‘Nam

OK, here it comes—I am just going to say it up front so that I don’t have to allude to it in my posts.  Ethnic Vietnamese people are among the, if not the, least friendly people I have ever met in the world.  It may just be that we are coming from Fiji, where the people are known as the most friendly in the world.  However, the Vietnamese are physically incapable of smiling and see the tourist as precisely two things: a thing to be scorned and a source of money.  We have been both and rarely anything more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our very first experience in Vietnam was getting screwed on the bus from the airport to town.  Here is how it works.  We are told a certain rate for the bus trip and pay with a larger bill than the total.  In most of the world, when there is a difference between the charge and what I paid, we would call that change and it would be given.  Well, the bus folks “didn’t have change” just then but I was promised that it would be given to me when they had change.  The money guy got off in the middle of nowhere and the driver had no money for change.  When we got to the city, there was no money guy, no money and hence no change. I thoroughly castigated the driver and felt better after.  Of course, he understood no English.  Three of us got screwed that way.  It was the first of many screwing.

Every taxi driver, ever vendor, every government office, hotel, bus company, tour company…will lie to you about the price or distance.  I have been around plenty of vendors elsewhere in the world where haggling is the name of the game and I usually enjoy the good-natured banter of haggling. In Vietnam, it is a life and death struggle and there are no rules, only victims.  I am thrilled if there aren’t any injuries at the end of haggling a price for an avocado.  Taxi drivers favorite is to lie about the distance to a place, then to drive in circles to make it look longer.  Street vendors demand at least double the actual price and throw a fit when you demand the fair price.

To be fair, we have met some really lovely people and it is known in Vietnam that the people in the south are much friendlier than those in the north.  We saw that too and were even occasionally smiled at in Saigon.  I was happy to not be spit on in Hanoi.  I also want to make it clear that I am speaking about the ethnic Vietnamese only.  We met a lot of H’mong and Dzao minorities in the north and Khmer (ethnic Cambodians) in the south and they are absolutely lovely people who give more than they have.  And we met plenty of wonderfully kind Vietnamese throughout Vietnam, but the exception proves the rule.

Here is my theory--it must suck to be Vietnamese.  Vietnam has been on the short end of the imperial stick for a few thousand years.  First it was the Chinese, then the Cham, then Khmer, then the French, then the Japanese, followed by another round of the Chinese and French to be topped off by the American War.  And since then they have had to once again fight wars with Cambodia and China to keep them out.  Foreigners have been trying to take Vietnam by force for a very long time so some skepticism about foreigners’ intent is understandable.

The second thing is that life is really hard here.  People work all of the time.  They pause briefly to eat and then go back to work, be it in a market stall, food stall, hotel, hawking stuff on the road, etc.  The shop is usually always open, 7 days a week.  They eat and sleep either in their shop or very near it.  Men usually just get a few hours of sleep on the floor or on hard benches in the shop.  If you get up early at your hotel, there are usually 3-4 young men asleep somewhere very uncomfortable in the lobby.  And they treat each other like crap.  From what I can tell, the extreme unfriendliness is only moderately mollified by being Vietnamese.  Smiling, politeness, and overall friendliness are just not values.  If I worked all of the time, slept on a bench, was occasionally carpet-bombed by foreign powers, and everyone was pissed off around me, I may not smile at foreigners either.

So, that is the bad part of Vietnam.  There are many, many wonderful things about Vietnam, and those will follow.  I just wanted to get this out of the way to avoid negativity in future posts.