Vietnam's Most Mysterious Shoplady

Every Saturday, I walk out of my school at 12:15 and attempt to cross Ba Hom street. It might be the single most dangerous thing I do all week. Swarms of motorbikes fly in every direction, and honking buses plow through the streets with a singular disregard for human safety. In one weekend there were three separate accidents in front of our school. Cops stood in the middle of the road making chalk outlines and collecting debris.

My destination sits under a large sign bearing the words 'HIỆP PHÁT'. It is a small storefront piled high with boxes of soda, toothbrushes, and squid-flavored potato chips. An old Vietnamese woman sits at the counter. She's well dressed in bright traditional clothes, with gold bracelets on her wrists and elegant jade earrings. I grab a bottle of tea from the refrigerator, place it on the counter in front of her. I reach for my wallet and she laughs as she produces a bag full of home-cooked food from beneath her stool. Then she reaches around for gum, candy, cigarettes - anything handy, really - and tosses it in the bag.

 I stand there like an idiot, smiling and brandishing a fistful of bills, muttering cam on ('thank you' in Vietnamese) again and again. She ignores the money, and eventually I give up and mutter cam on even more emphatically than before. Then I trudge back across the street, clutching my free lunch and spitting obscenities at the buzzing motorbikes.

This has been going on for months. It is one of my most baffling experiences in Vietnam.

The Lunch Lady.

There is a certain art to buying things in Vietnam, especially foodstuffs. Consistency is paramount.As an illustration - the neighborhood sandwich shop. Every morning, I stop there between 10-12 am to buy two banh mi op la (omelet baguettes). The process is incredibly efficient. As soon as the woman hears my motorbike approach, she cranks on the gas range and begins cooking the eggs. I park my bike in front of her cart, and wander off to buy fruit and coffee. By the time I return, she has wrapped two steaming sandwiches in old book pages. I climb on my bike, she clips the food to my bag, and I hand her 25,000 VND ($1.25 USD). We do this every day. We have the routine down pat.

However, should I deviate from the routine by ordering, say, one sandwich, the transaction devolves into utter chaos. All the painstaking familiarity gained over weeks and months suddenly evaporates and I am reduced to holding up fingers and pointing at loaves with the authority of an indecisive toddler. Eventually she concedes and makes the sandwich, eying me mistrustfully the whole time and staring at my money like it is made of human skin. This scene will repeat itself over the next week or so, until I regain enough credibility to qualify for automatic, expedited service. 

Now some might say, 'Nick, this problem could be easily resolved if you simply acquired a working knowledge of basic Vietnamese.'

This is true.

But Vietnamese is hard.

~

For the first three months I lived in Vietnam, I had a similar breezy routine with the Lunch Lady. On weekday afternoons I would pull up just before 6 pm, always buying a small Coke. On weekends I stopped by around noon for a green tea, carrying my customary lunch of com chien (fried rice) in a yellow plastic bag. Occasionally I'd buy some ChocoPies or squid chips for a particularly good class, which were always fetched by the Lunch Lady's teenage son, whose facial expressions ranged from intolerably bored to possibly comatose. We had a polite and uncomplicated relationship - take goods, give money, repeat as necessary.

One day, I noticed a small flower shop half a block from the HIỆP PHÁT. For reasons inexplicable considering my 5 am wakeup that day, I was in a lighthearted, gift-giving mood. So I bought a bunch of flowers and brought them over to the Lunch Lady. I stepped into her store and handed her the bouquet of rich purple…somethings. They matched her outfit that day, and I made a big show of saying 'dep, dep!', meaning 'beautiful' in Vietnamese. She blushed furiously and placed the flowers in a vase next to the cash register. She wouldn't let me pay for the tea. I silently congratulated myself for being an awesome human being and headed back to school, where I would go on to blatantly mail in my last two lessons with the help of pirated Doraemon DVDs.

The next Saturday, the com ga restaurant where I bought lunch had disappeared. Everything from the deep fat fryer to the sign outside were gone. When I appeared at the for HIỆP PHÁT for my tea, the Lunch Lady immediately noticed the absence of my little yellow bag. 'Com? Com?', she asked again and again, repeating one of the only Vietnamese words I was likely to understand. I gave her the double upturned handshake, the ubiquitous local sign for 'I am absolutely clueless.' 

After that, the Lunch Lady was born.

~

The first offering.

The first time she made me lunch, I was flabbergasted. It was a Saturday afternoon, around the usual time, and I had shown up more out of habit than anything else. I was planning on skipping lunch and binging on Indian food that night. So when the cute old lady handed me a bag full of freshly sautéed beef and vegetables, steamed white rice and (peeled!*) apples, I could do nothing but stammer 'thank you', unable to utter even a single word in Vietnamese. When I tried to produce my wallet, she unleashed a torrent of Vietnamese that admonished me, in no uncertain terms, for being a complete fucking idiot. Her actions completely subverted everything I previously understood about the business-customer relationship. I gave her a polite little bow, remembered that the Vietnamese don't bow, got even more embarrassed, and practically sprinted out of the store.

Bewildered and slightly hungry, I wandered back to the teacher's room and unpacked my grub. Ms. Ngu, one of the teacher support staff and possibly the sweetest human being ever born, looked confused and asked me if I had made lunch at home (since foreigners are generally assumed to subsist only off KFC and Heineken). When I told her it was a gift from the woman across the street, Ngu looked at me as if I was speaking Flemish. 'Foreigners are just the weirdest,' her face said plainly.

Better than a Famous Bowl, probably.

The same thing happened next week. Suddenly, my money was useless at the HIỆP PHÁT. Since she wouldn't accept money, I began to search the city for little gifts to give her. As the weeks passed and the free lunches continued to flow, it turned into a bit of a game. Every weekend she would deliver a fresh batch of com with all the fixin's, and I'd deliver a little glass figurine or another bouquet of flowers.

Step 1 to becoming a fatass.

 Every week was something different. Once she handed me a heavy box of fried rice with a dozen giant shrimp buried under the fragrant grains. Another Saturday's bag contained an assorted sampler of Vietnam's finest processed meats, which I delicately disposed of in an outside bin to keep it from smelling up the entire office. My lunches began to attract attention from coworkers, who teased me that I now had a new girlfriend across the street. Even the normally reserved Ms. Ngu tossed words like 'seduction' around, which was equal parts hilarious and horrifying. Others suggested that perhaps she had a daughter she wished to marry off, though I never saw anyone but her expressionless son hanging around the store. 

The gift war escalates.

Then the gifts began to come. For weeks I had been bringing her little trinkets and gifts, considering it a utilitarian trade of art for food. She placed them together on the counter, a steadily growing little pile of gratitude and guilt. I felt a very Midwestern need to be 'even' - something in Minnesotan blood curdles at the idea of being out-generous'd by somebody else. My father is a prime example of this - if the man borrowed your car for an hour, he'd return it with a full tank of gas, new brakes, and a copy of CCR's Greatest Hits. The gifts were my way of compensating for the time and energy she put into my weekly lunches.

When the food began to be accompanied by fashion accessories, I felt a twinge of panic. Things were beginning to escalate quickly - they could easily get out of hand fast. One week she gave me two beautifully wrapped boxes containing a leather wallet and belt. The next there was a silver watch nestled in a dark red box. Some other notables - a backpack filled with a motorbike helmet, poncho, and face mask, a traditional Vietnamese wind chime, an entire carton of cigarettes, and the coup de grace:

verysexyhot, baby!

At this point, I was afraid to even walk into her store. Merchants in Vietnam are usually ready to gouge foreigners to the utter limits of reason - my favorite example being a woman who once tried to charge me 500,000 VND ($25 USD) for a single coconut. People don't simply give stuff away, especially to foreigners who make comparatively exorbitant salaries. And storeowners never, never lavish expensive gifts on their customers while refusing to accept payment. A coworker joked that not only did she want me to marry her daughter, but also donate a kidney to her cousin. I laughed along with him and patted my sides nervously. 

One day, there was a light blue envelope inside my lunch bag. I opened it to find a beautifully written note, full of curly T's and elegant sweeping G's. The Vietnamese still practice handwriting in school, and reading their letters sometimes feels like studying calligraphy. In polite, formal English, the note informed me that that the lady had asked a niece to translate her words; the condensed version read something like this:

Every day I see you at my store and I feel happy. Your smiling face is very handsome and you have a kind heart. It must be difficult for you to live far from your family and homeland. I hope that you will remember me, and have a happy life in Vietnam. 

How do you reply to that?

~

I eventually wrote the Lunch Lady back, enlisting my talented coworker Ms. Phuc to translate my letter into Vietnamese. Phuc is a bit of a smartass - apparently she majored in literature or poetry or something while in university, and is thus a talented writer. 'How do you want the letter to sound? Polite? Respectful? Grateful? Romantic?', she asked, winking suggestively at the last one. I settled on grateful and polite, and began the difficult task of thanking someone whose kindness has exceeded all reasonable expectations.

In the end I have no idea if I found the right words to show my gratitude (or if Phuc ignored my instructions and wrote a steamy ode of lascivious dirty talk). But we've exchanged a few more notes since then, and the stream of food and gifts continues unabated, always in both directions, never entirely equal.

I'll never know exactly why she decided to show such kindness to a clueless, lunchless foreigner with long hair and lousy taste in cosmetics, but I am comfortable with not-knowing. Vietnam teaches you very quickly that some questions are not meant to be answered. A little mystery keeps things interesting. And everybody knows there's no such thing as a bad free lunch.

Although if she ever packs me squid rings again, I might torch the shop.

Teachers' Day in Vietnam: Puttin' on the Ritz

In many countries around the globe, October 5th is celebrated as World Teachers' Day. In Vietnam, a country where pleas for punctuality are made with a wink and a nod, teachers are recognized on November 20th. As I found out last Sunday, it is worth the wait.

~

Last year, I 'celebrated' Teachers' Day in Korea, where I worked at a private language academy for the pampered scions of Samsung middle managers and LG junior account executives. The owner of that academy, who could be charitably described as a twitchy runt (or something similar), decided that teachers would not be allowed to keep presents given on Teachers' Day. Ostensibly, this was to prevent any sort of favoritism toward students who lavished expensive gifts on their teachers in hopes of receiving preferential treatment. 

In practice, this meant I had to look a bunch of Korean kindergarteners square in the eye and politely tell them, 'Sorry Ji-Su, teacher doesn't want your monogrammed hankerchief. And this glittery card has to go back, too.' Meanwhile, the Korean staff hovered outside the classrooms waiting to swoop in and confiscate all tokens of gratitude, which would later be returned to confused and angry parents. The whole day was such a fiasco that the owner eventually announced that the school would be closed on Teachers' Day in the future, just to avoid the whole thorny issue of employee recognition.

Gimme yer gifts.

~

Teachers' Day 2013 in Vietnam was quite a different scene. The celebration was held at the Sheraton Towers in downtown Saigon, one of the city's swankiest hotels and a place that few of us had any business being at under normal circumstances. People accustomed to squatting at roadside stands while slurping suspiciously aromatic noodles were suddenly confronted with modern man's greatest fear: multiple forks.

How many salads can one person have?

The polished marble floors and elegant wood paneling of the Sheraton are an interesting juxtaposition to the madly boiling chaos of 'real' Saigon. Bellhops wait at the front doors, alternately helping people out of shiny new Lexuses and dinged-up Vinasun taxis. Once inside, a smartly-dressed person* can wander at will past banks of elevators that only go to one floor and extravagant seafood buffets featuring an endless array of expensive, French-sounding dishes.

*I  returned the next day on my motorbike to pick up some belongings at the concierge. Wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, I didn't make it halfway to the door before two very polite bouncers** asked me where I was going, and if they could help me, and if I wouldn't mind leaving as quickly as possible.

**Is there a classier word for a dude whose job essentially boils down to keeping out the lower classes?

The clothes make the man.

Places like the Sheraton always make my skin crawl until I've had a few drinks. Like many Millennials I am reverse-adaptable, a pretentious self-defense mechanism in which I critique post-modern literature at dive bars and make fart jokes at the opera. I felt like an impostor in my three-piece suit, as out of place as Kenny Powers at a Venetian fashion show. As I wandered around enormous chandelier-lit ballroom, it became obvious that many of my coworkers felt the same way. My roommate Kieran*, sharply dressed in all black like an Irish Johnny Cash, quickly found a bottle of tequila somebody smuggled in and was soon drunk as a lord. As it turns out he was one of the lucky ones.

*Kieran later went on to win the award for Best-Dressed Teacher. It was a remarkable accomplishment for a man who spends most of an average day wandering around the house hungover in his boxers.

Much to general dismay, the 'free booze' portion of the evening was not due to start for several hours. Apparently this was due to some unfortunate events the previous year, in which one foreign teacher became so uproariously drunk that he attempted to dance on the VIP table where all of VUS's grandest poobahs sat. When he was politely instructed to sit elsewhere, he threw a glass of wine at the president and lit a tablecloth on fire. Some, probably most, of the story is apocryphal, but in any case the promise of 'open bar at the Sheraton!' turned out to be misleading.

By the time the ceremony started, half the crowd was drunk anyway. Expats are nothing if not adaptable.

~

Bringing the ruckus.

Eventually the lights dimmed, a diminutive MC in shimmering ao dai traditional dress beckoned us to our seats, and the ceremony began. A team of fierce-looking drummers in red garb rushed the stage and began to beat the everliving shit out of some impressively large drums. Seated close to the stage, I could feel the percussion rattle my ribcage as my organs bounced about like bingo balls at the old folks home.  Their performance was kinetic, enthusiastic, and about 75% too long. There are only so many ways to hit something with a stick before it all becomes a bit repetitive.

When the drummers finished and their instruments were whisked off the stage by a team of burly roadies, our pretty little MC grabbed the mic and uttered the seven most horrifying words of any corporate event: 'And now, a word from the President.'

Synergies! Pro-active solutions! Market research optimization!

The President of VUS is a very nice, soft-spoken man with a decent tailor and an extensive vocabulary. He is also either impressively deaf or remarkably mellow, because at no point during his lengthy speech did the room ever approach 'silence' or even 'a dull roar'. Apparently the entire back of the room was now NASCAR-fan drunk off pocket-bottle whiskey, and even the President's occasional pauses and exasperated chuckles did nothing to quiet the noise. Those of us in the front breathed huge sighs of relief when his speech came to its merciful conclusion.

Next up were the awards, and there were many to bestow. Like most Asian countries, Vietnam puts great importance on appearance without any of the 'it's what's inside that counts' doublespeak bullshit we favor in the West. So it was fitting that the first people called to the stage were the recipients of the prestigious 'Best-Dressed Teacher'. After sitting through 45 minutes of 'increased market saturation' and 'cutting-edge technologies', we were finally given something to ogle.

Looking good, kids.

And ogle we did. This was my first formal corporate event and thus my introduction to an unsettling reality of adult professional life - a lot of your coworkers clean up real, real nice. People you would normally describe as 'nice' or 'cute' or 'friendly' suddenly appeared as glamorous, radiant sex-deities. And as you'd expect, eyebrows were raised.

Other, less interesting awards for stuff like professional dedication and exemplary performance followed. Luckily, there were many 'repeat' winners so the flow of eye-candy continued uninterrupted. Beauty and success, as always, go hand in hand. At this point however the audience had thinned out considerably as dozens of teachers flocked outside to chug convenience store booze and chain-smoke in the parking lot. There are few occasions as mind-bogglingly boring as an awards event in which you receive no award.

Awards were followed by dinner, a scrumptious buffet of expensive meats stuffed with other expensive meats, diabetes-inducing piles of frosted chocolate desserts, and finally the free wine. Unfortunately I was completely unable to enjoy any of this, as I was immediately whisked away from the table for dance practice.

I probably should have mentioned this before. The most eagerly anticipated/dreaded portion of the evening was set to follow dinner: the teacher dances. Every year, teachers from every VUS campus semi-volunatrily squeeze themselves into ridiculous costumes and shake their asses in front of a sea of camera phones while the crowd works itself into a ravenous, inebriated frenzy.

Along with five other teachers, I was performing a traditional Vietnamese dance about a boy from the South who falls in love with a girl from the North. One member of our group, a part-time dance instructor named Gary, was comfortable performing on stage, but the rest of us were decidedly not. We found a bottle of champagne, passed it around, and started practicing our steps in the kitchen. My partner, a beautiful Vietnamese girl named My (which means 'beautiful' in Vietnamese, coincidentally) looked ready to puke all over her traditional silk dress.

We waited backstage and watched as the other campuses performed their dances, still handing around the champagne and applauding wildly after each performance concluded without any major falls or wardrobe malfunctions. There were Bollywood bellydancers, a hula-salsa number, and a surprisingly good rendition of 'Love Potion #9'. When the MC called out for the 'teachers of An Duong Vuong' I slapped hands with Jenny, a sweet little South African girl on my team, and got ready to rush the stage.

A taste of India.

Shakira is always great.

Our performance went off almost perfectly, and our co-workers flooded the stage to snap photos once the music stopped. Holding flowers and grinning like idiots, we buzzed with relief, friendliness, and mid-rate bubbly. All of us were hugging and shouting and generally feeling like the world's most successful buffoons.

Bassy (Netherlands) and Jenny (South Africa) performing a traditional Vietnamese dance.

 Eventually the stage cleared and we retreated to our backstage post, still basking in the post-dance euphoria. Then came the highlight of the night: the sexy dance.

Aptly named.

Three female Vietnamese teachers slipped onto the stage and proceeded to blow the place out. Even the normally reserved VIPs were hooting like freshmen at a toga party. I turned to Gary, one of my fellow An Duong Vuong dancers, and whispered, 'Thank god we didn't follow THESE chicks.' The girls were dynamite dancers with absolutely no reservations about delivering an all-out performance. Quite a few monocles were dropped during that dance. When they finished, they had to remain in costume for over an hour as hordes of partygoers clamored to take their pictures. I'd been told of the famous risqué Teachers' Day dance before. After witnessing it with my own eyes, I can vouch that its reputation is well-deserved.

~

After the sexy dance there were a few more performances, some closing remarks, and a polite variation of 'you don't have to go home now, but get the hell out'. A tidal wave of giddily hammered teachers streamed out the doors on their way to the bars, eager to continue their buzz and maybe make a pass at the cute co-worker they'd been eye-banging for the past five hours.

I left the Sheraton long after the main crowd, weaving through the extravagant lobby with my buddies John, Rob, Kieran, and Scott. We were on our way to a casino at another swanky hotel, where we'd heckle waitresses for free drinks and moan about the lack of $5 blackjack tables. We were sheep in wolves' clothing, and determined to capitalize on all the misguided respect our suit jackets would get us.

We didn't last too long at the casino, even though most of us were winning. Our friends were waiting at a nearby bar, and we soon wandered over for another round of hugs, toasts, and slurred pickup lines. The hours passed, the morning came, and I stumbled out into the street to catch a taxi home.

As I left the bar I saw a guy I recognized. Hunched over by the curb, decked out in glorious pinstripes, he was holding his tie behind his head as he puked all over his brightly polished shoes on the trash-strewn Saigon street. He rose unsteadily, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and shouted, 'Happy Teachers' Day!' He was grinning from ear to ear as he stumbled back into the bar.

'Yes', I thought as I waved down a cab.

'Happy Teachers' Day indeed.'

Some Inconvenient Realities of Living Abroad

Yesterday my friend had her bicycle stolen while she shopped for vegetables at a market. The incident was as predictable as most 'surprising' thefts - broad daylight, lots of bystanders, a momentary diversion of attention. Theft is horribly common in Vietnam; it seems that half the population are employed as security guards to keep the other half of the population from robbing the place blind.*

*Figures only slightly exaggerated.

My friend is an avid cyclist and, while I hate bicycles like a nudist hates pants, my heart went out to her. So did the hearts of numerous people on Facebook. When somebody posts a status involving personal loss, there are four typical responses: 1) straightforward condolences, 2) sympathetic personal anecdotes, 3) hopes for better luck in the future, and 4) self-righteous moralizing. The first three are mostly harmless.

The last subgenus, however, is a pain. It can be tempting to point out that shit happens everywhere and scumbaggery has no borders. Like mathematics and the English Premier League, shady morals are universal. But well-meaning ethicists, secure in their impression that every society is just super in its own way, often dismiss the subtle unpleasantries of daily life in a different country. From their ivory tower of cultural relativism they pellet the expat with bromides while encouraging her to ignore her eyes and ears and firsthand experiences. Which generally include some variation of the following...

~

The people can be inhospitable.

Here is Lonely Planet's description of 'the Vietnamese experience':

Vietnam is a nation going places. Fast. Its people are energetic, direct, sharp in commerce and resilient by nature. This is an outrageously fun country to explore, the locals love a laugh (and a drink) and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to socialise with them and hear their tales.

To which the cynic might add:

For an authentic taste of Vietnamese cuisine, stop by a local market to sample the diverse array of fresh produce. Haggle for ten minutes over the price of a cantaloupe with a surly pajama-clad matron, finally paying an exorbitant markup so she'll stop shouting at you in Vietnamese. Then hop on a motorcycle taxi, or xe om, for an invigorating tour of notable landmarks such as the Notre Dame Cathedral, Reunification Palace, and Jade Emperor Pagoda. 

Make sure to allow plenty of time for this tour, as your driver is possibly drunk and likely has no idea where said landmarks are located. Expect to get at least one flat tire, at which point you'll have the chance to visit one of Vietnam's most hallowed institutions - the unscrupulous motorbike mechanic. Watch in awe as a chubby, shirtless man drinks coffee and chainsmokes while shouting at your xe om guide, who will reply by also shouting and jabbing his finger ominously in your direction. Eventually the mechanic will demand that you pay 500% of the proper rate, which you will (quickly) because both men are now yelling at you in Vietnamese. 

In the evening, your phone and wallet will probably be stolen no matter what you do.

For reasons of brevity, it's understandable why Lonely Planet's editors cut this bit.

~

The weather is going to suck in some new and awful way.

Here is a weekly weather forecast from February in Saigon:

High 30's, for you Celsius folks.

And here is the forecast for this week:

High 20's, metric chumps.

There's nothing surprising about a week of clouds in a tropical environment. Even the most grizzled Nebraskan corn farmer has heard of 'rainy season', and there are certain necessary tradeoffs if you want to live in a place with palm trees and coconuts. However, this forecast hasn't changed since March. Which means we're now going on eight consecutive months of daily downpours. This is unlikely to end soon.

The rain has little regularity, except for the tendency to reach its maximum deluge at the precise moment you are leaving for work. Interestingly, the rain seems to have little impact on the behavior of the Vietnamese unless you count the massive uptick in poncho sales. The streets are still clogged with reckless motorists, who calmly ignore the laws of physics and continue to charge pell-mell into oncoming traffic with the same idiotic determination they display in perfect conditions. Crashes abound. Skid marks appear with alarming frequency. Despite overwhelming evidence that doing so would be a great idea, few people bother to slow down. And so every day while driving to work I find myself cursing Vietnam's shitty, shitty weather.

I imagine that a Vietnamese might express similar despair after four months of a bleak Minnesotan winter. And I'm not trying to argue that one particular form of weather-related misery is worse than another. The important thing to remember is that moving to another country with hopes of a better climate is like trading your bag of rocks for a bag of differently-shaped rocks.

~

There will be a cultural quirk or habit that drives you utterly insane.

When I lived in Korea, there were a few talking points guaranteed to turn polite, open-minded foreigners into a pack of ravenous snarling hounds. For example, even the most accomodating waeguks were incensed by the tendency of old Korean men to loudly clear their throats and spit giant balls of phlegm in public. Once I was riding the subway with a Canadian friend of mine (whose patience had been worn especially thin by five years of loogies) when a drunk old man appeared to cough up most of his left lung onto the car's floor. My friend's face assumed the pained look of a PETA advocate who just watched a barrel of kittens being drowned, and I was legitimately afraid he was going to murder the wheezy geezer. Nobody else blinked an eye, of course.

In Vietnam, the social faux pas de choix is nosepickery. My personal feelings about this are the same as my feelings toward BDSM and spoken word poetry. Whatever kicks you get in the privacy of your own home are none of my business. Some things, however, do not belong in public.

Issues of hygiene and decorum aside, Vietnam's attitude toward nosepicking is remarkably egalitarian. On the streets of Saigon everybody from the wealthiest CEO to the scruffiest street urchin to the most stylish fashionista can be spotted knuckle-deep in nostril. Young and old alike dig relentlessly for nose-gold, regardless of setting (English class, for example) or company (English teacher, for example). There is no social stigma attached to public nasal exploration, so everybody feels free to indulge whenever the mood strikes. On the plus side, there is potential for a hilarious Morgan Freeman audio book here.

~

I've spent the past three years overseas, and on the whole I have a positive impression of expatriate life. Willowy platitudes about 'self discovery' and 'seeing the world' aside, living abroad has allowed me to travel, pick up some neat hobbies, and make a reasonable amount of money without working too hard. I'd imagine the same is true for most people who decide to leave their home countries. 

As temporary residents of a foreign country, I do believe we should make an honest effort to adapt and adopt some local customs and practices. It also seems reasonable to resist blaming isolated inconveniences on some intrinsic failing of that country ('supermarket out of Honey Nut gahhhhh fuck this place afasjdahsdadam!').

At the same time, a place's different-ness should not endow it with sacred cow status. Expatriates should not be criticized for using their eyes and ears to observe their surroundings and occasionally arriving at uncomplimentary conclusions. Holding expats to some impossible standard of objectivity is both condescending and self-congratulatory. It also ignores the positive impact that a foreign perspective can have on local issues.

Sometimes it takes a real friend to say, 'Yo, dude - you stink.'

Balut

Imagine the most delicious food you've ever tried. Maybe you're thinking of a thick ribeye steak, grilled medium rare and dripping with savory juices. Or perhaps a fresh tropical pineapple, plucked straight from the tree and chilled to perfection on a block of crisp, clear ice. If you have a sweet tooth, you might have pictured a rich chocolate eclair drizzled in decadent caramel icing.

Keep that image in your mind, and visualize the sensations of your first bite. Envision the sublime texture between your teeth. Allow yourself to be swept away by the intoxicating aroma, and recall that transcendent moment when your mouth becomes a garden of earthly delights. Then imagine this process repeating over and over again, the pleasure growing more exquisite with every bite. Finally you dab your mouth with a napkin and recline lazily. Your belly is full and round; you pat it with blissful tenderness. You smile and sip your digestif, basking in the afterglow of a toe-curling foodgasm.

Eating balut is just like this, only the exact opposite.

~

To the naked eye, a balut looks much the same as any egg. Depending on the species of bird, the shell may be white or speckled, or even a dark brownish hue. It is only after the shell is cracked that you realize something is horribly, horribly wrong.

God's cruelest mistake.

If you've ever eaten a hard boiled egg and thought, 'This is nice, but I wish there were more feathers, claws, and leathery membranes,' then balut would be an excellent food to try after your release from the sanitarium. 

Balut are allegedly popular throughout Southeast Asia, and have recently ascended to near-mythic status in the region's street grub pantheon. Several years ago noted asshole and food enthusiast Anthony Bourdain sampled one in Saigon's Ben Thanh Market, sparking a new wave of balut fever (with congruent nausea and violent diahhrea). Balut challenges have also appeared on 'Fear Factor', 'Survivor', 'Ultimate Fighter', and many other TV shows popular amongst idiots. Today, most grizzled backpackers can tell at least three balut-related stories which are all synopsized with the tidy platitude, '...but actually it wasn't that bad!'

I assure you these people are full of shit.

~

 In Vietnam, in-shell aborted avian fetuses are known as hot vit lon. They are a popular food amongst impotent middle aged men, social degenerates and alcoholics. Upstanding Vietnamese citizens do occasionally eat them as well, presumably to horrify their foreign friends. I have been forced to try hot vit lon several times during the past year by my local chums. The eggs are quite small, half the size of one's thumb. As such, they can be gulped quickly in a single mouthful without chewing. I have always considered these bite-sized treats as a fairly innocuous dinner time diversion, like eating a handful of jalapenos or snorting a line of salt. 

When I visited the Philippines in August with my sisters Lizzie and Alexa, I insisted that we try some of the infamous balut, figuring that my battle-hardened stomach would have no problem with a slightly larger version of the familiar hot vit lon. I had forgotten the time honored aphorism that size matters.

~

On my sisters' final night in Boracay, we gathered with some friends for a seafood barbecue on the beach. Together with my Irish roommate Kieran and some Filipino friends named Cathy and Brandon, we gawked at the restaurant's wriggling menu of freshly-caught lobsters, crabs, prawns, snapper, and lapu-lapu. After placing our orders we relaxed at the table with several pitchers of icy mango mojitos, digging our toes in the sand and savoring our last evening together.

Alexa and I were trying to convince Lizzie to get matching sibling tattoos when Cathy, a lovely Filipino girl whom I would later want to strangle, was approached by an itinerant food vendor bearing a large styrofoam box on his shoulders. They spoke in rapid-fire Tagalog, a beautiful melodic language full of soft sounds and rolled consonants. I was so entranced by their hypnotic conversation that I failed to realize the vendor was selling balut.

Minutes later we were staring at the giant, heavy white eggs in our hands as Cathy and Brandon gave detailed instructions on how to properly consume the fertilized chicken embryos. Here is a condensed transcript:

1) Never, ever look in the egg.

2) Crack open the top. 

3) Pour in vinegar and soy sauce.

4) Guzzle the embryo juice cocktail.

5) You didn't look inside, did you?

6) Stop crying and peel the egg.

7) Seriously, don't look.

8) Eat the deformed baby chicken curled around its thick, curdled yolk.

9) Pick the feathers and beak out of your teeth.

10) Renounce your faith in the goodness of humanity.

Before we ate the balut, we looked like this. 

When we finished, we looked like this:

But actually, it wasn't that bad.

Class(room) Warfare: Korea vs. Vietnam

When I first moved to Vietnam, people asked me a lot of questions. Most of these could be answered without much thought - 'Where are you from?' (America), 'What's your job?' (teacher), 'Does this look infected to you?' (dear god, yes). After these pleasantries were concluded, my new friend and I would smile politely and sincerely regret ever making eye contact with each other. Eventually we'd both feel uncomfortable and attempt to start a new line of conversation, since we were obviously going to be stuck together until the bar/coffee shop/teacher's lounge finally closed/burned down/threw us out for loitering. And at some point before that happened, we'd touch upon the subject of Korea.

Not the one with nukes and belligerent Kims. At least not the ones on CNN.

If my fellow conversationalist was a teacher, he or she would usually ask something along the lines of, 'Do you prefer teaching in Korea or here in Vietnam?' Then I would chuckle, gaze thoughtfully out the window, and silently curse myself for ever leaving the house. 

It's not as if this question is hard to answer. Teaching in Vietnam is much, much better than teaching in Korea. And it's not even close. But I found it hard to answer truthfully without sounding like a callous, cynical turd. And since most of our daily lives (and by 'our' I mean 'mine') are spent in the vain effort to conceal what callous, cynical turds we really are, a question like this is the Edward Snowden to our PRISM database of douchedom.

But screw it. Let's go all Anonymous on this bitch.

~

When I first arrived in Korea, I had absolutely zero teaching experience. I arrived in Seoul at 8pm, caught a bus to Cheonan (the first city I lived in), and hitched a ride from my school's owner to my new apartment. By this time it was almost midnight, and after putzing around my closet-sized digs for a few minutes I passed out from a combination of jet-lag, nervous excitement, and three donuts (a welcome gift from the owner, who apparently believed jelly Bismarcks are every white person's favorite bedtime snack).

Seven hours later, I was in the classroom. And that's when I realized that I wasn't actually going to be teaching for the next twelve months.

English instructors in Korea are half teacher, half babysitter, half amateur psychologist, and half hostage negotiator. Please direct any comments about my shitty math skills to Al Gore. Anyway, I hadn't been in the classroom for more than a minute before a little girl started crying and hysterically babbling in Korean. After frantically conferring with my TA, who spoke as much English as your average pencil case, I discovered the cause of Sara's angst: a boy had accidentally knocked her eraser off the table.

Jesus. Christ. It was going to be a long year.

I soon learned that the emotional fragility of Korean kindergarteners is matched only by their inability to tolerate any type of physical discomfort. This was made crystal clear during a game of 'Duck, Duck, Goose'. To make a long, boring story somewhat shorter and (hopefully) more interesting, a boy we'll call 'Tony' tapped a boy we'll call 'Jimmy' lightly on the back of the head. If you're familiar with the game, at this point Jimmy should have leapt up from his chair, chased Tony around the circle, and then given his teacher a $50 gift certificate to Applebee's. Instead, Jimmy fell on the floor, clutched his head like he was JFK in Dallas, and screamed louder than any boy should reasonably scream if his testicles aren't caught in a bear trap. All I could think was, 'You pussy...'

But this being Korea, I had to pick him up and take him to the front desk, where the hatchet-faced receptionists fretted over him like nervous mothers and pacified him with so much candy that he immediately developed Type II diabetes. Later that afternoon, my Korean co-teacher received a phone call from his actual mother, who (I am guessing here) had roughly fuck-all else to do with her day besides harass underpaid twenty-year-olds over the phone. My co-teacher was practically in tears when she finally hung up. And we never played 'Duck, Duck, Goose' again.

It's not as if such unbelievable sissiness is limited to the young'uns, either. During my second year in Korea I was teaching in a city called Yongin, which is an overgrown suburb of Seoul home to Korea's most obnoxious nouveau riche. I worked at an academy called LCI Kid's Club, renowned for its batshit insane mothers and criminally incompetent management. Here are two almost-verbatim transcripts of conversations I had with the Korean staff during that year:

Exhibit A: The Dance

Korean Manager: Amy's mother is upset because she is at the end of the line for your class dance.
Me:  Amy was absent for a week. Everybody else learned the dance while she was gone.
Korean Manager: Yes, but her mother is angry. Amy wants to be in the middle.
Me: Can you tell me why?
Korean Manager: Amy is very sensitive. Her mother does not want her to feel bad. You must change the dance.
Me: But there are only four days before the performance. What about the other kids?
Korean Manager: Amy's mother is upset. You must change the dance.
Me: Has anyone ever told you that you are a fucking idiot?

Exhibit B: The Test

Co-teacher: Chloe's mother is upset with her test score. It is too low.
Me: What's wrong? She got 84/100 on the test. That's not bad.
Co-teacher: But Chloe is a smart girl. Her mother wants her to get the high marks. 84 is not OK for her.
Me:  Fine, no problem. She'll do better next time.

The following month...

Co-teacher: Chloe's mother is upset with her test score.
Me: *genuinely surprised* But why? She got a 96! That was the best score in the class?
Co-teacher: Her mother thinks the test was too easy. She is angry at you.
Me: Next time just ask Chloe's mother what score she wants, and I'll give it to her.
Co-teacher: Ummmm...ahhhhh...you must only give her the good score to make her mother happy.
Me: Fuck this place.

~

After two years of dealing with this parental nonsense, I was ready to leave. I had absolutely no idea what teaching in Vietnam entailed, but as long as I wasn't coddling spoiled little shits in Burberry pea coats I would be happy. So you can imagine my delight when I learned that teaching in Vietnam involves absolutely zero interaction with mothers. Or fathers, for that matter.

Korean kids attend English class, on average, between 3-5 days a week. Vietnamese children, on the other hand, only have two days of class each week. This might not seem like a drastic difference, but it is. Sweet infant Jesus, it is...

~

'Wow...that kid can take a punch.'

I uttered those words to my Vietnamese TA during our 8 year-old class's break time. I had just watched a small boy take a running start and deliver a series of vicious blows to the back of his friend's head. It looked like this. Much to my surprise, the victim of this vicious bushwhacking didn't immediately start bawling and begging for attention. Instead he turned around, chortled happily, and aimed a kick at his assailant's face. I was so delighted that I didn't bother trying to break up the fight. I always tell my Vietnamese students that they are free to beat the shit out of each other during break time, as long as they behave during class. And I'm a man of my word.

The physical toughness of Vietnamese kids was the most obvious difference between them and the Koreans, but I soon grew to appreciate the lack of helicopter parenting even more. This might seem odd when you consider that every Sunday the hallways of my school are choked with daddies toting Doraemon bags and wiping their kids' noses (even the older ones), but Vietnamese parents seem content to let the teachers teach without imposing their own agendas on the classroom.

Granted, this is probably due in large part to the fact that most Vietnamese parents don't speak a lick of English, and in many cases didn't finish high school (as explained to me by the helpful TA during our break-time Thunderdome). But whatever the reason I am quite grateful for their lack of interest or ability in critiquing my teaching style.

I am making certain assumptions here, but from what I've seen Vietnamese kids are allowed to fend for themselves far more than Korean children. And I believe they are far better off for it. Not only do they soon learn to defend themselves from sudden roundhouse kicks (a more frequent hazard than you might think), but they develop thicker skins as well. My teenagers in particular can be absolutely ruthless when razzing their classmates, but I've never seen a kid cry in class. Or even mope, which is especially surprising coming from that notoriously angst-y demographic. It's as if Tom Hanks personally delivers a pep talk to all the nation's maternity wards so they learn it young.

~

Having said that, teaching in Korea wasn't all bad, and teaching in Vietnam isn't all lollipops and unicorns.

While having the same kids in a class for five consecutive days can be a repetitive nightmare at times, Korean kids do learn to speak English fairly well. I had a lot of fun with some kindergarten classes; at one point, I had a group of twelve students convinced that being a hobo was the greatest thing a person could achieve in life. I also taught a unit on animals entirely in Steve Irwin's voice, which led to a bunch of Korean six year-olds running around yelling, 'Crikey, lookout mate! It's a toi-gah!'

I'd make that face too if I had to stick my thumb in a snake's butt.

Also, I was stuck with some of these little monsters for eight months at a time. And some of them turned out to be pretty neat. I'll never forget huddling my first LCI kindergarten class together on our last day for a group hug. For once I was glad of their runny noses and constant facial leaking, because all the tears and snot blended together and nobody could tell I was crying too.

I still miss these little hobos.

I only spend one day a week with my Vietnamese students, so we don't get to bond quite as much. For the most part I'm quite OK with this - there's something very, very nice about showing up for two hours a day, dropping some knowledge on the little bastards, and then going about my merry way. I don't have to deal with their neurotic mothers or wipe their butts after they shit themselves (happens more often than you'd think in Korea, though I always delegated to the Korean staff, often with a diabolical grin as I delivered the poop-stained child directly to their desks). Sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when my favorite students would invade the teachers' room to climb on my lap and steal candy from my desk. The feeling usually passes quickly, but I never entirely forget.

It's true that Vietnamese kids don't speak as well as Koreans - in many cases, the kids can't string two words together unless they're parroting the teacher. So the ego-boosts that teachers in Korea get from their students are non-existant. Nobody writes letters saying, 'I love you teacher,' in that endearing childish scrawl. But every once in a while they'll surprise you...

Sir Mix-a-lot must've sown some wild oats over here.

And having dealt with the Tiger Mothers from Hell, that's good enough for me.