Looking Back and Ahead: My Six Months in Vietnam

JANUARY 20, 2015


One of the most important lessons I learned during my time in Vietnam was to practice patience, open-mindedness, and not to be judgmental. While foreigners can be seen as walking ATMs more often than not, far from every Vietnamese person is trying to make a quick buck off of you. Many are just looking to have a foreign friend to practice their English with and learn about a different culture. This is how I was able to both get a good deal on my motorbike and befriend the guy who rented it to me. By spending more time than most others do talking about a common interest of ours, economics, I was able to make a friend and inevitably gain a deeper understanding of Vietnamese culture. He told me about his girlfriend, whom he wanted to marry, but whose parents didn’t approve him, and later invited me to his house to have dinner with them. I learned about the idea of “face culture” which permeates Vietnamese society and is the reason why certain people can’t get married and why, traditionally, divorce is unheard of — though this is changing among the more globally aware youth.



The hospitable nature of the Vietnamese people, and the open, communal feel of the society is what prompted me to stay in this country  . I was able to explore the country on my own terms and travel around as I saw fit. This included trips to Sapa, Cat Ba Island, and some lesser known places such as the Perfume Pagoda and Ha Giang.


Vietnam is a place that has affected me deeply and permanently altered my perspective. If you don’t make an effort to explore the strange and unfamiliar, I’ve learned, you will never truly understand the world, its inhabitants, and why people do what they do. A cornerstone of anthropology is that culture is relative. Coming from the UK second only to America, arguably the helm of modern democracy and capitalism, it is easy for many of us to see our way as the right way and become blissfully ignorant of those who go about life differently, and live by different values than we do.



Vietnam helped me learn that money is not the end, nor even a necessary means to an end. The Vietnamese are very hard-working and self-reliant, yes, but this comes from a rigid backbone of familial support and ethnic camaraderie molded through generations of adversarial foreign domination. The result is a nation that does not dwell on the past and continues to move forward as an economic miracle and blueprint for the rest of Southeast Asia.



From abject poverty in the mid-80s to a place in the CIVETS list of most-favored emerging markets (i.e., Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa), it is the communalism and apparent lack of (or at least very blurred) social hierarchy. In the market-based economy, it is imperative to take risks. With the social safety net the Vietnamese have, these important risks can be taken. To reiterate, money is not the end for most of these risk-taking, prosperous young Vietnamese. It is for the pride of their ancestors, their families, and for the novel ability to build a life on their own terms. The money that comes with that is surely welcomed, but not chased to the ends of the earth as it sometimes seems to be in Western society.



Vietnam is a place I hope to get back to as soon as possible. It is home to a culture, a people and a landscape I have the utmost respect for, and a place I would like to help continue on its road to development, but also to preserve its traditional charm and customs so that everyone can have something akin to the life-changing experience I had.