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You have questions - she has answers

By Christina Verderosa

It’s interesting to look at the questions people asked me about my trip to Vietnam both before and after my trip. They say a lot about Americans and how they look at other countries.

I was asked a lot about the food, with the expectation that I would say the Vietnamese eat a lot of weird stuff. Well they do eat a lot of weird stuff, but it’s not weird in an awful way. As a matter of fact, most of it was delicious.

After a few days I gave up eating the American breakfast, which usually consisted of an omelet, because I don’t eat eggs much anyway. Instead I tried the Vietnamese breakfast, which is usually a noodle soup called pho. There are many types of pho; in Nha Trang I had it with chicken and green onions, in Hue I had Ben Bo Hue, which is rather spicy, and in Can Tho, the traditional pho with beef. I found out much to my surprise that pho made a very tasty breakfast, though for me it was a bit messy. When eating pho, you pick up the meat and noodles with chopsticks, which I have never been very adept with. In fact at several other meals, I used my hands a bit more than I should have.

One thing was a bit disquieting about the meals; a number of them had eyes. Many times, we were served fish, and I mean the whole fish. Unlike those nice impersonal fillets we’re used to, fins, scales, and head are still attached. The fish would be artfully displayed on a platter and we would all take our chopsticks and pick off bits of meat and drop in on our bowl of rice. But then there were those eyes! Peggy Bullock kept insisting that the fish was staring at her. It didn’t help much when John Benjamin told us that he had eaten fish eyes and they really didn’t taste that bad.

One of the highlights of the meals was the delicious fresh fruit, many of which I had never seen before. My favorite was dragon fruit, which looks as interesting as it tastes. The softball size fruits have a fuchsia-colored skin. Inside the fruit is white with black seeds. The closest way to describe the taste is that it’s similar to a kiwi fruit. There were many others as well as the familiar bananas, mangoes, papayas, and coconuts.

One of the amazing things about eating during my trip was that although I stuffed myself shamelessly, I didn’t gain any weight. In fact I’ve been thinking nostalgically about spring rolls, steamed fish, and even squid ever since I got back.

Another question I’ve been asked is, is it really backwards there? Well that depends on what you mean by backwards and where you are in the country.

Two members of our group, Jean Hershey and David Flores had been in Vietnam during the war and said the country has made a lot of progress since then. On the bus trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang, Jean said that the area between Ho Chi Minh City and Bien Hoa had all been country, now it was all suburbs. Construction of large industrial parks was going on everywhere.

The traffic would give all but the most hardened New York City cabdrivers fits. Very few people have cars, but almost everyone has a motorbike or a bicycle and they just come at you in waves and waves, especially in the cities. If you want to pull out in traffic, you go. If you want to cross the street, you go. Usually when we crossed the street, the whole group of us joined hands just like we did back in grade school and prayed that no one would hit us. It was not until our last day in Vietnam that I got up the nerve to cross the street in Ho Chi Minh City at a corner where there was no traffic light by myself.

You don’t need to understand Vietnamese to see that the media is state controlled. One morning I went to a cafe with two of our YMCA guides and as we sat drinking our coffee, we watched the news, which Tran Khanh Hung obligingly translated for me. There was a story on how fish production is up 40% and about a conference of Vietnamese and French doctors talking about high blood pressure. There were also the obligatory stories of people receiving medals for some service to the state. The show was called, “Good Morning” but Diane Sawyer was nowhere to be seen. But we could also watch MTV on the TVs in our hotel rooms.

But the Internet is everywhere. Peggy and I went to Internet cafes several times and sent e-mail back. I also kept up on the doings in DeWitt by reading the DeWitt Era-Enterprise on-line, and I introduced some of our Vietnamese friends to the doings in South Arkansas County. When I wanted to check up on the rest of the world, I just logged onto the New York Times website. Internet time cost between 100 and 200 dong a minute (between .75 and 3¢).

Once one got out in the countryside, things could get a lot more primitive. At our hotel in Nha Trang, the laundry was done by hand. I saw the laundry woman outside washing clothes in a tub, by hand and then hanging it on the line. We saw people living in small huts with no electricity and no running water. Some families still live on sampans, boats in the rivers. I did notice that a number of those sampans had bicycles or even motorbikes on board.

One of the things I disliked the most was using squat toilets. In most of the cities and tourist areas, the bathrooms had western style toilets, but in Hoa An and some other areas, one basically squatted over a hole and did one’s business. Some were cleaner and nicer than others, but they were still holes in the ground. It was bad enough when the toilet was standing still, but much to my horror, the toilets on the train were squatters and since we were going to be on the train all night, I had to deal with a moving toilet. It’s not real easy for a taller, heavier American (especially one with a bad leg) to get in the right position, but it’s worse when that toilet is lurching around. I managed to do my business without any accidents, but it took quite a bit of maneuvering.

So what are the people like? How do they react to Americans? The people are wonderful, friendly, polite (except when you’re waiting in line, when little old ladies will shove ahead of you without a second thought), and inquisitive. Many of the people we met were too young to remember the Vietnam War, but since we stayed in what had been South Vietnam, we met many people who had worked for the Americans. Our tour guide in Hue, Tran Sam, had been an air traffic controller, who had trained in the U.S. at Keelser and Lackland Air Force Bases. When I told him that I was a retired U.S. Navy officer, he decided he liked me a lot.

Wherever we went we attracted a horde of children, wanting to talk to us, wanting to sell us things, or looking for a handout. Many of them gravitated to Peggy, who usually had goodies to hand out, a hand to hold, or a friendly word. I told her they knew she was a soft touch. I, however, scared most of them off, with one exception. I was having my breakfast in Can Tho and I felt someone touch my arm. A little girl of about three or four from a nearby table had decided that I was her best friend and she was going to hang out with me for as long as she could. We had a rather one-sided conversation: I talked to her and she grinned at me, until finally her parents convinced her to come eat breakfast.

Was it what you expected? Like many Americans I had barely given a thought to Vietnam since the war ended, until I interviewed Peggy after her trip. I had been to a communist country once before, to the Soviet Union in 1979. Vietnam, however, did not look anything like the Soviet Union. From what I read and heard from others, Vietnam tried to be the Soviet Union and found out that it didn’t work any better for them than it did in Russia. As we were checking out at the airport, much to my amazement the customs man actually said thank you, instead of just staring balefully at me in typical Soviet style. Our group leader, Donald Voth who has been to Vietnam many times talked about how much the tourist services have improved. In particular, workers tried to be helpful, instead of being obstructive bureaucrats. They probably discovered that this is much better for business.

We met a lot of tourists, especially Australians. I talked to one woman on the beach at Nha Trang who said that Vietnam is a popular stop for Australians, because it’s inexpensive, and (unlike the trip from the U.S.) only an eight-hour trip. But I also met a lot of Europeans and Americans, including several Vietnamese-Americans who were returning for the first time after the war. We talked to one woman at the airport, who said she was surprised to find that she felt at home.

But the question most people asked me, especially before I went was, “Why?” Usually they asked me in that tone of voice which meant, “What the heck would you want to go there for?” I usually answered, “because I’ve never been there?” Isn’t that the best reason to go anywhere?

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Originally published in the DeWitt Era-Enterprise (DeWitt, Arkansas), March 7, 2002

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