Surreality in Motion

I know what you did last summer...(Part 3)

By: Lindsay Napor, WG’05

Posted: 9/20/04

Xin Gao Bo - Hello, Bite my turkey, I want soup. I was trying to say the first, but you never know who you're insulting in Vietnamese. Put the accent in the wrong place and you're saying something completely different. I never really got the difference between the short falling double dipthong and the long rising flat toned "O," let alone the long falling, short rising and three other ways of pronouncing every vowel.

Thank God they know this and don't make us try. This summer three of us Wharton kids, Ethan Johnson, Leonard Chen and myself, went to Vietnam for a WIVP project to help out an organization called Saigon Children's Charity. Aside from living out a week-long comedy skit Ethan coined "playing telephone with zero degrees of separation" (communication was always something of a challenge), we had a chance to meet and work with some incredible people and hopefully do some degree of good.

Our microfinance project was based in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) but took us out to the poor rural areas of Vietnam to meet the loan officers and recipients. Although the scenery is what everyone raves about when they travel to Vietnam (and Ha Long Bay in the north is one of the more beautiful places on the planet), we've all agreed that getting to meet these people was the best part of our trip. There aren't many experiences that can rival women that live without real floors or four walls trying to give you part of their harvest as a gift for visiting.

Surreal moments like that became the theme of our trip. In a country that has largely been closed to the world until five years ago with the release of the U.S. trade embargo and the gradual loosening of the press, there are plenty of unbelievable sights to go around: The elegant traditional dress and hats flying through the air behind a motorbike with three people on it, right in the middle of a busy modernizing city (the motorbikes carry everything from families to refrigerators to whole harvests of rice). People with monthly salaries of $350 spending $500 on cell phones and 50 cents on clothes imported from China (yes, even they import from China). Watching the movie Mean Girls with the girls from our office and being the only ones in the theater laughing at most of the jokes. The propoganda posters that still proclaim that working hard and loving your country (and driving safely and throwing your garbage in the trash) is the way to "Happiness for Everyone." Not to mention whipping out 10,000 Dong ($0.60) to pay the street vendors for books or CDs with titles spelled just a little wrong (best one was Ill Communication by the Beach Boys). And no, the Dong jokes just never got old.

In the end the most surprising part for me was the thing that was glaringly absent, especially now, and that was the anti-American sentiment. The museums still talk about the evils of the U.S. during the war and still call their war medals the "American Killer Hero Award", and the effects of Agent Orange are still a national issue. But outside of the museums the negativity was hard to find. People were incredibly friendly and curious and wanted to know about what life was like in America (all they know is from watching movies such as Mean Girls-somehow the only form of media that is not state sponsored. I guess they know we can hang ourselves with that one). Most expressed the extremely sophisticated point of view that they dislike our government but understand that government has little to do with individual people. The warmth extended to us in Vietnam will stay with me for a very long time.

I had an amazing time in Vietnam and I won't soon forget the people or the sights we saw there, from the rapidly changing cities to the floating fishing villages to the communist commune leaders we were allowed to interview. So the only question is, do you think I can finance a trip back by taking orders for cheap clothes? Made to order, real fast, good price for you!