A Microcosm of Vietnam:
Embracing Vietnamese culture bump by bump
By Julie Ginsberg
The minibus bumped along the highway connecting Hanoi with Vietnam’s eastern coast, and with each bump I felt my spine pressing into the plastic edge separating the two seats I was straddling. Hoping to find a more comfortable position, I tried shifting my hips, but they were firmly wedged between those of a Vietnamese man to my right and my friend Allison to my left.
Allison and I exchanged a look and let out a mutual sigh: it was going to be a long four hours to our weekend cruise in Halong Bay.
The minibus slowed, and the man standing at the open doorway, who seemed to be in charge, yanked a new passenger on board.
No way, I thought. There’s no way another person can possibly fit in here.
I was wrong. A few minutes later, a woman and her young daughter hopped on board as well, and they weren’t the last. Each time a new passenger appeared in the doorframe, I fought a rising wave of indignation, a product of my ingrained belief that personal space was an inalienable right. This is ridiculous! I thought, silently fuming. I paid to have my own seat on this bus, didn’t I?
I expected to see the same annoyance reflected on the faces of my fellow travelers, who were all Vietnamese, with the exception of Allison. There was no trace of it. With each new rider, everyone simply shifted accordingly to find the most logical place to squeeze in the new body. The passengers appeared neither cheerful nor perturbed: they had bought bus tickets expecting and accepting that 60,000 dong (just under $4) purchased a minimal amount of wiggle room.
In retrospect, my fellow travelers’ relative comfort in the situation is unsurprising: in a small city with more than three million residents, space is at a premium. Houses as narrow as 15 feet stretch skyward side by side in lanes too narrow for cars to pass. The situation on the minibus only confirmed my initial hunch that Vietnamese ideas about personal boundaries might ultimately trump my own.
I closed my eyes and willed sleep to offer an escape for my constricted, overheated body, but it was impossible to feel at ease under the curious gaze of the tiny, gray-haired woman who had turned around to give me a thorough examination. I elected to sit back (as much as was possible), relax, and embrace the humor of the situation. The man whose thigh was pressed against mine saw that I was holding my overflowing bag in my lap and gently took it from me to put it behind his feet. I thanked him, and, startled to hear Vietnamese from a foreigner, he asked what I was doing in Vietnam.
Had I possessed superior language skills, I might have told him that I had applied for a fellowship position at Viet Nam News to gain exposure to diverse ways of living and the worldviews that come along with them. After three months of tutoring sessions, however, I was still relegated to repeating the same conversation I’d had many times over, in which I explained that I was American, 22 years old, working as a newspaper editor, and not married (rather, not yet married, as it is always stated in Vietnamese). The man gave me a wide smile of brown-stained teeth and enthusiastically assured me that my garbled Vietnamese was better than his English.
Gaining proficiency in Vietnamese and making Vietnamese friends were priorities I set for myself from the start. When I first arrived in Vietnam, I was disappointed to hear numerous expats say that Vietnamese people tend to be reserved and difficult to get to know. But I’ve since learned that gaining insight into Vietnamese culture and feeling embedded in a community don’t necessarily require emotional outpourings from close Vietnamese friends. Human connection is more simple and subtle than that: even involuntary physical closeness can be a way of overcoming cultural distance.
That said, when the minibus to Halong Bay stopped for a bathroom break and the “toilet” consisted of a trough shared by a row of squatting women, I can’t say that I embraced my physical closeness with the women urinating next to me. To be perfectly honest, I was really grossed out. And I think it’s safe to say that they were, too.
My good humor survived one more bump in the road in the final stretch of the journey, when the girl who had boarded with her mother began to vomit. A man handed a plastic bag to the girl’s mother, and the woman sitting next to her clucked sympathetically and rubbed the child’s back. When the girl had finished, her mother knotted the top of the bag and handed it to the passenger on her right, who nonchalantly cracked open the window and tossed out the bag.
Under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have felt a bit sorry for myself at that point. But as the minibus teetered toward our divergent destinations, and the elderly woman still eyeing me cracked a smile of black-dyed teeth, I found myself returning it with equal gusto. Somewhere along the way, this crammed minibus had become a mini-community, and I felt proud to have kept my eyes open to witness it.
Julie Ginsberg graduated from Princeton University in 2006 with a degree in Anthropology. Afterwards, she moved to Hanoi , Vietnam , where she currently lives and plans to stay through the fall (or perhaps longer, if she can’t break her addictions to sticky rice and tailored clothing). Her account of crowded minibus travel, “A Microcosm of Vietnam,” shows how even uncomfortable bus rides can be an opportunity for cultural learning (page 86). Julie currently works as a subeditor at Viet Nam News , a national English-language daily newspaper, through a Princeton-in-Asia fellowship.