A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
I am a Vietnamese radio star! Or maybe a Vietnamese brief radio presence. Whatever. I spent yesterday morning at the HCM Department of Education recording facility, which was set up with a $10,000 grant from the Canadian Friendship Committee. If that seems like an inadequate amount of money with which to establish a full professional recording studio, I can assure you that it looks it, though they clearly got the most out of their 10 grand. To give a sense of the modernity of the technology and techniques we're dealing with here, the book they were using to guide their efforts, "Radio Programming -- A Basic Training Manual", was published in 1968 and features some classic photos of men in front of old timey microphones wearing what look to be my father's 1966 black-framed army-issue eyeglasses. (Not that there's anything wrong with those glasses. I mean, Dad wore them into the 80's, if I recall correctly, just before they became stylish again.)

My role in this scenario was to read one part of a series of dialogues/conversations, which would be put on cassette tapes for personal use and broadcast to the countryside on Vietnamese educational radio. From what I'm told by Mr. Lanh, the government airs educational broadcasts in all subjects, mostly from Hanoi, but this studio is the only one from which English lessons are created.

I was placed in a chair in the barely sound-proofed studio in front it its single microphone, which appeared to possess a crocheted cover. I was given a script in which the lines were highlighted or circled in different colors depending on which native-speaking guinea pig (I am Volunteer #38) had been assigned. It was a bit odd. Because they don't have the capacity to record more than one person at a time, I was asked to read a line, pause, then read the next line and so on. Since I did a series of scripts for both Mr. Lanh and his assistant Mr. Tien separately, I actually ended up reading both ends of the dialogue in some cases. I can only imagine how strange and stilted it sounds once it's all spliced together, particular if my voice is both asking the questions and answering them. The dialogues were of very mixed quality as it was -- mostly grammatical, but very formal and not always closely related to the actual rhythms of American speech. It must be very overwhelming for a Vietnamese person who learns English from this system to hear the real thing for the first time, though at least they will have had the incomparable pleasure of learning from my mellifluous tones.

© 2002 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 7:12 PM