnam's previous high culture, stored neatly in the Royal Citadel in Hanoi and torched by marauding Ming troops.

All the invasions did something to define Vietnam's cultural identity in anti-Chinese terms. The Vietnamese victors of battles against the Chinese formed the basic pantheon of national gods and culture heroes. At an even more basic level, the whole place turned itself into a wildly tough fighting force capable of subordinating pretty much all individual desire to the needs of collective self-defense. Historical irony no.1: The collective consciousness which the Vietnamese think of as a distinctively national trait has two historical bases, both of which are deeply related to China: a positive base in Confucian ideas about the individual's duty to family and society, and a negative base in Chinese bastardry towards its southern neighbour. Countries are made to stick together as countries in funny ways. In Vietnam it was a deep undercurrent of Chinese ideas and an overwhelming amount of Chinese nastiness that did the trick.

Probably the most counter-intuitive response to the threat of Chinese invasion was the decision on the part of Vietnam's own Lê Dynasty (1428 - 1788) to set up a thoroughly Chinese system of government and education, after the Ming ran amok in the early 1400's. Effectively, a new Chinese strand was grafted onto Vietnamese history, in the generation or two after the rout in Hanoi; from 1463 the selection process for all government jobs in Vietnam was rigorously based on knowledge of the Chinese classics, tested in national exam competitions every three years. The watchword of the great Confucian emperor, Lê Thánh Tông, was that government should be the preserve of men of noble character, not men of noble birth - well-educated men steeped in Confucian notions of ritual and responsibility and capable, if called on, to improvise a drily beautiful poem or two. (As a virtuous Confucian, women, either of noble or not so noble character, were of little interest to him.) 

The immediate effect was to raise the prestige of Chinese high culture to new heights. From the time of the Lê reforms, anyone (anyone male at least) who wanted to share in the responsibilities or profits of government also had to be a master of the Chinese language, together with the general arts of life associated with it.

In fact you could say that many of the elements that the Vietnamese think of as constituting "Vietnameseness" only came together at the time of the Lê Dynasty's turn towards China. The "traditional" Vietnamese respect for learning only became traditional under the impact of Chinese ideals of scholarship. The political cohesion of the country was solidified as a centralized bureaucracy modeled on Chinese lines came into existence. In the end, even the struggles of ordinary Vietnamese against the injustices of the system got a boost from - the system itself. While Chinese-style scholars who successfully landed government jobs tended to use their hard-earned privileges to grind the noses of poor rice farmers, other Confucians lived much closer to the people. There were Confucians who retired to their home villages once their work in government was done. There were Confucians who taught in their home villages all their lives after failing to get a government job in the first place. Both types of outsiders encouraged the broader masses in their struggles with royal authority in the decades and centuries that followed, as the initial Confucian idealism of Lê Thánh Tông slowly dissipated.

In the long term, a nice little amalgam of Chinese and native Vietnamese culture came into existence. The formal rules that regulated daily life, which Confucianism had issued by the 1000, were adapted or abandoned in line with average-everyday Vietnamese common sense. The prudery of official Confucianism was set aside in lusty village festivals (and is still there to see in the artwork on display in old-fashioned Vietnamese villages).

The patriarchal emphasis of official Confucianism was infused with some authentic, Vietnamese-style mummy worship. The cult of ancestors, which in the Chinese tradition is basically a duty on the part of male descendants to pay homage to male forefathers, in the Vietnamese tradition was renovated, with male and female ancestors honoured equally at the family's ancestral altar.

After another Chinese invasion in the Eighteenth Century, Vietnam's feudal monarchy was in fact overthrown and the country's new rulers briefly looked set to modernize the place along authentic non-Chinese lines. This time, Chinese-style conservatives won the day and Vietnam's last royal dynasty, the Nguyễn, established itself on the throne. (The reason so many Vietnamese share the family name "Nguyễn" dates from this era of Vietnamese history. The Nguyễn clan had long provided the Southern parts of Vietnam with a caste of feudal overlords. Essentially, once the overlords of the South became the new ruling clan throughout the land, they ordered masses of their new subjects to take the clan name, giving rise to a top-down naming system whose effects persist to this day.)

With the rise of the Nguyễn, the stuffy side of Vietnam's Chinese heritage asserted itself; having ascended to royal power, Vietnam's new masters styled themselves more Chinese than the Chinese themselves - which itself was a complex bad joke, given that China at the time was ruled by a non-Chinese dynasty, intent on wrapping itself in the now heavy cloak of Chinese tradition. Major historical irony number 2.

Strict adherence to traditional Chinese forms got Vietnam exactly nowhere. The Nguyễn's traditionalism, just like that of their models in Peking, left them ill-equipped, both mentally and materially, to confront the challenges posed by a new set of invaders from the outside: Westerners armed with weapons, drugs and a hard-nosed attitude to getting their own way. Here was a force that was more powerful and far more foreign - both to the Chinese and the Vietnamese - than any army that had swept across their respective northern borders down the centuries. While Western intervention in China fueled Civil Wars that were still being fought in the middle of the Twentieth Century, in the case of Vietnam the result was out and out occupation. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, French colonists had systematically performed two feats. First, they had divided Vietnam into three, ruling the South as an out-and-out colony and Central and Northern Vietnam as "allied dependencies". Secondly, they had reduced the great Chinese spectacle of the Nguyễn monarchy to a colourful sideshow, which is what it remains (with a bit of help from the tourist industry) pretty much down to today:

As far as more recent attitudes to China go, parts of Vietnam's communist establishment seem at times quite close to recognizing that the age-old Vietnamese grudge against the Chinese is hardly a simple matter. School primers still tend to present the Chinese as the eternal aggressor and communist orthodoxy tends to reinforce this with simple moral tales about the injustice of the total social-political system imported from the Middle Kingdom: Chinese influence on Vietnam tends to get lumped together in a black and white volume entitled "the evils of feudalism". Over the past 25 years, more open-minded historians have taken the liberty to fill out the story - in particular to show how local Confucians were a diverse bunch who at times played the part of country intellectuals, shaping, or even leading, the struggles of ordinary Vietnamese against the venal agents of feudal authority. 

In fact one of the more interesting ways Vietnam's Chinese heritage has begun to be read during the past 25 years of tentative liberalization is through a combination of Marx and Confucius.

To explain how this works would take another 10 hours, so I'll spare you the details. But the rough idea is to downplay orthodox Confucian ideas about fixed social roles and the duty of absolute obedience owed to rulers and instead take the Confucian idea of humaneness, teasing out of it an acknowledgement of the basis of political rule in the hearts and aspirations of the people.

Obviously it'd be a pretty steep task to discover in Vietnam's Chinese heritage a full-blown notion of legitimate government of the people by the people. But Vietnam's Communist masters, in their own cramped way, know they have to add some of the lessons of Confucius and Mencius to the more familiar strictures of Marx and Lenin. The task of ruling Vietnam, and of keeping themselves firmly positioned on the once plush seat of state, depends crucially on responding - not just to contradictory expectations emanating from Beijing and Washington, but to the average Vietnamese sense of what it means to live in a dynamic, but rapidly fragmenting, social world.

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Not that China and Vietnam are particularly at peace now that the positive side of Vietnam's Chinese heritage has been given some degree of official recognition. Chinese raids into Vietnamese territory started all over again in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, virtually from the time China began its current rise to global power. Nowadays, fear of further Chinese aggression is kept on permanent low heat by Vietnamese media sources ever-fond of a patriotic story. And of course it is heavily fueled by the Chinese, who are intent on projecting power in cultural, economic and military terms now that they produce half the goods, and own half the debt, of the entire world.

You might have thought the well-known war the Vietnamese fought against America between 1963 and 1975, with substantial Chinese assistance, might have helped to keep a lid on old-fashioned tensions between the two neighbours. Surely the project of building socialism together, and defending it against the aggression of American "imperialists", was enough to make the age-old enemies work together?  Unfortunately, minor differences of opinion are sometimes as good as actual wars to get people or nations at each other's throats again. And it was just such a muddle of strategic and ideological differences that again turned the Vietnamese against the Chinese in the 70's, after a mere 20 years of communist brotherhood.

Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Chairman Mao started seriously negotiating with the Americans, in a bid to win an unlikely ally in another weird, nasty ideological struggle (between Communist China and the Soviet Union). Mao in fact favoured a two-state solution to the conflict in Vietnam and if he'd had his way the North Vietnamese effort to boot out the Americans and unify the country would've been rendered entirely meaningless - Vietnam, like Korea, might have remained divided in two down to this day. Understandably, the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi were upset. 

However, relations between Beijing and Hanoi really went sour after the end of The War, once the North Vietnamese had stitched up their victory over the American-backed government of the South. In the years prior to 1975, Mao had been the main patron of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who, when they came to power, proceeded to turn the entire country into an enormous death camp and then launch raids across Cambodia's border with Southern Vietnam, killing miserable Vietnamese rice farmers by the thousand.

In the meantime, the Vietnamese were doing their fair share of shooting and smiting. In the South of Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese origin were on the receiving end of a not very bright idea: to liberate the accumulated capital of the Chinese business community in South Vietnam - straight into the coffers of the new Communist government. Large numbers of the Chinese population of Saigon (soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City) were sent back to China and many of the rest fled the country. Ethnic Chinese Vietnamese made up a large percentage of the boat people who were soon fleeing South Vietnam in droves. Those who remained were often forcibly resettled in the Southern countryside. Many ethnic Chinese had been small traders in and around Saigon's Chinatown (Chợ Lớn) for generations. With little or no skills growing subsistence crops in wild jungle places, many came close to starvation in the years immediately following the war.

The new Communist government's decision to expropriate the riches of Chinese Vietnamese after 1975 might have been a social disaster. What the new government did to stop the raids across the Cambodian border was an unprecedented good; it marched the Vietnamese army straight into Phnom Penh and kicked out the Khmer Rouge, who by 1978 had managed to slaughter 2 million Cambodians in the name of their special Chinese version of communism. However, the episode was a disaster for Chinese-Vietnamese relations. By 1979, China's Deng Xiaoping had decided that the Vietnamese needed to be "taught a lesson" for kicking out China's mob in Phnom Penh. So a six-week war was launched, Chinese troops occupied several towns on the Vietnamese side of the Chinese-Vietnamese border, only to be beaten back by battle-hardened troops, fresh from fighting the Americans, the Cambodians and just about everyone else.

The Chinese claimed the mess as a strategic victory. The Vietnamese noted with some pride that this time the invaders from the north hadn't made it more than 50km into Vietnamese territory. Neither side pointed very frankly to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Vietnamese killed in Deng's extravagant pedagogical set-piece.

That brings us almost to the present day, when numerous minor and medium-sized grievances still simmer away.

The dispute that gets the most coverage is over a series of tiny islands in the South China Sea that are claimed by both countries. For China the dispute seems to be partly about mineral riches, partly about geopolitical strategy: a third of the world's shipping passes between Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines on its way to ports in Northern Asia and having military control of sea-routes is definitely on the map of China's path to global power. For the Vietnamese, the dispute is mainly about national pride. Naturally enough, they consider it highly provocative when the Chinese build military bases on what are in essence fortified sand banks.

 
And they find it downright offensive that China claims sovereignty over the sea pretty much right up to the Vietnamese coastline, as the notorious Chinese 9-dash map of the region makes plain:  

Even mentioning the "South China Sea" in Vietnam could land you in a bit of trouble. Many Vietnamese won't know what you're talking about and some of the ones who do will be riled by the word "China" in the English designator for the relevant body of water. Calling it the "South China Sea" in some sense gives credibility to Chinese claims. In Vietnam it's called the"Biển Đông" (East Sea) - presumably because it is to the east of the impish, dragon-shaped nation whose belly sticks out into the deep aquamarine in a way richly suggestive of property rights.  

If Vietnamese suspicions about Chinese geopolitical strategy are well-founded, then the suspicion that the Chinese are intentionally setting out to poison Vietnamese kiddies seems slightly overblown. There can be no doubt that a certain quantity of deadly Chinese chemicals ends up in Vietnamese food, and in some of the other products flowing across the Vietnamese-Chinese border in great profusion. But Vietnamese patriots have blown this up into a systematic plan to kill, or at least seriously enervate, the Vietnamese body-politic; the reality, I suspect, is that the dangerous chemicals moving southwards over the border into Vietnam are in equally wide circulation in China.

True, Chinese factories might be producing coffee-substitutes laced with lead and other toxins and trucking them across the border into Vietnam. But greed alone is what prompts Vietnamese coffee vendors to buy the stuff and sell it on the street. One plastic tank apparently makes 400 cups of a saleable, coffee-related product. And creates dozens of new cases of cancer. Yum.

A little less nutty, but still in the realm of uncontrolled suspicion, is the idea that crafty Chinese farming conglomerates are deliberately driving honest Vietnamese primary producers out of business. Again, there's a kernel of truth to this. Yes, large, credit-rich Chinese farms do produce large, cheap, chemically enhanced fruit and vegetables which flood the Vietnamese market, making it harder and harder for small-scale Vietnamese growers to get by. And, yes, there do seem to be Chinese business operatives at work in various upcountry places in Vietnam, buying up supplies of subsistence products and selling them back to locals at an extravagant mark-up in what is essentially an elaborate con. However, the grim reality of what is going on most of the time is probably not that of systematic Chinese evil-doing, but the simple fact of hard-nosed economic competition across borders. And here's the thing. Economic competition across borders is something that China and Vietnam have both signed up to in a very big way in recent decades.

If dodgy chemicals and toxic economic competition are controversial enough, then there's the whole issue of the Mekong, which is the life-blood of the economy, indeed the life-blood of society itself, in the south of Vietnam. Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, the Mekong has its source - do you know where? In Laos and Cambodia (firm Chinese allies) and in China's ("China's"?) Tibetan highlands. And what have Chinese investment banks been encouraging the Laotians and Cambodians to do with merry abandon in the upper reaches of the Mekong in recent times? Exactly what the Chinese have been doing to most of China's rivers: damming them as fast as they can to supply the region's growing power needs, and in the process reducing water flows to Vietnam's "rice-basket" in the Southern lowlands.

Though tensions have been managed diplomatically so far, the long-term potential for conflict over the issue is palpable. The Vietnamese already have a sense that the Chinese have their hands around the nation's proverbial jugular. The fact that the Chinese and their allies have control over half the country's water supply is only bound to inflame it. In the long-term, reduced water-flow has the potential to turn the Lower Mekong, home to 20 million people and the source of 90% of Vietnam's rice, into little more than a searing, salt-logged plain.

No doubt about it, the uncontrolled suspicion and awkward messages directed at the Chinese from the Vietnamese lowlands look set to keep on coming:

 
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If the similarities and common interests between Vietnam and China are masked by historical aggression and modern-day suspicion, what can we say does genuinely distinguish the Vietnamese and the Chinese?

The first thing the Vietnamese themselves would point to if you asked them this question would be the last thing to strike a Western visitor to Vietnam: the Vietnamese and the Chinese, according to the Vietnamese at least, look quite different.

Of course, you'd expect the Vietnamese to claim that Vietnamese women are more distinctive (more beautiful) than Chinese women. What they'd also tell you is that Chinese eyes are smaller and narrower, Chinese faces flatter and rounder and Chinese general features somehow not as fine - all of which does make it roughly possible for Vietnamese to tell Vietnamese and Chinese faces apart at least some of the time. (Chinese lips are supposedly not as full as Vietnamese lips and, as the local proverb goes, "thin lips tell lies".)

Is it true that the Vietnamese think a bit differently to the Chinese? It would be silly to take Vietnamese self-stylization at face value, though it's true that clichés about national character do have real world effects - normal people adjust the way they think and behave to fit in with fixed ideas about the way members of their own clan normally think and behave, and how they're different from their neighbours. It's a kind of trick of psychological perspective. And one that certainly seems to be in play a fair bit on the south side of the Chinese-Vietnamese border.

The Vietnamese, across the board, think of themselves as pluckier and tougher than the Chinese - something they put down, in large part, to having been invaded by their northern neighbours so many times down the centuries.

The further south you go in Vietnam, the more you'll hear it claimed that the Vietnamese are better at enjoying themselves than the Chinese. Vietnamese, it is true, are willing to credit the Chinese with having a more ancient or refined culture than their own. The downside is that the Chinese are supposed to be more boring and staid; where a "typical" Vietnamese will speak his heart or throw a spontaneous party, a "typical" Chinese will (in the Vietnamese mind) stand on ceremony.

In my experience, Vietnamese, across the board, are in fact more accommodating towards foreigners, a little more eager to please; they're interested in what the rest of the world thinks of Vietnam, where the Chinese are indifferent, or maybe just too busy to care. Turn up in Vietnam speaking half-decent Vietnamese and people will really make a fuss of you; even if you can just pronounce half a dozen simple phrases, you'll make quite a few locals deliriously happy. In China, try the same party trick and you will be greeted, at best, with a certain wry smile.

In business and politics, the Chinese are supposed to be coldly calculating, in both the short and the very, very long term. The Vietnamese (again on their own account) could never be like that; like Australians, they're attached to the sorts of ideas of informal mateship that do the rounds of little nations which think of themselves as made up mainly of good, little people. A typical Vietnamese, on this picture, could never play his cards close to his chest or pretend that nothing is happening for years on end, the way Chinese businessmen and government officials do: striking up friendships and making the general warmth of Vietnamese existence flow out in all directions are much too important for that.

Or such roughly are the fixed ideas the Vietnamese have about the Chinese. The key point being that there is no corresponding set of fixed ideas about the Vietnamese entertained by anyone in China. The Chinese of course have their stereotypes and clichés, their historical and cultural sore points, and their blind spots, about other nations and the wider world. But one of the benefits of being the most populous nation on earth with a 5000 year history is that you are spared little-nation anxieties about the really big nations in your neighbourhood of the world. This brings us to inter-cultural irony number 3. The Chinese just don't pay the Vietnamese as much attention as the Vietnamese pay them.

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Your lesson for today: when in Vietnam, whatever you do, don't tell Vietnamese people that, as far as you can see, they're basically Chinese with a twist.

Remember that nowadays being a normal, patriotic Vietnamese person, who's proud of his country's culture and its successes fighting painful defensive wars, means being a little bit anti-Chinese.

If it's the younger generation of Vietnamese you're mixing with, note that being young and hip in today's Vietnam means idolizing Korean boybands, imitating Korean hairdos, reading Japanese manga and infusing your life with a bit of pop cultural edginess from a range of Asian and Western sources.

Vietnamese teenagers might spend days (or years) playing Chinese martial arts games on their computers and quite a few Vietnamese oldies are addicted to the historical soap operas that are churned out by studios in Shanghai and Hong Kong by the bucketful. However neither the games nor the soaps have any noticeable effect on wider culture or mentality. While masses of Vietnamese learn Korean or head to Japan for work, and eventually make it back to Vietnam with a range of Korean or Japanese ideas in their heads, the number who orient themselves towards China is vanishingly small: a minority in the military-political establishment, plus the realists in the economics and business fraternity, who know well enough where most Vietnamese supply chains start out from.  

Ask a bunch of Vietnamese teenagers what their nation's primary cultural symbols are and they'll probably tell you something about the lotus. Ask them what the lotus stands for and they won't mention the Buddhist idea of tranquil beauty, they'll tell you about Vietnam Airlines.

Try digging a little deeper - and the brighter ones will tell you that red is the traditional Vietnamese colour of marriage, bamboo the traditional Vietnamese symbol of unity and the dragon the traditional symbol of Vietnamese power and prosperity.

 

Now ask them where these key cultural signifiers come from and their eyes will widen and one or two of the boys will let out a confused roar: China! At which point some of them will start booing and some of the others start muttering in an undertone.

Optimistic inhabitants of a globalized culture world that they are, young Vietnamese might say they'd be happy to see all the old Chinese stuff that belongs to Vietnam's past disappear into the dustbin of history.  

But the ones doing the muttering perhaps see it differently. They know, or rather they feel in their bones, that by pulling up the roots of Vietnam's Chinese culture, they'd in a sense be abolishing Vietnam itself.

Irony no. 4, the biggest of them all, one that applies equally to history and culture and individual psychology: there's nothing more awkward than the effort to escape something that has always been a part of yourself, and often one of the deepest parts, the way China is part of Vietnam.

15 Things about Vietnam #10 - Vietnamese Cool

Throughout Asia, cool has minor but essential variations, as anyone knows who has been here for more than a cocktail under a palm-tree.

In China, there is off-shore cool and mainland cool, HK cool and SH cool.

There are the various versions of Indian cool, which revolve largely around themselves (Tollywood, masala movies, kurtas with tight leggings), just as there are a vast range of Japanese cools, including everything from computerized pets ("Aibo") to stylized asexual drifting ("hervibores").

The Thais, of course, do a nice little line in sexual androgyny too. Free of Christian sex-complexes and Chinese obsessions with social self-control, they manage to sneak the idea of pleasure into a fairly traditionalist culture in a fairly cool way.

While Japanese cool takes elements of the foreign and transforms them without giving the rest of the world much of a look in, Korean cool is basically export-oriented; its main products are candy-coloured t-shirts, bloodless teen comedy and I-left-my-brain-at-home girlbands:

In plenty of Asian cities, you’ll find old colonial palaces and plenty of other ageing colonial architecture, which none of the locals find especially cool. You’ll also find the remnants of much older civilizations – standing there as mute testaments to the days before human beings needed the ideas of cool and uncool to mark the difference between social up and down, in and out, beautiful and ugly.

In all of Asia, serious money has been made in recent history, sometimes in obscene quantities. And the purchasing power of those who did the making has kick-started the sorts of commercial arts, the competitive displays, the restless imitation and change that make more things seem cool or uncool in the first place.

Being cool in Asia normally involves taking a splash in global culture – hence the fascination with the standard Western accessories, tv formats and pop-music genres. Hence also the uncoolness of a lot of Asian Cool in the minds of formidably cool Westerners who, when in Asia, tend to idealize precisely what they despair of back home in the West (oversized urban jungles, poverty) or what Asians despair of in Asia (hidebound traditions, sleepy country ways).

Hence also one of the advantages of Asian Cool: because it takes its lead a lot of the time from a kind of super-culture, global culture, it mainly avoids splitting itself into a hopeless muddle of subcultures the way Western culture does. Cool is something it is almost impossible to be in the West – what is cool in one corner of the social landscape is boring, weird or incomprehensible in the next. (Who over the age of 23 is really cool anyway? etc) To be cool in Asia all you need, at least to get started, is enough money to spend at an upmarket shopping mall.

This makes it sound as though what is cool in Asia is mainly what comes from somewhere else (the fashions and accessories of the wealthy, enviable West). But that’s much truer in some places than in others.

At its worst, Asian cool is a game of catch-up with the West, played with a conformism that is pretty hard to take. At its best, cool is also what renovates homegrown Asian tradition in any way that seems attractive, interesting or fun. And what Vietnamese girls and boys find cool is no exception.

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The latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is dancing.

Do Vietnamese kids think they can dance?

Having been taught at school to hold everything in, most are not sure whether they can, but watching other people who can (or who are trying) is definitely a whole lot of fun.

The second-latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is singing. Most Vietnamese, in their upbeat moments – and all Vietnamese men in their drunken moments – think they can. They don’t need American tv formats to convince them they can. But the imported formats (and the imported speaker-systems) definitely give the whole show a huge boost.

The thing that became cool the day before yesterday is – Korean stuff. (South Korean stuff of course. There is nothing cool in the minds of young Vietnamese about fat underage dictators or armies of goose-stepping zombies.) Vietnamese girls, particularly in Hanoi, swallow Korean fashions whole. So at the moment they go for the “boyish” look (long baggy trousers and short hair):

or the "sporty" look (big glasses frames, singlet-tops, high-riding shorts and sneakers):

(The sporty look, of course, has nothing to do with any sort of interest in sport. Most Vietnamese girls would break into a sweat at the idea of breaking into a sweat.)

Korean pop music (Bigbang, Psy, Girls Generation) effortlessly conquers the hearts and minds of Vietnamese teenagers, while the Korean film industry is considered a model for the local industry. There are essentially three types of Korean film that find their way into Vietnamese cinemas: quirky comedies, quirky horror films and quirky “historical” films – the latter being thinly disguised comedies in which ancient Korean princes talk like witty Seoul teenagers.

Compare Korean historical films with the vast quantities of historical pastiche being churned out in HK and SH. In Vietnam, Chinese historical dramas are basically fodder for retirees and car-park attendants. Full of the same bitchy princesses, the same growling monarchs, and the same endless Ang-Lee-inspired effects, they have a relatively small following which doesn't let on too much about its Sinophilic habits. Such is the enmity between the two countries, no matter how rich the Chinese get, the Vietnamese are never going to accept that the Chinese are cool in any essential way.

While there’s no question of them bumping the Koreans for the top spot on the list of cool Asian nations, the Thais are definitely also getting cooler in Vietnam. It’s a little difficult to know how this happened. Plenty of middle class Vietnamese go to Thailand for holidays. To many of them the Thais seem more relaxed than the folk back home. They make better films than the Vietnamese (slightly better films). They have less hang-ups about sex. Not being a nation of ethnic purebreads, many Thais look Asian in a less hard-boiled way; Vietnamese admire them their longer noses and deeper-set eyes. And though Thai politics, like Vietnamese politics, involves some hefty prohibitions (never saying mean things about the king, etc), it lacks the heaviness of Vietnamese politics. Hey, the teams are colour-coded, just like an old-fashioned game show! Until the junta moves in . . .

For anyone in the market for darker experiences, there's no denying that Japanese manga taps authentic feelings of anxiety, plus a whole lot of raw desire, that other cool products - and the wider scene of Vietnamese culture - don't give much of a look in. Some of it crosses teenage fantasies of desirability and violence in fairly obvious ways:

Some of it muffles its anxiety in camp gesture or cheap romanticism:

But a lot of the time it speaks the boredom and pain of being young, Asian and middle class in pretty pure form.

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Korean music and Japanese manga are very cool in Asian terms. But the more time you spend in Asia, the more you realize a lot of Asians find being Asian a bit déclassé. It’s Western bodies and Western souls a lot of Vietnamese kids really want – soul referring here to two things: among 20-somethings to the possibilities of deep romantic experience, among teenagers to the upended version of the concept, with 2.5 emotions: love, hate and m’eh, all on the outside.

In Vietnam, looking too Vietnamese is definitely uncool. The aim of the Vietnamese girls who care about these things – which is a lot of Vietnamese girls – is to adapt classical Vietnamese standards to the main Western ideals of beauty and attractiveness. (This does not mean junking classical Vietnamese ideals of beauty. Some of the time it means redoubling the force of classical imperatives and prohibitions.)

Fair skin has always been considered desirable in these parts of East Asia. But with Western models to live up to, buying the expensive cosmetics and applying them daily to make yourself look as un-yellow as possible has become big business. With more Western noses on display, more Vietnamese women find they can’t live with the short, stubby arrangement they already have. The list of cool surgical adjustments has also come to include eyelid snips, boob jobs and major jaw reconstructions. Thin, longish noses and heavy breasts are about as sought after, and about as readily purchased, by Vietnamese girls as ugly, “posh” handbags and upmarket mobile phones. (Because it's a sure-fire way of looking sort-of Western, actually being Eurasian has become very, very cool.)

Then there is Western food. Vietnamese kids are taking to Burger King, KFC and McDonalds in a big way, even though, by comparison with Vietnamese street food, Western fast food is vastly expensive.

They also love going out for coffee and cakes – bad, pseudo-Western iced-coffees with turrets of whipped cream which they drink with bad, pseudo-Western cakes, mass-produced on South Korean machine lines. Thank God the homely Viet version of the coffee date is still an option for young couples. Kicking back beside a canal in a double-deckchair with your boyfriend and a delicious glass of straight Vietnamese coffee is still considered normal and can be done in a cool sort of way.

While as yet there’s nothing in Vietnam to compare to the behaviours of Western foodies, young Vietnamese with disposable income are starting to attribute significant amounts of subcultural cool to particular culinary styles or a broad range of culinary experiences. Vietnam doesn’t have the heavily-hyped restaurant openings or the competitive public assertions of culinary sophistication that middle–class bogans go in for in Western countries. But it does have restauranteurs and cooking game-shows and you can tell they’re starting to have an impact on the stock of inherited Vietnamese ideas because many Vietnamese men nowadays actually speak with pride about knowing how to cook. (Traditionally, plenty of Vietnamese men have always known how to cook - their seedy bachelor days saw to that. But of course no traditional Vietnamese guy would admit he could cook, because he wouldn’t want to have to do the cooking any longer than it took to find a wife to cook for him.)

Though middle class Vietnamese dream of going to Singapore for long-weekends, the same way middle class Americans dream of going to London and Paris, for the super-rich it's Western locations - the US, Australia, Europe - that are the really cool places to holiday and shop. Taking an interest in Western culture when holidaying in a Western locale is considered slightly ridiculous and old-fashioned. No matter how many letters to the editor get written about how shameful it is for Vietnamese to come back from the West knowing nothing more than the price of standard consumer goods, the same thing keeps on happening: fashionable

In the movie stakes, Koreans supply the spooks but Americans supply the explosions - and the repetitious fantasies of moral redemption, which Vietnamese teenagers are much less interested in than the explosions. In the music stakes, a lot of youngsters take a passing interest in Bruno Mars, Brittney Spears or Lady Gaga. Having little idea what these people are trying to assert the coolness of – and no idea what the lyrics mean – most go back to listening to Vietnamese pop music pretty quickly.

Western clothes are considered very cool. And, I have to say, they are very cool. But why?

To a Western eye, the first night nerves young Asians experience on the stage of global history, the light air of formality that informs their everyday ways, seem beautifully offset by a denim jacket or a flannelette shirt.

The general rush to borrow from the wardrobe of Western style doesn’t mean traditional Vietnamese costumes are looked down on though. No Vietnamese girl finds being a bridesmaid boring - traditional Vietnamese áo dài are the best dress-ups ever, almost as cool as mini-skirts and stilettos:

However, the ultimate fashion accessory in today’s Vietnam would have to be the tattoo.

Tattoos are probably the most controversial aspect of Vietnamese cool, especially for girls.

The first thing to remember here is that in Vietnam there is a deep-seated taboo that girls are breaking in getting a tattoo. Tats fly in the face of the traditional East Asian belief that when you die you’re supposed to deliver your body whole and unblemished to the realm of the spirits if you want your spirit to rest in peace. So for most older Vietnamese, tats are for unsavoury characters who are not interested in the fate of their souls - gangsters, hookers and the like.

From a negative point of view, tats might seem like a long-winded exercise in pissing off parents and a self-reinforcing statement of your identity as fashionable and free: if, as a progressive Vietnamese 23 year old, you went through the pain of getting the thorn-anklet (the muscly love heart, the slowly blue-ing slogan, etc), then what you say about being different from your parents must be true, right?

The debates about tattoos that take place in Vietnamese social media are not that different from the ones Westerners were having with their parents over Xmas lunch late in the past millennium. What Vietnamese girls with tats argue online in their own defense rings pretty true. In short, they say, quite believably, that they continue to love and respect mum and dad, in spite of their thorn anklet - that the thorn anklets are there to express to the world the beauty of their souls.

Vietnamese girl’s tats exist to eternalize the inspiration of a single moment, to express the poignance of the single, irrevocable decision. They are as cool as romanticism itself – the Western cult of deep individual emotion which, with a few adjustments for Vietnamese sensibility, is one of the biggest shows in town in today’s Vietnam.

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So if that’s pretty much what’s cool in today’s Vietnam, what do Vietnamese girls and boys find uncool?

This is where the broad differences between Asian cool and Western cool come out.

Tattoos aside, one of the main differences between Vietnamese cool and Western cool is that rebelling against your parents is not considered cool in Vietnam. (Vietnamese Cool, you’d have to say, is not yet Rebellious.)

As in the West, in Vietnam no one’s parents are cool. In the West, that’s basically because the engines of fashion have been turning over quite fast for decades, leaving anybody who seriously adopted cool stuff from previous decades feeling light years behind what is being adopted by the kids of today, or, at best, feeling admired by the kids of today for the 30 seconds it takes to recycle the styles of the past and then move on.

In Vietnam, the reason no one’s parents are cool is very different – because everyone over 30 was brought up during the war or during the period of post-war austerity.

In the West, no one’s parents are cool. And they’re a little difficult to love because of that. Giving them and everything they stand for a good little kick in the teeth, especially if they stand for jobs, mortgages, values-based education and nutritious food, has been considered a pathway, if not to long-term self-respect, then at least to a certain social cred, for numerous generations.

In Vietnam, though no one’s parents are cool, kids, in the main, still adore their parents. Of course, there is tension and, occasionally, tragic conflict, when parents stand on the side of convention and kids find themselves drawn to unconventional ways of life. But systematic spite, or stylized gestures of defiance, are not encouraged and not in general circulation. Young Vietnamese who seriously don’t like the deal served up to them by their parents usually fly the family nest and get on with living cooler, more open-ended lives without making a big deal about it.

Next, there is sex, drugs and rock n roll. None of these three is particularly cool.

In Vietnam, sex, you could say, is not yet cool.

True: flashing the flesh has definitely become a huge social phenomenon in Vietnamese cities, where shorts have been getting shorter, jeans tighter, necklines rakinger and shoes kinkier for the better part of the last two decades. (Good manners, on the other hand, went out of fashion in 1997.)

And true: actually being hung-up about sex is uncool. One of the more serious reasons parents are considered uncool is because of the anxiety that older Vietnamese people feel about free-form social relations between men and women – any sort of free-form public relations between men and women, not just free-form sexual relations. Traditional Vietnamese culture is considered hopelessly backward, especially by some young Vietnamese women, because of its obsession with female chastity and domesticity – the traditional insistence that the main social role of women is to be masters of “gia chính” - an interesting word which can either mean “domestic arts” or “household chores”.

But none of this means that sex itself is considered particularly sexy. Vietnamese girls do not talk to each other, let alone to boys or anyone else, about how much they’re getting. 95% of Vietnamese girls would never kiss a boy experimentally with no thought for the future, and no Vietnamese girl would loudly have sex with her boyfriend in her bedroom to teach her parents a lesson. Vietnamese teenagers are not primed to think of sex as the most meaningful experience of their lives. They do not obsessively contemplate the ritual of losing their virginity. Nor are they encouraged by Vietnamese pop culture to pretend that they know more about sex than they “ought” to.

All the stories run by Vietnamese Cosmo about the mysteries and thrills of sex seem irrelevant, a little pretentious. They are contained in a section called – in English, not Vietnamese – “Love and Lust”. If you ever get really good at Vietnamese and try reading this stuff (which I don't recommend) then you’ll quickly realize that the rather Western backstory of the love/lust distinction is lost on Vietnamese 20-somethings. Who the hell are Adam and Eve? In which James Cameron film were they the main item?

Young Vietnamese men probably consume about as much pornography as men in the rest of the world and many of them probably pick up dumb ideas about huge racks and shaking booty as a result. (Those ideas seem particularly dumb in Vietnam, given how slender Vietnamese women tend to be.) But with the majority of high-speed internet connections still found in very public places, boys still tend to get most of their kicks from online violence rather than online sexual depravity.

The sexualized antics of Vietnamese stars – everyone from Elly Trần and Angela Phương Trinh to Hồ Ngọc Hà – are seen by both boys and girls as entertaining, rather than impressive. The most credible of the three, Hồ Ngọc Hà (a singer, below), looks mainly like an upmarket calisthenics instructor:

Once she has stopped swiveling and thrusting on-stage, she becomes as stiff and proper as any middle-aged Vietnamese housewife. Elly Trần and Angela Phương Trinh, who are famous for showing off their breasts in public, have, by definition, lost the plot. Neither are even remotely cool.

Alternative sexual practices, it must be said, have quite a lot of cool potential. Vietnamese gay and lesbian folk have their own styles and their own stereotypes, which have been captured memorably in some very good Vietnamese films. (For an intro, try this one and this one). There's even a minor cult of gay love among certain straight (slightly bent) Vietnamese girls. What we are talking about are imported Japanese novels, both literary and graphic, that canvass a full range of issues, from wistful glances across flowing streams to full-blown pillow-biting of the Richard Amory variety.

While many younger Vietnamese are quite comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, but quite anxious about the possibility of actually being gay, mainstream Vietnamese culture is just anxious and in denial. Possibly the worst aspect of the situation are the insults Vietnamese movie directors deliver to the LGBT community in mainstream films on a regular basis. Every year sees the release of a couple of home-grown comedies whose main character is a cheap caricature of an ugly, not very intelligent woman - and whose plot inevitably involves him/her having to get over a crush on the straight male lead.

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Unlike in the West, drugs are unambiguously very uncool in today's Vietnam.

Very few Vietnamese kids feel the need to unwind with a spot of weed or bend their Friday nights into interesting shapes with Ecstasy. (Quite cool Vietnamese kids approve of the death penalty, which the Vietnamese government makes regular use of for drug offences.) Likewise, very few people in Vietnam fall for the bohemian argument that drugs are a laudable, really rather sexy, form of protest against bad social reality or a vehicle of personal expression or in some sense mind-expanding, “philosophical”.

Medium-ranking police officials on the other hand get interviewed on tv by breathless junior reporters whenever they conduct successful drug raids. The job of the reporters in such situations is to express a certain sort of frisky admiration; the job of the cops is to sound as if no one has ever put one past them in the history of the world. Coolness is something it is obviously pretty easy to exude when you have a 20 year-old intern getting het up about what you had for breakfast on the morning of the big bust. Plain-clothes police in Vietnam are definitely quite hip.

Again, while it is considered uncool to worry too much (eg like your parents) about female drunkenness, regularly getting drunk for Vietnamese women is definitely not cool either. Drinking expensive cocktails is for tryhards. Cavorting on table-tops for the benefit (i.e. torment) of heavily drinking men is for sluts. And drinking with the heavily drinking men, the way some Western girls do – because female equality means taking men on in the various pissing contests that their social lives revolve around, doesn’t it? – is not considered even remotely admirable or courageous. (Being a heavy drinking Vietnamese guy though is quite cool, if it shows you know how to enjoy yourself.)

As for rock n roll – well, some middle-aged Vietnamese folk have heard of The Rolling Stones and Queen, but frankly as a nation Vietnam was up to slightly different stuff during the heyday of Western pop culture - fighting major wars and picking up the pieces for example. Most of the various sub-moods that were minted by the greats of American pop and rock had lost most of their attraction before Vietnam was ready for them.

Rock n roll at its best, you might say, helped Western 20-somethings express a range of negative truths about how angry or disillusioned life made them feel in the gilded cage of Western society from the 60's onwards. It captured certain heroic sensations of quixotry, desolation. It gave voice to a bit of rogue male tenderness of heart (or at least offset the blasé cult of male toughness that a lot of other rock n roll was about). It also let loose the eloquence, intelligence and general sassiness of women who wanted to make up their own lives. 

None of these cultural gestures means that much in a Vietnamese context. Vpop – which is the overwhelming exception to the rule that Vietnamese cool comes from outside Vietnam – hardly bothers with minority emotions or negative truths. About the only sensation it is interested in is teenage love gone bad; year after year, the Vpop machine churns out the same old videos of gym-fit boy-men emoting into the stratosphere:

Oh, and quite a few of Hồ Ngọc Hà doing what the idea of love gone bad makes Hồ Ngọc Hà want to do – close her eyes, shake her glossy mane and go round and round in circles. . .

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As this list indicates, what’s cool today in Vietnam hardly invests at all in the deeper attitudinal complexes of Western cool and maybe this is what gives it its special air of groundless drifting, pure spectacle. Depending on how you look at it, you can see it as a playful, purely aesthetic phenomenon, or as a particularly self-absorbed form of consumerism. Asia, it has to be said, has known its floating worlds before, but nothing even vaguely like this.

For better or worse, one of the other main things that is not cool in Vietnam is irony. Like sex, irony, you’d have to say, is not yet cool – the Vietnamese, at this stage of developments, are not yet ready to mock their own drift into materialism, and they are still too attached to the communist idea of the nation to mock seriously at political authority. Vietnamese humour still has something gentle and positive about it - something that to Westerners feels totally before the fall. In general, if you put your tongue too far in your cheek in Vietnam nowadays, the kids will just not get it. Saying one thing and meaning another is neither cool nor uncool, it’s incomprehensible.

Last of all, there's politics. One of the complicated issues it is definitely worth pointing out about Vietnamese social life nowadays is how uncool politics has become. Yes, a lot of young Vietnamese feel an abstract admiration for the achievements of the nation under Communist leadership (mainly – winning the war). Yes, they appreciate that Uncle Hồ and General Giáp had their understated style and their robust political beliefs – and a considerable willingness to stick up for them. Maybe some younger Vietnamese have fond memories of the fun they had as kids at Party-sponsored jamborees. But all of this is coupled with a nigh-on total lack of interest in either the politics or the policy-settings of the Communist Party.

No section in a Vietnamese bookshop goes more untouched than the corner devoted to political doctrine. No subjects within the school curriculum are considered more deadly than the introduction to Marx and Lenin and the drills in Communist history which all Vietnamese kids get put through.

The standard response you’ll get from a Vietnamese 20-something, if you ask what the slogan on one of the million big red banners actually means is – Who knows? Why are they always 50-feet long? The Vietnamese Communist Party doesn’t seem to have adjusted to one of the basic conditions of urban living – that an idea or image, to be lodged in the mind of casual passers-by, has to be compact enough to be taken in with a quick sweep of the eye.

Membership of the Party is still something Vietnamese go in for in order to realize worthy social goals, not just because it’s the best way to move up in the world. But imbuing the party with any of the attributes of cool is the last thing on their minds – either on the minds of Vietnam’s leaders, or the country's politically rather mellow citizens.

There’s almost certainly a method to this. Live in Vietnam for a couple of years and you might find yourself thinking that the Vietnamese Communist Party is happy to seem as boring as possible because it doesn’t want to be subject to the iron law of cool: that what is cool one day will become uncool the next.

Vietnamese cool, like Asian cool in general, has a very definitely bearable lightness. Political ideals, let alone political realities, are by comparison unbearably heavy. Vietnamese cool floats along on the assumption that both the ideals and the realities can be safely put to one side. And in this it's pretty similar to other regional versions of Asian cool too.

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 . . .

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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. . .