The Yellow Line is a Social Construct

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

-Romans 12:2

No, I have not forsaken blogging, nor do I intend to; it's been a very busy couple of weeks, and I haven't been taking nearly as many pictures as I'd like to. Also I'm lazy. Mostly the latter.

I've been living in the city of Cần Thơ (hereafter transcribed as Can Tho, because those are way too many accents) in southern Vietnam for about 10 days now, and I'll leave tomorrow morning for Ha Noi, the nation's capital, in the north. My stay here in Can Tho has been amazing, hectic, stressful, frustrating, and most of all educational for me; I've learned a huge amount about a city and country that had never really crossed my mind much until just a few weeks ago. I've also gotten to know a wonderful Vietnamese family, and become immersed in an unfamiliar but very welcoming and vibrant culture.

This blog entry is going to be a little bit different in that it might be more text-heavy than usual, with my thoughts on Vietnam up to now interspersed with some pictures I took along the way. Instead of chronologically, I'm going to divide it into sections based on the topic, with some pictures to accompany it. I don't often try new things, so trying a different blog format is very scary for me. (That was sarcasm)

The city:

Can Tho is Vietnam's fourth-largest city, located right in the middle of the Mekong River Delta. In Vietnam, the Delta is called the "Nine Dragons", because it originally split into nine different channels near the mouth. Two of those have disappeared or been dammed in the past couple centuries, but it's very clear that the river dominates pretty much every aspect of daily life here. There are canals everywhere, especially the countryside, and it would be possible to get from Ho Chi Minh City to Can Tho, 100 kilometers inland, only by boat. The constant humidity means that it is one of Vietnam's most fertile agricultural areas; the Delta region provides more than half of the country's rice crop and an even larger proportion of its seafood and tropical fruit (more about that later).

The vast majority of Can Tho's economy is based off of agriculture, and it shows walking around the city; it feels very working-class and practical, without much of an orientation towards tourists. There is one particular street with some nice hotels and overpriced foreign food, but for the most part the whole city feels very authentic. It almost reminds me of a Midwestern city in that respect. I say "almost" because it really has very, very little besides that in common with a Midwestern city, as anyone who has been to the Midwest could tell you.

The upper class of Can Tho are pretty clearly wealthy... Interestingly enough, there are very few true "rich" and "poor" parts of the city, and often there will just be gargantuan mansions squatting in the middle of a sea of wooden houses with tin roofs. It's like gentrification, but much, much weirder.

The view from my host family's balcony

One of Can Tho's biggest tourist attractions (there aren't many, to be honest) is its floating market. Rural people will boat in from hundreds of kilometers away to sell their products, sleeping on their boat and selling everything out on the river. The group took an early morning tour of the market, which was kind of nice but for the fact we had to wake up at an ungodly hour to do it, and didn't have the chance to explore as much as I had hoped. I guess it's understandable though, because I don't think I'd be able to explore it to my satisfaction unless I had my own canoe or something. Which, by the way, is totally something I would do if I come back to Can Tho.

My host family and religion:

For most of our time in Can Tho, we were placed with host families, generally two students to one family. My host family is an old couple who are associated with Can Tho University, the campus we've been studying at. Our host mother, Anh, is an English teacher, and our host father, An (yes, this is confusing) taught education before he retired. We also have a 14-year-old host brother, a 27-year-old host sister who probably spoke four words to us in the whole space of our stay, an adorable 2-year-old host nephew, a very friendly dog, and a kitten that's given me several deep scratches on my arm already. They're a really wonderful family, and we had quite a few really good dinner table discussions about culture, politics, religion, and many other things.

Our host mother is Catholic, like a significant minority of the Vietnamese population (thanks to French colonialism), and her husband was also raised Catholic. However, he read some Buddhist texts a couple years ago and decided to convert; he now calls himself "Catholic and Buddhist, but mostly Buddhist". On the second floor of our house is a picture of Jesus and a rosary, and on the third floor there's a shrine to their ancestors and some incense and offerings for Buddha.

An also apparently joined a Buddhist study group in order to get to know the religion better, and for whatever reason the members of that group are disgustingly wealthy. We went to visit the leader of the group, who lives in a house the size of my college library on an island in the river. He and his wife have apparently been to literally EVERY country with a Buddhist history, and visited famous monasteries and other monuments. They have two entire walls dedicated to pictures of it, just in case we were in doubt.

No, seriously.

We also visited several really beautiful pagodas and a church with my host parents. I have quite a bit of experience with and respect for Catholicism (much as I disagree with many parts of it), and I've always been really interested in Buddhism, so it was really great to see genuine places of worship here. To me, those are usually some of the most authentic places one can go while abroad. It was also kind of refreshing to see that the two religions could live together so peacefully, especially considering that up until recently they really, really didn't.

From left to right: John, my homestay partner, my host mom, my host dad, and my host dad's friend, who casually has a giant stupa in his back yard.

Transportation:

Oh lord.

I mentioned in my last entry about how popular the motorbike was. Well, they're popular everywhere, but the streets of Can Tho are absolutely choked with them. The great thing about the streets of Vietnam is that most rules are pretty much guidelines, and pretty loose ones at that. Weaving in and out of lanes to get ahead? Perfectly normal. Waiting for a break in traffic to make a left turn? Why waste time? Just go ahead and head forward, people will swerve around you. Driving the opposite direction through traffic? Sure, why not? My homestay partner, John, and I were given bicycles to ride to the campus where we had, which is about 2 kilometers away. I have never had so many near-death experiences so close together as what I became used to every day biking to campus. Nobody stops for anything except for the occasional stoplight, so making a left turn is absolutely terrifying.
Crossing the street on foot is also an ordeal, especially the first few times. The trick is to just walk confidently across the street without stopping, no matter how much traffic there is. It's nerve-wracking at first, but I've perfected the art of walking straight across a busy street while looking directly forward, listening to motorbikes whizzing past less than a foot in front of or behind me. I'm sure I look very cool doing it.

Something like this.

Politics and Economics:

Most of you probably know that the Vietnamese government is a one-party communist system (so much for that war, America!). After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Ho Chi Minh fired most of the South Vietnamese officials from their jobs and replaced them with friends of his from the North, most of whom were woefully unqualified for their positions. Predictably, it ended up seriously screwing up the economy, and a lot of the south fell into poverty after that (the trade embargo on the part of western countries probably didn't help much either. However, in 1988 the Vietnamese economy finally liberalized, and the country has developed pretty impressively since then. It's definitely still a "developing country" (what does that term even mean?), but from what I can gather the economy continues to grow pretty reliably. On the other hand, inequality has been increasing as well, especially with the industrialization of agriculture. I have many thoughts on the Vietnamese government, but I'm not sure if I should post them until I'm out of the country.

The Environment:

It's the whole reason my group is here in Vietnam, so we've been learning quite a bit about the effects of climate change and other environmental degradation on the ecosystem and economy. Vietnam is one of the top 5 countries most vulnerable to climate change (according to the UN), and that's especially apparent down in the Delta, where the average elevation is about 5 feet above sea level. About 40% of the land area could be underwater over the next century if current trends continue (that's a conservative estimate), and the increasing intrusion of seawater is making rice farming increasingly difficult.
Perhaps more immediately worrying is the impending damming of the lower Mekong River, which could have disastrous consequences for the fisheries down in the Delta. Many of the important fish species require unbroken river access in order to swim upstream and spawn. Even scarier, the soil in the Delta region is dependent on the constant flow of sediment down from the Himalayas, which would be reduced dramatically if the river were to be extensively dammed. Without sediment, the soil would become more acidic, increasing erosion and wreaking havoc on rice fields. Unfortunately, the dams are almost certain to be built; despite resistance in Vietnam, the Laotian government, which controls a large section of the river, is determined to go through with the projects, regardless of the environmental and social impacts. Protests and social movements aren't allowed in Laos, whose government is even more authoritarian than Vietnam's, so the government really has the final say in things. Which isn't always a good thing.

On a more positive note, the Can Tho University, in conjunction with several foreign donors, has had a lot of success with implementing VACB, a renewable energy system, in rural communities. The acronym stands for "Cage, Garden, Pond, Biogas" (in Vietnamese, obviously), and it basically involves using waste from fish ponds and livestock in powering gas and electricity within the house. It's a very cool system, and it seems to be working fairly well in households it's been installed in. Some farmers are trained in putting in the system (which seems to be fairly straightforward), and will then help to train their neighbors get it themselves. There are a lot of things I'm still curious about with the system, but the language barrier makes asking about them very, very difficult.

Pigs on the VACB-using farm we visited. I can see how one would get a lot of, erm, biogas from them.

A fish pond that's part of the system; methane from decomposing plant matter is captured for energy.

Language and Culture:

And about that language barrier... Boy is it frustrating. I usually make a point of knowing at least a little bit of the languages of countries I visit, but I definitely slacked off in preparing for Vietnam. I'm trying to learn some Vietnamese, but damn is it a difficult language. It has 6 tones (one more than Chinese), and way, way too many vowels and diphthongs I can't pronounce. I usually have to say a word five or six times before someone understands it, and most of the time it just ends up with me staring helplessly and hoping there's someone nearby who speaks the language.
This can be especially frustrating when we do site visits to different farms or communities, and are forced to depend on local professors or students for translation. Often the interpreter will answer a question for the interviewee without even talking to them, or only give a small part of the full answer. I spent enough time working as an interpreter this summer to know that those are two VERY BIG NO-NO's with interpretation.

As for culture, I'm always amazed at how friendly and welcoming the Vietnamese people are. Can Tho isn't very touristed, so I've had to get used to lots of wide-eyed looks, people randomly yelling "hello" at me, and having strangers ask for a picture with them when I'm on the street. One of the things you never learn to appreciate about America until you've left is the amount of diversity; people from just about anywhere in the world could walk the streets of a large city and nobody would bat an eyebrow or assume they were foreigners. In Vietnam, the population is homogenous enough that people know instantly that I'm not from around there, and will treat me as such. I don't care about it a huge amount, but it sometimes feels like I'm a zoo animal more than anything else.

The food is, of course, delicious. Vietnamese food ranks right up there with genuine Mexican cuisine in my list of favorite foreign foods, and that's saying something. It's usually a lot of rice and noodles (just like everywhere else in East and Southeast Asia), coupled with many, many different types of meat. I'm pretty sure they happily eat absolutely everything that seems to be moving of its own volition. Meats I've seen include pork, chicken, fish, eel (very good), shrimp, squid, snake, field rat (too bony), frog (surprisingly good when deep-fried), snails, cats, and dogs. The latter two are probably the only two I'd have trouble eating, especially since my host dad told me we can't let the pet dog outside because she would be kidnapped and sold to a dog mean restaurant. I don't have a huge moral issue with it in theory, but the idea that I could be eating some poor kid's Fluffy or Mittens kind of turns me off of the whole thing.

Yeah, you'd better watch out.

The fruit here is indescribable; some tropical species I'm used to, some I haven't seen since Bolivia, and even more that I've never seen nor heard of, but taste delicious.

Jackfruit: another fruit that really needs to reach the United States.

Some other random observations about Vietnam:

•It seems like a rule that every clothing shop or electronics store worth its salt has to play extremely loud house music on outside speakers at all hours of the day. Bumping bass can be nice sometimes, but not so much at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning.

•The colorful, patterned jumpsuit is definitely in-style for older Vietnamese women.

Definitely.

• The Vietnamese currency is called the Dong. If you want to make a joke about that, get in line; the whole group has been using it in suggestive sentences as much as humanly possible. There are 21,000 Dong to a US dollar, so I've basically been swimming in Dong since I got here. See what I did there?

• Massages are very popular here. Apparently, it's also very easy for guys to get "happy endings" as part of the package. I don't really approve of that personally, but boy does it have the creepy old guys flocking to massage parlors.

I'm all about the boody massage though.

I'll be back soon with another entry! Until then, I hope everyone back in the temperate zone is enjoying fall! I'll finish the post out with some other random pictures I took this past couple weeks.