Việt Womện

XXVII

There is a deep moan inside of me; a dull ache right in the pit of my stomach. My whole being is yearning for the country I’ve just returned from:

Việt Nam.

***

I know I could go into depth and describe what I’ve experienced in meticulous detail (for instance, how much better bananas taste there or how the colours of the country shine brighter than anywhere else). However, I'm sure you can get a decent impression of that through Google. Instead, whilst traveling, I felt the urgency to write about the fantastic Vietnamese people and their culture. There is a lack of coverage in Western media; in fact, embarrassingly, I had no idea that the country was still communist until I decided to go there. I had the impression that Vietnam remains a mystery to many of us, so I’m going to try and lift the veil in a couple of blog posts.

In view of International Women’s Day I decided to put two special women I talked to into the spotlight.

Huyền is one of the sweetest young women I’ve ever met. She currently works as an operations manager and a tour guide or, more like, a brilliant entertainer for the tourists who visit the Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park in the Northern part of the country, an overnight train ride away from the capital Hà Nội. It’s a small community here, with about 1,000 people living in the village right on the edge of the vast jungle. There are a lot of beautiful caves in the park, two of which my group explore together with Huyền, a fellow tour guide and three park rangers. I’m stunned by the unspoilt beauty of nature but I’m even more amazed by our cheeky female tour guide.

Huyền's open-mindedness is unparalleled among her fellow countrywomen; her English at a level where she can joke around with tourists (and the Vietnamese love a joke!) To her, being open-minded means that she has a lot of Western views about life. In the evening, Huyền takes me and some other European guys to rent one of the private Karaoke rooms in the village. Locals love singing together and we are surprised how many Western pop songs there are to choose from. A massive sound system blasts our katzenjammer back at us but we enjoy every minute of it.

In her early twenties, Huyền essentially has to get married if she wants to be an accepted member of society. Women get hitched from an early age (16) and when you reach 25, your mother will worry day and night that you’ll end up as a grey spinster. Huyền also tells me about the difficulties Vietnamese women face when they’re left by their husbands: ‘It's hard to re-marry and dating someone else in public can cause problems within the local community.’ The choice of a solitary or a secret love life? Condemnation of progressive thinking? Sounds to me just like what happened to women in Europe before the wave of emancipation rolled over our Western communities in the 60s.

Huyền has another example for me. ‘A friend of mine had to marry a guy who got her pregnant. He just wanted some fun with her and now she is expected to live with and look after his family as well as her child. She’s very unhappy but there’s nothing to be done. I wish I could help her.’

I ask Huyền whether she would ever consider marrying. ‘A woman’s life ends when she marries. I don’t want to lose my independence. Also, having children means losing your youthful, slim body’, she says and grins mischievously. My guess is that more than half of 23-year-olds in Vienna or London would agree with her. This is Vietnam, however, and conservatism is still highly valued among people, even in more urban communities.

A visit to the Vietnam Women's Museum in the capital gave me a good impression of what big role tradition still plays. On one hand, there are extensive ceremonies connected to religion, weddings and child birth but on the other hand, many women have had to overcome their role of being a housewife and mother and work long days in the cities to support their family. Most of them can be seen walking along the busy streets hoping to sell fruit. They only get to visit their family in the countryside every other weekend.

Mai*, another female tour guide who grew up in Ho Chi Minh City (the previous name of the Southern Vietnamese city is Sài Gòn), tells me that her family has been putting pressure on her to get married for a long time. At almost 30-years-old, she’s way beyond the usual marital age, but she and her boyfriend have made the conscious decision not to say “I do” until they have kids because they simply don’t see the point in it. We meet Mai in a more Southern national park, where she is taking care of a German group travelling north. She impresses me with her fluency in German, which she studied at university, and even more so with her wish of visiting Germany this year.

Having saved up money for her visa, Mai is already bracing herself for a bureaucratic ordeal which will take up a few months. ‘You need to have at least an equivalent of roughly £20,000 in your bank account so that the government can expect you to be able to buy a return ticket. With an average monthly wage of roughly $220 only very few can afford this luxury. We learn from Mai that many Vietnamese haven’t even travelled around their own country, let alone neighbouring Cambodia, Laos and Thailand for which the Vietnamese don't need a visa. ‘We often work 28 out of 30 days a month to make a living. There is hardly any time or money left for visiting places.’ 

The next obstacle for visa applicants is an invitation they need to obtain from someone in Europe (which Mai fortunately got from people she became friends with on one of her tours). The government then conducts a detailed interrogation about your relationship to these people. Mai is facing several “interviews” before she will finally (and hopefully) receive the visa. I have my fingers tightly crossed for her .

Mai answers my question regarding whether it’s possible to speak openly about personal political views in her country with a cynical snort. ‘My friends and I often joke about how you shouldn’t be saying this or that or you’ll be locked up. You simply cannot speak your mind here, not even in English. People can report you so you’ve got to be careful all the time.’ 

This makes me read up on Vietnamese re-education camps that the government generously “provides” for dissidents. It’s a bleak reality the Vietnamese have been facing since the North and South of the country were reunited in 1976. Huyền and Mai are, however, part of a new generation of women who might want to shift things around a little. Even if it's not a political change then perhaps their shared views create an impact on how young women want to shape their own life in future.

In my next blog post I’ll be talking about how, decades after the war ended, tourism has been creating a new set of jobs, and how the Vietnamese are masters at making a living.

*Names changed for political or other reasons, please see: https://www.hrw.org/asia/vietnam