Many Vietnamese suffer from an inferiority complex and why they shouldn't
Many Vietnamese suffer from an inferiority complex and they shouldn't. While many see their homeland as poor and still developing compared to the economically wealthy nations of the US and many EU nations I would argue they're using only capital wealth to measure its value. This yardstick is one created by capitalism and reinforced by the Western power of neoliberalism. I see the use of this measurement akin to worshiping a false and cruel god.
I get it and saw it with my own two eyes having lived there for a couple of years. No doubt many Vietnamese struggle economically. Many live in homes that most in the previously aforementioned economically affluent countries would consider uninhabitable and most Vietnamese people can't afford the latest-and-greatest gadgets but there's more than these things that make a place respectable. To those in the West that would cast aspersions upon a place I love so very much I would remind them of the quote from Hamlet where he said "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There is more to life than what we can simply hold in our hands and purchase with a fiat currency with no intrinsic value.
Bún chả cá at Chợ Hội An. Hội An, Việt Nam in Astia. Fujifilm X100T. image: ©Brian Beeler
First let me start with the most obvious: the food of Việt Nam which is unto itself in my humble opinion the best in the world. While I have great love for the food of China to which much of Vietnamese cuisine was inspired the Vietnamese have added their own unique twist to its many classic Chinese dishes.
Unless you've been to Việt Nam or eaten a home-cooked meal with a Vietnamese family you haven't had real Vietnamese food. While still much closer to its origins than Chinese-American food found everywhere, which is one of my guilty pleasures, the food you get in Vietnamese restaurants outside of the homeland while excellent just isn't the same because the ingredients and cooking styles aren't the same. I could tell the difference between bún bò Huế made in Đà Nẵng and the same dish made in the city of its birth just two hours to the north.
Every morning while living in Đà Nẵng I was faced with a difficult choice: do I have banh canh or bún bò Huế for breakfast after my morning coffee and ensuing holding forth with other expatriots. As not to offend either highly skilled chef I switched between the two every day.
The morning routine went off like clockwork. Chi Bé started her morning around 5am prepping her mise en place by cleaning and cutting locally sourced vegetables and meats, hand grinding rice flower and hand cutting the rice noodles. If we were lucky she might of even been supplied with some eel procured from a fisherman that lived on our street. At 6:30am her soup of the gods contained within a well-worn, five liter stock pot, heated by a brick of charcoal, was hot and ready to serve in which the noodles were firm and the flavors bold. At 7am the noodles were tender and the flavors more balanced. At 7:20 am the noodles were gloriously soft and the flavors quite mellow. By 7:30am her stock pot was empty and she was finished serving for the day. If you were late it was truly your loss. After that meal it was my custom to return home and drift into a brief but pleasant food induced coma for about 30 minutes.
Then there was my other choice: bún bò Huế at Quán Thảo on Dương Trí Trạch found about ten homes down from mine. Like a local at a bar in Southie I never had to say what I wanted. As I approached em Thảo would wave and then as I got closer I could see her preparing my soup just the way I liked it: with rare flank steak and extra huyết or what could be best called "pig's blood Jell-O." I would greet her, sit and wait a moment or two to be served. While waiting I'd watch her skillfully prepare my soup. First she'd start by placing the rice noodles in the dish afterwards resting it on the counter before her. Then she'd take her well-worn ladle, with grace swing to her left and plunge it deep into her 20 liter stock pot to get to the hottest broth then returning it to the surface. With her right hand using chopsticks pick up a few pieces of raw flank steak, place them into the broth filled ladle and stir with some broth from the top to flash cook the meat to a perfect rare. That was added to the bowl with a bit of additional broth along with a few small crab cakes, cooked and freshly chopped scallions. Then I was served to which I thanked her. As she was only a bit younger than me I would also playfully tell her she was beautiful, which she was. We both knew this was harmless fun which was good as her husband was a fisherman. Enough said about that. Like the banh canh I'd return home to rest for a bit to appreciate my most pleasant meal.
And I repeated this process of switching between banh canh and bún bò Huế every morning for almost two years. There's great happiness in a good meal and when that meal is breakfast that happiness follows you throughout the day.
There is great happiness in the hearts of the Vietnamese people while those in the West are trapped in an epidemic of loneliness and depression. This is so bad as to have required the UK government to have recently assign former MP Tracey Crouch as their first Minister for Loneliness. This, while a small step, is still much better than the US where over 70,000 people die every year from opioid-related overdose deaths. This number is greater than all the US servicemen that died during the 20 years of the American War in Việt Nam.
When opioids are prescribed by a competent physician for acute pain overdoses are very rare even when those doses are very high. These patients receive their medication from a single provider who carefully monitors their opioid intake. I'm well-versed in this procedure as I was prescribe various and large amounts of opioids including transdermal fentanyl patches after life-saving surgery to both my face and leg in the treatment of stage four cancer. As the pain subsided I without pressure from my oncologist simply reduced my usage in accordance with CDC guidelines over an eight month period until I needed them no longer. This is not the case when these drugs are purchased by folks seeking relief from mostly psychological pain like some of my siblings which causes me and those around them great angst. Those addicted to opioids have little to no choice in the strength of their dosage which can either cause frustration from withdrawals or even worse overdose hence the reason when I visit those plagued by opioid addiction I'm always equipped with naloxone, a drug to reverse an overdose. In fact most fire departments in the US use this drug more often than their ubiquitous fire hoses.
As you can imagine this is not the case in Việt Nam where loneliness is simply not an issue. Whereas in the West we rarely speak to our neighbors the opposite is true in Việt Nam. Without fail every morning on my way for coffee or breakfast in the Vietnamese language I greeted at least a half dozen neighbors and asked if they were well. I knew who was happy, who was sad, who had family problems and who was ill. I spoke to a kind woman that made banh mi on the corner about her almost constant sadness caused by the death of her son and another woman who struggled with the all too common issues found with aging. For the former as a small gesture of sympathy I'd usually bring by a couple of avocado smoothies where we'd sit and enjoy them as she finished her sandwich making duties for the day. Where the elderly die alone in a nursing home or hospital I sat with a neighbor on a bamboo bed on the sidewalk in front of her home as she died. They were not only my neighbors but also my friends. If they were outside on their front steps having dinner I'd many times be invited to join them. At night I'd walk around my streets not to find my neighbors cloistered away behind locked barricades but with doors open to the world allowing me to see a slice of local life every five meters. Once soon after moving in to my new home I repaid a local carpenter for the couple of beers he'd shared with me with a case of the same and that favor was never forgotten. One day I was speaking to a neighbor about my bout with cancer and he simply said "oh yeah, I already know." He knew much of my life story shared with him by my neighbors, my friends. While I was without family in that land of beauty I was never alone.
While there is sadness in Việt Nam it's shared not hidden. A very dear friend and special person to me had once considered suicide in a rather Vietnamese way: crashing her motorbike into an oncoming truck. Thankfully at the last moment she decided to swerve away from the traffic ahead choosing life over death. While not so forthcoming about her suicide attempt she did share her sadness with me as she too struggled with chronic depression. Where in the West we see such matters with shame the Vietnamese see it as part of the struggles of life. No doubt her very difficult life which included being a child that had to witness the Battle of Huế City during the American War and having a former husband that was cruel to say the least she found joy in rich friendships with others. She made my life better and if life had been a bit different we might of even become as close as any man and woman could. Apart we were flawed and together we were stronger than the some of our parts. Again, unlike the West where depression is seen as a shameful flaw to be hidden there it is just part of being alive.
Another well respected woman that was like a sister to me also struggled with bouts of depression. She had lost her mother to the American War and grew up very poor but was fortunate enough to receive a chance to attend a very good secondary school created by bác Hồ in the north. This required her to walk over 600 miles during the American War at night and hiding from American troops during the day. She attended the school in which she excelled leading to a life as a well respected attorney. Her strength was simply beyond my imagination and her kindness to me, a man from the country that took her mother's life, was without bounds. A far cry from the Western world where many hold lifelong grudges for the mildest of slights. This brilliant woman also made the best fish sauce I ever tasted.
From Việt Bắc to the Sài Gòn Delta
From the mountains and plains below
Young and old workers, peasants and the toiling tenant farmers
Fight for freedom with Uncle Hồ.
- the Ballad of Hồ Chí Minh
Từ Việt Bắc tới đồng bằng Sài Gòn
Từ miền núi xuống những cánh đồng
Những người công nhân trẻ và già, tá điền và những nông dân mệt nhọc
Họ đấu tranh cho tự do cùng với Bác Hồ
- Bài ca Hồ Chí Minh
The third and most important: Việt Nam's history of struggle and triumph. While this is a subject fraught with numerous landmines (no pun intended) the struggle of the Vietnamese people against the occupation of foreign forces for the sole purpose of exploitation of natural resources and labor has to be addressed because it's the greatest story of struggle and triumph since the French Revolution.
Let's address the elephant in the room: all sides committed what today we would call war crimes. There's a story about how during the American Revolution George Washington one day came across an encampment of British soldiers in a small valley. While the rules of engagement required Gen. Washington to send forward a single man under a white flag of truce to warn the British troops that they were present and give them time to properly assemble he did no such thing. Instead he secretly encircled the group and opened fire without giving them a chance to so much as raise nevermind load their rifles. There is also the Battle of Trenton where American soldiers disregarded the agreed upon rules of engagement and secretly attacked the assembled and rather hung over Hesse-Kassel troops. Over 800 German soldiers were captured including one Daniel Biehler to which I am a direct descendant. All war is a war crime but there is a difference between those people that are oppressed fighting for their freedom and those fighting for profit.
During the entirety of the American War in Việt Nam the Vietnamese people were subject to a ruler in a foreign land, be it the French with their control of the last emperor of Việt Nam then directly by the french military and finally when faced with failure rule came from the US. While the Viet Minh, akin to the Continental Army during the American Revolution, had to suffice with captured French small arms the best equipped military in the world, the US, had weapons that would rain fire and chemicals upon the indigenous people. Later the North Vietnamese Army did receive assistance from other countries.
Simply put America's undoing was their underestimation of the Vietnamese people's desire for autonomous rule. U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) commander Gen. Westmoreland said that any enemy that lived in a cave could be defeated while Hồ Chí Minh said "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." This thought was somewhat memorialized in the classic line from the movie the "Princess Bride" where Vizzini said "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia.'"
One of the greatest military victories of the war was the battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Faced with impossible odds against a much more powerful french artillery base General Võ Nguyên Giáp secretly hauled artillery cannons up the side of a sheer and dangerous mountain side to launch his assault. The lost was so devastating to the chief French artillery officer that he committed suicide. A victory akin to the Battle of Trenton launched by American troops during the American Revolution.
So to the few Vietnamese reading this I say unto you "you are no longer the students of the world but now the teachers." Stop measuring yourselves by Western standards and embrace all that truly matters, all that you have truly worked so hard for, and teach the West what's really important: độc lập, tự do và hạnh phúc (independence, freedom and happiness) and discard the rest.
Unless you've been to Việt Nam or eaten a home-cooked meal with a Vietnamese family you haven't had real Vietnamese food. While still much closer to its origins than Chinese-American food found everywhere, which is one of my guilty pleasures, the food you get in Vietnamese restaurants outside of the homeland while excellent just isn't the same because the ingredients and cooking styles aren't the same. I could tell the difference between bún bò Huế made in Đà Nẵng and the same dish made in the city of its birth just two hours to the north.
Every morning while living in Đà Nẵng I was faced with a difficult choice: do I have banh canh or bún bò Huế for breakfast after my morning coffee and ensuing holding forth with other expatriots. As not to offend either highly skilled chef I switched between the two every day.
Banh canh from an unnamed shop at the corner of Nguyễn Công Sáu and An Cư 4, Phước Mỹ, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam in Velvia. Fujifilm X100T. image: ©Brian Beeler
First the banh canh which was served from an unnamed shop about four doors down from my home by a very sweet, older woman that spent most of her life as a cook for a local police station. While law enforcement officials in the West are stuck with most likely a burger in their cruiser the Vietnamese police ate smarter and better.
The morning routine went off like clockwork. Chi Bé started her morning around 5am prepping her mise en place by cleaning and cutting locally sourced vegetables and meats, hand grinding rice flower and hand cutting the rice noodles. If we were lucky she might of even been supplied with some eel procured from a fisherman that lived on our street. At 6:30am her soup of the gods contained within a well-worn, five liter stock pot, heated by a brick of charcoal, was hot and ready to serve in which the noodles were firm and the flavors bold. At 7am the noodles were tender and the flavors more balanced. At 7:20 am the noodles were gloriously soft and the flavors quite mellow. By 7:30am her stock pot was empty and she was finished serving for the day. If you were late it was truly your loss. After that meal it was my custom to return home and drift into a brief but pleasant food induced coma for about 30 minutes.
Bún bò Huế at Quán Thảo, 135 Dương Trí Trạch, An Hải Bắc, Sơn Trà, Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam in Velvia. Fujifilm X100T. image: ©Brian Beeler
Then there was my other choice: bún bò Huế at Quán Thảo on Dương Trí Trạch found about ten homes down from mine. Like a local at a bar in Southie I never had to say what I wanted. As I approached em Thảo would wave and then as I got closer I could see her preparing my soup just the way I liked it: with rare flank steak and extra huyết or what could be best called "pig's blood Jell-O." I would greet her, sit and wait a moment or two to be served. While waiting I'd watch her skillfully prepare my soup. First she'd start by placing the rice noodles in the dish afterwards resting it on the counter before her. Then she'd take her well-worn ladle, with grace swing to her left and plunge it deep into her 20 liter stock pot to get to the hottest broth then returning it to the surface. With her right hand using chopsticks pick up a few pieces of raw flank steak, place them into the broth filled ladle and stir with some broth from the top to flash cook the meat to a perfect rare. That was added to the bowl with a bit of additional broth along with a few small crab cakes, cooked and freshly chopped scallions. Then I was served to which I thanked her. As she was only a bit younger than me I would also playfully tell her she was beautiful, which she was. We both knew this was harmless fun which was good as her husband was a fisherman. Enough said about that. Like the banh canh I'd return home to rest for a bit to appreciate my most pleasant meal.
And I repeated this process of switching between banh canh and bún bò Huế every morning for almost two years. There's great happiness in a good meal and when that meal is breakfast that happiness follows you throughout the day.
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| Mother and daughter in Astia. Đa Krông, Quảng Trị, Việt Nam, Fujifilm X-T1. image: ©Brian Beeler |
When opioids are prescribed by a competent physician for acute pain overdoses are very rare even when those doses are very high. These patients receive their medication from a single provider who carefully monitors their opioid intake. I'm well-versed in this procedure as I was prescribe various and large amounts of opioids including transdermal fentanyl patches after life-saving surgery to both my face and leg in the treatment of stage four cancer. As the pain subsided I without pressure from my oncologist simply reduced my usage in accordance with CDC guidelines over an eight month period until I needed them no longer. This is not the case when these drugs are purchased by folks seeking relief from mostly psychological pain like some of my siblings which causes me and those around them great angst. Those addicted to opioids have little to no choice in the strength of their dosage which can either cause frustration from withdrawals or even worse overdose hence the reason when I visit those plagued by opioid addiction I'm always equipped with naloxone, a drug to reverse an overdose. In fact most fire departments in the US use this drug more often than their ubiquitous fire hoses.
As you can imagine this is not the case in Việt Nam where loneliness is simply not an issue. Whereas in the West we rarely speak to our neighbors the opposite is true in Việt Nam. Without fail every morning on my way for coffee or breakfast in the Vietnamese language I greeted at least a half dozen neighbors and asked if they were well. I knew who was happy, who was sad, who had family problems and who was ill. I spoke to a kind woman that made banh mi on the corner about her almost constant sadness caused by the death of her son and another woman who struggled with the all too common issues found with aging. For the former as a small gesture of sympathy I'd usually bring by a couple of avocado smoothies where we'd sit and enjoy them as she finished her sandwich making duties for the day. Where the elderly die alone in a nursing home or hospital I sat with a neighbor on a bamboo bed on the sidewalk in front of her home as she died. They were not only my neighbors but also my friends. If they were outside on their front steps having dinner I'd many times be invited to join them. At night I'd walk around my streets not to find my neighbors cloistered away behind locked barricades but with doors open to the world allowing me to see a slice of local life every five meters. Once soon after moving in to my new home I repaid a local carpenter for the couple of beers he'd shared with me with a case of the same and that favor was never forgotten. One day I was speaking to a neighbor about my bout with cancer and he simply said "oh yeah, I already know." He knew much of my life story shared with him by my neighbors, my friends. While I was without family in that land of beauty I was never alone.
While there is sadness in Việt Nam it's shared not hidden. A very dear friend and special person to me had once considered suicide in a rather Vietnamese way: crashing her motorbike into an oncoming truck. Thankfully at the last moment she decided to swerve away from the traffic ahead choosing life over death. While not so forthcoming about her suicide attempt she did share her sadness with me as she too struggled with chronic depression. Where in the West we see such matters with shame the Vietnamese see it as part of the struggles of life. No doubt her very difficult life which included being a child that had to witness the Battle of Huế City during the American War and having a former husband that was cruel to say the least she found joy in rich friendships with others. She made my life better and if life had been a bit different we might of even become as close as any man and woman could. Apart we were flawed and together we were stronger than the some of our parts. Again, unlike the West where depression is seen as a shameful flaw to be hidden there it is just part of being alive.
Another well respected woman that was like a sister to me also struggled with bouts of depression. She had lost her mother to the American War and grew up very poor but was fortunate enough to receive a chance to attend a very good secondary school created by bác Hồ in the north. This required her to walk over 600 miles during the American War at night and hiding from American troops during the day. She attended the school in which she excelled leading to a life as a well respected attorney. Her strength was simply beyond my imagination and her kindness to me, a man from the country that took her mother's life, was without bounds. A far cry from the Western world where many hold lifelong grudges for the mildest of slights. This brilliant woman also made the best fish sauce I ever tasted.
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From Việt Bắc to the Sài Gòn Delta
From the mountains and plains below
Young and old workers, peasants and the toiling tenant farmers
Fight for freedom with Uncle Hồ.
- the Ballad of Hồ Chí Minh
Từ Việt Bắc tới đồng bằng Sài Gòn
Từ miền núi xuống những cánh đồng
Những người công nhân trẻ và già, tá điền và những nông dân mệt nhọc
Họ đấu tranh cho tự do cùng với Bác Hồ
- Bài ca Hồ Chí Minh
The third and most important: Việt Nam's history of struggle and triumph. While this is a subject fraught with numerous landmines (no pun intended) the struggle of the Vietnamese people against the occupation of foreign forces for the sole purpose of exploitation of natural resources and labor has to be addressed because it's the greatest story of struggle and triumph since the French Revolution.
Let's address the elephant in the room: all sides committed what today we would call war crimes. There's a story about how during the American Revolution George Washington one day came across an encampment of British soldiers in a small valley. While the rules of engagement required Gen. Washington to send forward a single man under a white flag of truce to warn the British troops that they were present and give them time to properly assemble he did no such thing. Instead he secretly encircled the group and opened fire without giving them a chance to so much as raise nevermind load their rifles. There is also the Battle of Trenton where American soldiers disregarded the agreed upon rules of engagement and secretly attacked the assembled and rather hung over Hesse-Kassel troops. Over 800 German soldiers were captured including one Daniel Biehler to which I am a direct descendant. All war is a war crime but there is a difference between those people that are oppressed fighting for their freedom and those fighting for profit.
During the entirety of the American War in Việt Nam the Vietnamese people were subject to a ruler in a foreign land, be it the French with their control of the last emperor of Việt Nam then directly by the french military and finally when faced with failure rule came from the US. While the Viet Minh, akin to the Continental Army during the American Revolution, had to suffice with captured French small arms the best equipped military in the world, the US, had weapons that would rain fire and chemicals upon the indigenous people. Later the North Vietnamese Army did receive assistance from other countries.
Simply put America's undoing was their underestimation of the Vietnamese people's desire for autonomous rule. U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) commander Gen. Westmoreland said that any enemy that lived in a cave could be defeated while Hồ Chí Minh said "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." This thought was somewhat memorialized in the classic line from the movie the "Princess Bride" where Vizzini said "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - the most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia.'"
One of the greatest military victories of the war was the battle of Điện Biên Phủ. Faced with impossible odds against a much more powerful french artillery base General Võ Nguyên Giáp secretly hauled artillery cannons up the side of a sheer and dangerous mountain side to launch his assault. The lost was so devastating to the chief French artillery officer that he committed suicide. A victory akin to the Battle of Trenton launched by American troops during the American Revolution.
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So to the few Vietnamese reading this I say unto you "you are no longer the students of the world but now the teachers." Stop measuring yourselves by Western standards and embrace all that truly matters, all that you have truly worked so hard for, and teach the West what's really important: độc lập, tự do và hạnh phúc (independence, freedom and happiness) and discard the rest.
Top image: Flags in display for Liberation Day 2017 in Velvia. Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam. Fujifilm X100T. image: ©Brian Beeler
