Hello Hanoi

At both of the schools where I’m teaching, the textbooks we use are British—mostly from Cambridge University Press. My schools probably choose these books because Cambridge seems like an authority on the language, but I’ve been discovering that they’re at least somewhat culturally irrelevant to my Vietnamese students. Here are some examples.

• In a unit about money, one activity urges students to “Ask your classmates what country they come from. Then ask them what currency they use in that country.”

This kind of exercise assumes that the classroom is multi-cultural. Granted, that would work well in most ESL classrooms in New York. Here in Vietnam, however, multiculturalism is foreign. Not one of the 100+ students I teach was born outside of Vietnam, or has a non-Vietnamese parent, or has spent any significant period of time outside of Southeast Asia—and this is in Hanoi, where the population is one of the most diverse in the country. 

• In the same chapter, the textbook reads “today we use coins made of metal for money.”

There aren’t any coins in Vietnam. That’s kind of a nice thing about this country, actually. I do miss how tactile it is to clunk down a couple of dollar coins to pay for a coffee, but I like the convenience of having all my cash in one place.  

• In the unit called “Love,” one discussion question asks: “What would you do for someone you’re in love with? Could you be convinced to vote for a different political party?” 

Of course, in Vietnam, nobody votes. My students reminded me that Vietnam has a “one-party system.” To be fair, though, the two-party system in America is hardly an improvement—it has been argued that this provides little more than the illusion of choice. Still, in my class we had to bypass an entire section of our textbook because it was irrelevant. 

• There’s a role-play activity in the textbook that asks students to imagine that “Someone with a different colour skin is being beaten up by someone with your colour skin. What do you do?” 

This exercise appears to be designed to foster tolerance between races, but it expects that the student playing the witness in this role-play would yell “Stop!” or at least “You shouldn’t do that!” Instead, my student giggled and encouraged the assailant to “Continue! Please continue!” I interpret this as more indicative of my students’ maturity than their cultural attitudes, but it does reflect their feelings about foreigners to some degree. 

• “Think about a band you like. Now talk to your partner. How are the bands you like different from your partners? How are they similar? Now describe a band you like that’s unknown.” 

It may be just because the students at my university are all studying management or accounting, but my students didn’t really have divergent musical tastes. When I asked them what kind of music they like to listen to, they all answered “pop.” If you asked the same question at an American university, it’s likely you wouldn’t hear the same answer twice. When I was an undergrad, I was into all kinds of crazy stuff—polka-punk, post-folk, indie electronic, bhangra, bebop, ska—I couldn’t get enough music. Here, I couldn’t imagine a Vietnamese student listening to anything except for one of a handful of pop songs from ten years ago. They certainly wouldn’t be into anything “unknown.” There are, for instance, virtually no local bands. I find this pretty sad, but I don’t necessarily mean it as a criticism. I suppose one way to think of it is that Vietnam hasn’t had the luxury of being able to enjoy music, especially with its turbulent history. It’s also possible that its students don’t have the luxury of being able to study something like music, when there are more practical subjects they should be studying, like accounting. I freely admit, there’s still a lot I have to learn about this country. 

• In a chapter about food, the textbook asks the students to “Rate your local restaurant/supermarket. Is the food organic?” 

In a western country, this might be an exercise designed to get students thinking about where their food comes from. That might be very worthwhile in the west, but here in Vietnam, this exercise comes across as a bit insulting. There’s one shop I can think of in the city that sells organic food, but it’s in an extremely expensive neighborhood and the food they sell there is similarly unaffordable. It would be completely impractical for Vietnamese people to worry about whether their food is organic—not only because the prices of organic food are prohibitively high, but also because agricultural technology has brought them (and much of the rest of the developing world) out of famine. Pesticides and other chemicals have made it possible for there to be enough food to feed most of the country. For 99.9% of the people here, there is no choice but to buy non-organic food, and so a question like this is not a fair one for this country. 

• In a chapter about honesty, “Have you ever cheated on a test?”

Cheating here is not just rampant—it’s the norm. All of my students cheat, without exception, and they try to cheat at every opportunity, sometimes rather blatantly. This goes for my nineteen-year-old students as well as my six-year-old students. If I leave the room for a moment, they all exchange papers and start copying each other’s answers. On one occasion, I’ve had an entire class submit homework assignments that differed only in handwriting—their answers, spellings, and formatting on the page were all completely identical. On other occasions, I’ve had students copy each other’s answers directly in front of me, as if I wouldn’t care. The above question from my textbook is irrelevant, because there isn’t anyone, at least among my hundred or so students, that has a moral objection to cheating. In Vietnam, you cheat whenever possible, and so there’s no question about ever having cheated on a test—everyone has. 

• In the same chapter about honesty, “How dishonest is it to make a copy of a copyrighted movie or book? Why should you not copy these?” 

That question appeared in a photocopied textbook. All of our textbooks are photocopied. I don’t really blame them—some of those books cost as much as an average rural worker makes in a month. If the DVD shops here were to sell their movies for western prices, nobody could afford to buy them, and so they’re forced to sell bootlegs. If it means that they get exposed to other forms of art, I’m all for it. Especially if it means that I can spend three bucks and get all the Woody Allen movies ever made. 

Basically, I think someone should make some textbooks that are as well-informed by grammatical and pedagogical theory as the Cambridge books, but design them to be more relevant to Vietnamese life.  

So I picked up this travel book the other day and noticed that lots of words and sentences were censored. Strangely, however, they weren’t blacked out with a thick black sharpie like you’d expect—they were half-heartedly crossed out with what appeared to be a glittery silver pen. Now, one might ask, why did these government officials only partially cover the words? Why did they use a glittery pen? Does the censorship board only hire 13-year-old girls? It’s ironic that someone went through the trouble to cross out (I should say, “glitter out”) all these words in all these books, only to effectively call attention to them.  

Read More

From what I can tell, the croissants, bagels and donuts are all made out of the same kind of bread, and just shaped slightly differently. The other day I went to “DoCo,” the donuts and coffee chain, and discovered that their donuts are basically just circular bread with some sugar on top. It’s almost as if these bakeries had been given pictures of what these baked goods were supposed to look like, and made up all the details themselves. To their credit, however, the baguettes, though nothing like real baguettes, are fairly tasty.

Last night we went to a restaurant that bills itself as a “rotary hotpot.” I think by “rotary” they were referring to the conveyor belt that pushes little colored plates of food around, like at the famous “sushi train” restaurants. Otherwise it was a straight-up Taiwan-style hotpot restaurant, with little individual soup pots in front of each person, and a heat knob that the customer can control. I was really excited, because sushi trains and hotpots are two of my favorite novelty restaurant styles. Presumably, the plates were color-coded according to price, with the more expensive items (squid balls and mini steaks) on the gold-colored plates, and the cheaper items (bok choy and noodles) on green-colored plates. Curiously, though, there were eggs on both green- and gold-colored plates. I thought that the expensive eggs must be free-range or something. I decided to try one to find out. 

When I lived in New York, eggs were one of my favorite parts about going to a hotpot restaurant in Chinatown. Sometimes I would hard-boil it, and other times I would try to poach it by cracking it into the pot. This time, I tried to poach my gold-plate egg, but it was a little difficult to crack. Then there was an squirt of blood, and a dead baby chicken fell into my pot. 

I’d heard about embryonic chicken eggs, but I was in no way prepared for a baby chicken to come falling out of my egg, beak and eyes and all. I warned the Taiwanese couple across from me: “there are entire chickens in there!” but they were totally unfazed, and assured me that they were delicious. I was worried that the beak might be crunchy or that the eyes would be gooey. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too bad. Given the choice, I don’t think I’d order it on purpose, but it wasn’t an entirely unhappy accident. I think I was actually more perturbed about the beef hearts that we accidentally ordered a week ago.