Communicating

As a part of our volunteer fee, we were provided with two Vietnamese lessons to give us an overview of the language. Ten minutes in I had a headache and intense look of frustration plastered on my face as I struggled to imitate the sounds that our teacher was asking us to repeat back to her.

The very first thing we were taught were the different 'a' sounds. There are three different 'a's in the alphabet, and these three different 'a's can have five different accents, six if you count the sound you make if there is no accent at all. The three A's are:

a â ă

The five accents are (shown on the a we use):

ã ạ ả á à

These accents can also be added to the second two 'a's in the alphabet, for example the letter â with the five accents looks like this:

ấ ẫ, ầ, ậ ẩ

So in total, there are 18 different kinds of 'a's. Our first lesson involved pronouncing the word 'ba' with five different 'a' accents (bã bạ bả bá bà). To the trained Vietnamese ear, these sounds are all very distinguishable from each other and present little problem. So, when our teacher quickly read us the five 'ba's, she expected us to repeat them all back to her. The problem however, was that to westerners, she sounded like this: Bah bah bah baaah bah. After straining my hearing and having her repeat herself many times, I could hear slight differences in a few, but not enough difference to remember, and certainly not enough to imitate myself. This presents a problem (no pun intended...lame), as these 'ba's all have very different meanings. For example, one of them means grandmother. Another means rat poison.

Vietnamese is a monosyllabic, tonal language. Every word, as you might guess, is only one syllable (Vietnam is Việt Nam). It is tonal in the sense that many words are almost sung, and different pitches and intonations indicate different letters, words and phrases. So you need to have a good ear for pitch. If you are one of those people who can't sing along to a song for the life of you, I'm sorry to report that you will never learn Vietnamese. That includes my brother, sorry bud.

I have better luck with phrases (v. lone words), simply because if you are saying multiple words a Vietnamese person can more easily guess what you are trying to say. There are also few things most foreigners know how to say, so they can guess that way as well.

Saying hello is Xin chào. (Seen chow), this one seemed pretty easy, but apparently if you pronounce it incorrectly you could be saying 'give me rice' instead of hi.

If you're wondering why their language is not comprised of typical Asian characters, it's because of colonialism. The French adapted their language from characters to a roman alphabet in the 1950's I think. I'm not sure of the exact decade because most Vietnamese I ask don't know for sure either. Most of them cannot read their traditional alphabet.

Through our lessons we also learned that to ask how you are doing, Vietnamese will ask 'have you eaten yet?'. I love this, as most of my happiness revolves around how hungry I am. Not that it matters much, because I can't remember the phrase and no one thinks to say it to me. Also, they will ask 'where are you going', which is more rhetorical, and is the equivalent of our 'what's up.' It doesn't really require an answer and is just a way to say hi.

Although the language is very difficult, I believe if i made a serious effort (which I have not), that I could get by and eventually achieve proficiency. Knowing this makes it more frustrating to not communicate. There are several occasions everyday that I strongly wish for subtitles so that I can appreciate a funny situation, or know what people are saying about me.

Everyday I ride the elevator at work, and almost every time I can tell that they are talking about me. I've ridden it multiple times with Huong, so after one particularly obvious elevator talk session on the topic of myself, I asked her what they were talking about all the time. She said they always say that I am very beautiful. In normal circumstances this would be a great compliment, but here, if you are white, you are very beautiful. I don't feel like delving into this subject right now, mostly because explaining will inevitably make me sound as though I think I am ridiculously good looking, but here all of my friends and I get told we are beautiful and so lovely on a constant basis. Okay actually one side story cause this is funny:

In America when there is a phenomenon, or some pattern that is not easily explained, we (and by we I am mostly thinking of my mother) use the phrase 'must be something in the water.' The Vietnamese have a similar phrase, and when something surprises them or is unusually good or bad, they say 'what did you eat to become so smart/stupid/weird etc'. On my first day of commuting to work, I was accompanied by a Vietnamese girl who works for my volunteer organization. While we were waiting for the bus, a local man came up to her and asked her to translate for him so he could talk to me. He asked me what I ate to become so beautiful, and he asked multiple times. The girl, named Chau, explained what the phrase meant, and I laughed and smiled (my go to reaction for almost every situation), and said Cảm ơn (thank you, pronounced come on). He kept repeating his question and eagerly awaiting an answer. Chau turned to me and was said "oh no i dont think he joking, he really think you eat something! He crazy, we go now." If I could have answered him in Vietnamese, I would have said cheese, only because there is none in this country and I would love to eat some right now.

The amount of compliments they give white girls here makes me wish my chubby, awkward twelve year-old self had visited. It would have been a great self-esteem booster, especially when I was hoping a guy would ask me to dance at our middle school dances (never happened, all three years), when I could have consoled myself by remembering I was a huge hit in Asia.

One good thing about not knowing the language here is that it's really quite fun to communicate without the language. And also very gratifying once you get your point across. This communication mostly comes in the form of hand gestures, noises, and acting things out. Some actions are very easy, lets say drinking water. Trying to find where to buy a banana is much trickier, and a recurrent problem for me considering my asian banana obsession. It is also quite funny when you are both talking to eachother in different languages and neither of you understands one bit. This happens frequently and it always makes me laugh.

One thing that seems to translate in every country is a sense of humor. I've found that if you always manage to keep your temper, laugh things off, smile and act eager, that you can easily win friends and good favor. It's something important for many westerners to remember when traveling to asia, because many tend to lose their temper very easily, and if you are not laid back there are a million things here that can set you off.

I also thought that hand gestures such as thumbs up, thumbs down and the like are universal, and in many cases they are, but here there is an exception with the hand signal that means 'no'. Our no mostly revolves around a shaking head, maybe a hand put up to indicate stop. The no in Vietnam is what we would use to indicate something is so-so. So an outstretched hand rocking back and forth. It was quite confusing at first, because when they were telling us no, the restaurant isn't open, we thought they were either saying eh its not worth it, or maybe its open, it depends.

And finally, one more thing on staring here. I've found that being stared at intensifies whatever mood you are in. If you are in a good mood, lets say having made it a whole kilometer without getting muddy, with no rain, and having just ate four particularly tasty bananas, and people drive by you and stop and stare just to say hi or curiously see what you are doing, you usually become even happier. You feel like Mr. Rogers, a friend of everyone you pass, stopping to say hello to everyone in the neighborhood, and enjoying the beautiful day.

However, if you are already in a bad mood, staring usually makes it severely worse. I've only had three short-lived episodes of this, since I try to avoid frustration, but I was having serious internal temper tantrums when they did occur. The first time this happened, I had been riding the 201 back home. The bus was so crowded that I couldn't see out the window to tell where my stop was, and I couldn't push through all the people to get out at the last second when I finally realized where I was. The next stop was 2 kilometers away, and I had already been traveling almost two hours home (the commute home is always longer). I had to get out on the highway, with everyone on the bus laughing at me because it was an absurd place for someone like me to get off, and then I had to walk down a tiny sidewalk on the highway, hurrying to make it before it got dark. Everyone on the highway was looking at me like I was nuts, and I was already in such a bad mood from being pushed around on the bus and missing my stop that it enraged me. Internally I was screaming WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?!?! IM JUST WALKING!! You're carrying 50 straw hats on your bicyle, and you, over there, you have live chickens in your lap! And how about the guy with the skinned dog slung across his back?!?! You think IM weird??STOP LOOKING AT ME!!!!!

Luckily this feeling fades quickly, but it is why i now walk home instead of taking the miserable bus, so that I may be intrigued by a motorbike carrying 10 bags of gold-fish (carnival style) on a pole, instead of infuriated.

FwH:

• We now have a new routine after work. I stay later, go down with her to the garage where she parks her bike, and then I ride out with her, handing the parking attendant her 4000 dong fee and parking ticket on the way. Then we go to this nice little cafe, talk about life, work on her english, and then she drives me part of the way home, which I walk or cab.
• Most names here are not just names, they are usually nouns as well. Huong means nice fragrance. So basically her name is I smell good.
• She loves the animated film 'Tangled', and we watched some of it yesterday at work. She learned the word Gesundheit, gecko and countless other random words from this movie that she attempts to slip into conversation with me.
• She started drinking water at work because of me. I drink a ton of water while I work, a habit I formed while studying at college. Now she drinks all the time. I said it was healthy for her, but annoying since you have to go to the bathroom more frequently. For some reason this didn't translate at all, and multiple people had to consult me until she finally understood what I meant.
• She's bugging me to go buy my lunch right now so I have to go!!