There are so many types of expats here, and forgive me as I group these individuals into categories; I'm not trying to say they have no unique qualities on their own. There are the smiley older fellows, and I'm going to have to get racial and say they're white, so as to not mix them together with a different group of older Vietnamese fellows who are to be categorized differently. The older white men almost seem like wiser backpackers, more likely to stop and soak in the contrast a developing country like Vietnam has to whatever Western suburban world they came from, with all its rush to stay ahead of the global game and consumer protection and suffocating demand for accountability of bankers and politicians.
Then there are young Westerners, who make up the bulk of the English teaching workforce, coming from all corners of the English speaking world, who perhaps had a little more adventurousness among their group of friends back home or were maybe even a bit more romantic, wanting to live that poetic ideal of trekking the world and taking in knowledge of diverse cultures and peoples. Some actually maintain this desire, while others fail miserably and are shocked that encountering people of different cultures meant these people would actually be different, in ways that are not compatible or even "pretty" in their own cultural sense of the word, and return home after a year or so and report that they were unable to venture too far from their comfort zone or maybe even brag that they'd "been there seen that" but really just stuck to a group of four people from their hometown and complained about locals the entire time.
Some of the more adventurous individuals endowed with a higher threshold for dealing with the "differences" may even end up staying, for a myriad of reasons ranging from no desire to return to a 9-to-5 grind back in the the same neighborhood where they had their uneventful childhood or an attraction to locals of the opposite sex who are perhaps more easy-going, dare I say passive, or simply more physically attractive. And that's fine by me. Since I've been on all sides of countless discussions about the moral, historical, post-colonial, racial arguments expounding the rights and wrongs of expat perceptions and interactions with Vietnamese, I've stopped being any kind of judge altogether. That is not to say I defend those hateful, twisted, and just plain creepy individuals who would probably be locked up in their own country here taking advantage of poor people looking for a way out and contributing in any way big or small to the creation of a sad, inhumane industry catering to their needs.
I guess I'm writing this to make sense of my own perception of this place and where I am with how I interact with Vietnamese people. My understanding of this place and who I am in relation to it has gone through so many emotionally-charged phases, I admit I'm exhausted and I'm over it. To place it in any historical framework or social paradigm, like I tended to do as a university student, is never conclusive. I've been that Vietnamese American kid searching for his roots and finding his identity among his "people," taught to never forget the historical impact of race and discrimination and how it still "shackles" entire peoples while giving others undue advantages. Then I saw my own "people" taking advantage of their own, those like me who wore their overseas upbringing like a designer suit to manipulate and deceive and get their kicks. I saw not all locals were victims, and they were so willing to step on each other to reach for some superficial niche in this increasing unbalanced and divided country.
I find myself now in my most comfortable phase yet. I have my friends.
