My Journey to Vietnam

I have always wanted to travel the world and visit different countries because I’ve thought it would be interesting to learn about other people’s cultures. But I didn’t realize that I can learn about them right here. The students at Miamisburg High School are diverse and unique, so I decided to look around me for inspiration. I asked one of my closest friends questions about her culture and family life. I learned more about her than ever before and I’ve known her for almost eight years! I couldn’t believe that I was so caught up in my life that I never thought to ask her these questions before. It seems that it’s easy for us to be stuck in our own corner of the world and we don’t look around to see what we may be missing.

My friend’s family is from Vietnam and the first thing I asked was what brought them to the Americas. She informed me that, “It’s not so much what brought me here as it is who brought me here.” She explained to me that her dad and his family immigrated here in 1992 and her mom’s family immigrated in 1999, but she was born here in Ohio. Both sets of her grandparents decided to come to America because of all of the opportunities. They said they were “looking for a better place for their children to live and work in,” and especially after the Vietnam War, “America was a more stable place to raise future generations.”

She tells me that family life in Vietnam is very similar to family life in the United States. For example, Vietnamese extended families stay close and near each other. In fact, her grandparents on her mother’s side live with her today. The Vietnamese use more formal terms for addressing elders, relatives, and close friends. It is more of a requirement to speak formally when meeting someone new or just talking to someone who is older. While in America, we don’t have ways to formally greet someone besides “sir” and “ma'am” they use a more specific and wider variety of terms for each person.

I also learned that Vietnamese traditions are fairly different than those in America. They have more holidays, such as Lunar New Year. For Lunar New Year, she and her cousins play Bầu Cua Cá Cọp together. This is a Vietnamese gambling game that uses three dice. The six sides of the dice have pictures of a fish, a prawn, a crab, a rooster, a calabash gourd, and a stag. Players put a bet on which pictures they think will appear on the dice when it is rolled. If no one picks the picture that was rolled, the moderator gets the money.

When I asked my friend about her favorite Vietnamese meals she said, “I like to believe that food is interesting no matter where you are in the world, but Asian cuisine is definitely the most diverse.” A very iconic dish would be Pho and, according to Google, pho is “a type of Vietnamese soup, typically made from beef stock and spices to which noodles and thinly sliced beef or chicken are added.” Bánh xèo is an egg crepe with shrimp inside. She then told me that her all time favorite Vietnamese dish is Bò Kho, which is like a spicy beef stew.

Every few years, she and her family go back to Vietnam to visit family. Her favorite thing to do there is visit her grandmother who is “still living her best life at almost one hundred years old.” Even though she never attended a school in Vietnam, her parents always told her stories about what it was like. They told her that it is much more strict and if a student could not keep up with the others they were punished and considered “unfit to work in the real world.”

My favorite response from my friend was when she said, “What I learned from my visits to Vietnam was that I really do have a lot to appreciate here in the United States where there are SO many opportunities.” It was amazing to learn so much about another culture. I can’t wait to go on my next adventure.

#Vietnam #culture #vietnamese