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

 
You know how some people love to make you guess their age? My friend H does this. She actually likes to guess other people's ages, and makes a game out of making them guess hers.

I hate that game.

To me, guessing the age of strangers and acquaintances is an activity strewn with barbed wire, mines and traps for the unwary or innacurate. I avoid it at all costs, and in general have no talent for it. When forced, I tend to guess at least 10 years low just to be on the safe side.

But here's my problem. I am living in a country in which everyday conversation is one big horrifying game of Guess My Age. See, in English we have this fabulous word that makes life easy for all of us: YOU. In Vietnamese, life is hardly so simple. There are multiple "you"s, depending partly on age or relative age, partly on the situation (casual/formal), and partly on the relationship between you and the person to whom you are speaking.

So before you say a word to someone you must assess their age and status. This would be bad enough if I had to do it on a regular basis in my own country where I know the rules, but here in Vietnam I just don't know the culture well enough to do this properly. For example, is it better to call a new acquaintance "ba" (older woman, grandmother, respected person) and potentially insult her by guessing her age too high? Or should I call her "chi" (woman same age as myself or older, older sister, casual) and have her think I'm a mannerless clod who doesn't respect my elders?

The situation became further complicated when I discovered that most Vietnamese don't really use the word "I" in conversation. I figured this out by talking with the maids in my guesthouse. I would ask a question and one of them would answer using one of the "you" words, which caused me no little amount of confusion. It turns out that not only do I have to judge the age and status of other people, I also must simultaneously determine how they will judge mine. The "you" that they would use is the one I should use for "I". Confused yet?

And just when you think you've got the relationship clear with someone, the rules change. Because you might use one "you" when you first meet someone, and as you get to know them you may switch to something more casual or quasi-familial. You may have heard Ho Chi Minh referred to as "Uncle Ho". That "uncle" is a loose translation with much more meaning than the English word implies. It refers to your younger paternal uncle, the fun one, rather than the older more dictatorial paternal uncle who rules the family with an iron Confucian fist. Politically, this self-adopted designation allowed Uncle Ho to let his generals and underlings do the heavy revolutionary lifting while he pulled the strings and maintained a benevolent, beloved familial role for the Vietnamese people.

Another interesting element of this "you" issue is that in a married couple, the husband always calls his wife "em", which is the word you use for people younger than you and for all children. The wife calls her husband "anh", which sort of translates to young man older than I or older respected brother. When I suggested to my Vietnamese teacher that this perhaps spoke to a rather patriarchial power structure within marriages here, he scoffed. And he may be right -- women do tend to rule the roost around here at least at home, though it's more difficult for them to get good jobs.

It's pretty clear that I need more than six weeks of classes to get a handle on these very basic issues of Vietnamese grammar and vocabulary. Maybe I shouldn't have fired my Vietnamese teacher, but how long could I really stand to spend two hours a day with someone who didn't laugh at my jokes?

© 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 12:02 AM