Vietnam

A Change of Perspective

The countries I have travelled to recently have always had one big topic I focused on. Vietnam is not in the middle of a segregation conflict or at war but still I feel like there are many stories to tell. For me it is new to write about something less political and more cultural but I will definitely give it my best shot.

At the beginning I was overwhelmed by the chaos around me and even though it was already my second visit in Vietnam, I was again surprised how people manage to get by every day. The constant honking in the streets, the stop-and-go in the cab because a motorbike with a complete Vietnamese family on it tries to squeeze in between my cap and the autobus next to us, and of course the street sellers who sell everything from miniature turtles to lottery tickets not strictly on the side of the road but also right in the middle, drove me crazy. I pretty much asked myself the question how any society could possibly work efficiently if they do not even follow rules as simple as waiting in front of a red traffic light. Well I was proven to be wrong but I stayed resilient for a couple more days. If any cartoonist would have bothered to draw me at this point it probably would have turned out as a policeman in the middle of the intersection trying to regulate traffic while everyone just kept 

on doing what they did before.

I still remember when my perspective changed. I was riding into town on the back of my friend’s bike to go for some dinner when he mentioned how the honking has the sound of whales or dolphins communicating between each other or how the motorbikes move around obstacles like a shoal of fish. There was a certain harmony in this metaphor which made me reconsider my own position. Of course if I keep looking at the Vietnamese society from the point of view of a European I could never relax or enjoy anything there. The realization to let go of certain habits to truly arrive at your destination has helped me to become part of the Vietnamese life. I hate being a tourist in a country, the things you get shown are not real, overpriced and represent nothing about the culture you came to experience. Therefore I got rid of my ambition to teach the Vietnamese drivers about right of way and instead became part of the shoal myself.

I finally started to discover. There are so many bizarre aspects. The country is governed by a communist party since the war ended in 1975 and still the people simply worship Apple products. The French tried to colonize the country unsuccessfully until 1954 and pretty much represented social-Darwinism and still it is considered an ideal of beauty to have white skin. Throughout history it seems like the Vietnamese people always had to fight against foreign intervention to keep their own culture alive and now that they are self-dependent they elaborate on it but still have chosen to liberate their markets in the 90s for foreign investments. All those correlations mixed with their very own traditions and beliefs makes it even more difficult to describe their society sufficiently.

I think the Vietnamese people are very pragmatic not only in the way how they transport simply everything on their bikes but the way they accept foreign support or intervention if they benefit from it and it does not matter if it is the same country which tried to occupy them a couple decades before. This pragmatism helps to boost your economy and you can tell by the number of expats and growing investments, especially in the urban areas, that the strategy works out fine.

For the future I wonder how they will further develop. An average age of 28 years, a low illiterate rate and an entrepreneur friendly environment are promising prerequisites. I am curious if they will make use of it and if the relationship to foreigners in their country will begin to change as they start to be successful themselves.

If anything I can only say that I admire the way the people live and work there. As a European many situations are cruel as you see people sleep behind their streetfood shops or old ladies pushing huge trash bins through the streets at night but then again you cannot observe objectively from a European perspective. It is easy to label those conditions as inacceptable but considering the given circumstances in the country it is a rational consequence.

I really enjoyed my visit and I am sure to be back at some point, maybe not for the food, but as an escape from my German habits and to comprehend how life in another culture can work in completely different ways.

Very sorry there are not so many picture this time. I used an analogue camera so I still have to develope the pictures and digitalize them. I just use those few pictures from my first trip to make this article look a little bit more exciting! ;-)