By: Tony Navaneelan
[monsoonJournal.com]
The Teaching Experience of a UFT Undergraduate in Vietnam
On board the twenty-one hour Viet Nam Airlines flight to Ha Noi, it is difficult not to notice with some confusion an Air France logo hidden under a thin wash of paint or still engraved on the back of one of the forks. Most of Viet Nam Airlines’ older jets were bought on discount from the French airliner after independence; a small compensation for the long colonial history between the two countries. On board, well-groomed attendants see little irony in handing out immigration forms to the ‘people’s socialist republic’ at the same time as glossy duty-free catalogues peddling imported luxury items. And despite the numerous non-smoking signs all over the aircraft, I keep finding a suspicious number of cigarette butts in my armchair ashtray.
[Me and my co-teacher Nancy Nguyen]
These contradictions – jarring and yet so commonplace in contemporary Vietnamese society – were still novel and disorienting for me as I flew towards Ha Noi. Most of what I knew of Viet Nam to that point came from a handful of American war movies and the Vietnamese phở restaurant near my university. In the seven days that past between when I was accepted for the job posting and when I actually stepped on the plane, there wasn’t much time to consider the experience ahead of me. But there I was, after flying across eleven time zones, stepping off the plane to spend half a year in one of the world’s last and most infamous Communist states.
* * *
[Class Picture]
I arrived in Viet Nam last February with a well-thumbed Lonely Planet Guide and a six month working visa from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). A few weeks earlier I had applied for a volunteer teaching position in the country over the internet – although the job positing was vague on the employer. It wasn’t until my employer called to offer me the job that she asked casually, “you know you’ll be working for the United Nations, right?” I had finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto the previous summer and this seemed like the ideal way to fill my year off. The phone still in my hand, I glanced at the world map to see where Viet Nam was exactly and then told her I’d take the job. When did you need me to be there, I asked? “How’s February 26?” I looked at the calendar. It was February 21.
We touch down in Ha Noi airport through a cloud of crisp fog. It is wintertime in the north and far from scenes of lush tropical rainforest, the city feels damp and there a lingering fragrance of mildew. The airport is not what is expected. The new building is sleek and modern, complete with polished black marble floors and an elderly lady doggedly sweeping away footprints as soon as they are deposited. The airport is intended as showcase of the new Viet Nam: prosperous, technological, modern. But the very cleanliness of the building, a sign of its under-use, belies that fact that new Viet Nam is still in its infancy. As I glanced at the Western products being sold in the gift stores, I was immediately regretted the ten tubes of toothpaste and deodorant sticks I had nervously packed for my half-year stay. And outside on the curb, under the portrait of Ho Chi Minh – the man who had orchestrated the US’ only military defeat in a foreign war – taxis from the Hilton and Sheraton now waited to whisk American tourists to the new glass-clad towers sticking into the Ha Noi skyline.
[Vehicle used to transport the women]
This is the not Viet Nam from American war movies. It is the Viet Nam that I and thousands of other foreigners had come here to experience following the country’s two decades of economic growth, second only to China’s in its voracious pace. But that is not to say the old Viet Nam is not still ever present. Once my taxi sped away from the airport the land opened up into a flat, green plateau of rice paddies full of women toiling away in the country’s iconic white cone-shaped hats. These women earn less than US$2 per day and they represent the vast majority of Vietnamese society still. They, like tens of millions of others, work not only in the shadow of the country’s modern airport, but in the shadow of the country’s economic miracle as a whole. As I would come to learn, Viet Nam is, if nothing else, a land of tenuously co-existing contradictions.
* * *
A few after arriving and I am on the back of a Honda motorcycle – ubiquitous in Viet Nam – heading into the countryside. Motorbikes are a cheap and efficient way of moving around which has made them extremely popular in Viet Nam since the 1990s. At every intersection in Ha Noi, hundreds of motorbikes will stream haphazardly into one another, oblivious to any concept of traffic laws or helmets. In Canada I do not even have my learner’s permit, so in Viet Nam I am confined to my bicycle. This means, like all other cyclists, I am relegated the very bottem of Vietnamese society along with recently arrived migrants and people who have sold their motobikes for drugs. But bicycling in Ha Noi rush hour traffic is difficult enough. I tend to hug the curb and hang out with the bicycling ladies who are carrying rice or vegetables on their head while they peddle. They give me the ‘thumbs up.’ In the countryside, however, we have escaped the traffic of Ha Noi and my driver and I are able to speed easily towards our destination: an all-female labour prison inside a national park.
[Women in the Program]
Most North Americans come to Asia to teach to middle-to-upper class students eager to study at universities abroad. My class was somewhat different. To begin with, they were all recovering drug addicts or sex-trade workers. Secondly, they were still in prison. I had been hired to work in a pilot UNDP project which was providing vocational training to soon-to-be-released inmates in these ‘special’ prisons. Viet Nam has an entirely separate prison system for individuals convicted of a special class of ‘social’ crimes: drug use, sex trade work, sexual indecency, homosexuality, etc. Typical of Communist governments’ fetish for strange rhetoric and even stranger institutions, these women are officially termed victims of ‘social evil’ and the facility they are housed in was operated by the Ha Noi Sub-Department for the Prevention of Social Evil.
[Women in the Program]
While the prison I worked in only housed drug users and sex workers, the government has also launched campaigns against such social evils as gambling and has even targeted karaoke bars and foreign-language signage as being counter-revolutionary. The prisons are officially known as rehabilitation centres which made me cringe at what the conditions in an actual Vietnamese prison must be like. Our ‘rehabilitation centre,’ like all others, was overcrowded and underfunded. The women sleep 35 to a room with only 20 beds. Most sleep on bamboo mats on the floor. They work in factories most days painting plastic toys. Everything smells of mildew. This was not the Betty Ford Clinic.
* * *
For too many North Americans, Viet Nam isn’t so much a country as it is a war. It is easy to lump this state alongside a few infamous others – Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq – as places which have been flattened in our memories to a few newspaper photographs of a distant and violent conflict. Indeed, the word Viet Nam itself has become shorthand for military quagmire and terrible sacrifice. But with the exception of a US B-52 bomber wreckage that is still floating in the lake into which it crashed in Ha Noi, the country harbors almost no evidence of, and even less resentment over, the Viet Nam War – or the American War, as they refer to it. From the Vietnamese perspective, the country was essentially in a state of continuous war for independence and territorial unity from WWII until 1988; a small and poor country which successfully fought back invasions by the Japanese, the French, the Americans and the Chinese.
But what is done is done. Far from the venomous perceptions of Americans in Iran, Cuba and other places where US foreign policy has been defeated, Vietnamese have developed a very positive impression of the United States. Most Vietnamese in the cities express a desire to work and live in the US for some time and every tourist is inevitably approached by youth looking to practice their English. The people I spoke to seemed almost disappointed when they found out I was not American but Canadian. The land lady at the small apartment I rented in Ha Noi was certain I was mistaken and that “Canada is in America. No? America very rich. Don’t you want to be rich?” All of this is testimony to the new and dogmatic focus in Viet Nam since the onset of a period of relative peace since 1988. Far from dwelling on the lost decades behind them, Viet Nam has chosen to direct its attention squarely on a forward-facing obsession: economic development.
Like most people in Viet Nam, the lives of the 30 women I was soon to meet and teach mirrored the large social upheavals that have come along with Viet Nam’s drive towards development. After the drying up of subsidies from the USSR at the end of the Cold War, the Communist government in Viet Nam began a process of serious reform, opening up the country to trade and allowing private business. The hope was to mirror the successes of nearby China and Thailand in catapulting themselves away from decades of warfare and beyond the status of a low-income country. What followed was an economic boom that has seen the country grow at an annual rate of 8% for nearly twenty years, producing the fastest rate of poverty reduction in human history. In no other country have so many people escaped poverty so quickly than in Viet Nam between 1988 and the present. Just last year, the Viet Nam Stock Exchange increased by 150%. The sense of optimism in the country is almost palpable. Everyone is smiling.
[Women’s prison in Vietnam]
But along with imported Taiwanese DVD players and American cigarettes, the newly opened economy also generated an appetite for heroin and along with it, HIV. And so on my first day I entered a classroom of women who represented the physical cost Viet Nam was paying for its rapid growth – “the waste products,” I once heard someone distastefully say, of the country’s famed economic machine. Most were struggling with addictions, most commonly to heroin or for the more affluent, to ecstasy. Many concealed prized – yet banned – photographs in their jacket pockets of children living in Ha Noi. And one-third of them were battling HIV in perhaps the most unfavourable of circumstances: in a rural prison, in a poor country, and without any form of medication.
Over the next six months, myself and a team of six UN workers ran the vocational training program inside the women’s prison. The course work consisted mainly of computer training, English lessons and information sessions on drug counseling and social networks when they are released. Our ambitions were low. When we arrived, the prison we were working at had a return rate of over 90% — 9 out 10 women would relapse and be sent back for another 2-year stay. Just having 5 women in the program gain stable employment following release would be enough to declare success. Of course the women themselves had their own varying incentives for succeeding. Letters (opened by the prison of course) from boyfriends in their hometowns, visits from their children and parents on weekend, or rumors of a famous South Korean movie playing in Ha Noi would all bring them all pangs for home.
* * *
The problems of our project were frequent table conversation when our UN team would go out for dinner. This helped distract us, at times, from the food. The diet in Viet Nam is largely a function of the population. In a country of 88-million living in an area half the size of Saskatchewan, nothing can go to waste. Dog meat, pig stomach, cow cheek and insects have all staked out a place for themselves on the Vietnamese menu. Ordering snake at a restaurant in Ha Noi entails a live snake being brought to the table, killed on spot and its still-beating heart placed on a dish on the table. Then the oldest guest eats the pulsating heart while the others drink a shot of snake blood and vodka. For health and longevity, of course. Delicious. But when the meal is over, the discussions with my UN co-workers would inevitably turn into a verbal browbeating of the state over the conditions of the prisons. The prisons have been termed by many critics as forced labour centres or even concentration camps for people living with HIV/AIDS. And on days when my classes with the women are cancelled because they failed to meet their work quota for the previous day, I was tempted to agree.
But while the prisons may seem crude, they represent an honest (although futile) attempt to address an epidemic by a country which, until a few years ago, did not even have a word for HIV. Indeed, it is part of the promise but also the problem that such rapid poverty reduction has brought to Viet Nam. A society that twenty-five years ago was preoccupied with Chinese invasion and rice famines, is now trying to absorb Korean soap operas, Microsoft, admission to the WTO and HIV/AIDS simultaneously. The results are sometimes tragic, often comedic and never perfect – there is still an infuriating lack of social norms governing where and when cell phones can be used. But they represent the best attempt of a society to deal with a total economic and social upheaval the likes of which Canada has never experienced. To put the scale of growth in perspective, the total wealth of Viet Nam’s 88-million people doubles every nine years. Greater countries have come apart under lesser strain.
And even amongst those who have paid the highest price in the country’s race for modernization there exists no less enthusiasm for the project as a whole. I would have expected the women in the prison – most victims of the new imports of cheap Thai rice and Cambodian heroin, a lethal mixture for rural Viet Nam’s rice-based economies – to be the most critical of the new reforms in the country. Instead they seem to be completely enthralled by, and well adjusted to, it. As if we were at a café instead of a prison, the women feverishly inquire what foreigners think about Viet Nam, ask what Canadian girls wear dancing and if Canadian boys live with their parents, and are proud to pass on to me their new email addresses – even though many will not be able to check their inboxes until their release in two years. With few exceptions, the women in the prison know that even with a criminal record, the pace of growth means they will enjoy a quality of life greater than their parents and almost unimaginable to their grandparents. And perhaps most surprising of all is the constant requests for Bee Gees and Lionel Ritchie CDs. The Bee Gees and Lionel Ritchie, like most foreign music, are big in Viet Nam.
* * *
Packing up my apartment in Ha Noi at the end of six months was a bittersweet experience. I had become tired of making a fool of myself on a daily basis while trying to complete such basic tasks as grocery shopping or finding an internet café. The novelty of everyone staring at me as I drove by on my bicycle also became less enjoyable. And I longed for a conversation with friends that did not take place over email and across eleven time zones. The addition of Ha Noi summer heat – so humid it made the wallpaper in my apartment peel – did not add much incentive to stay. I was ready to go home. When our UNDP program finished in August, I booked a ticket for my long, twenty-one flight back to Canada. But this is a natural experience for people working in different cultures from their own. The daily frustrations of culture-clash and language barriers can be trying but they are passing. Those feelings quickly melt away once you get home, allowing you to appreciate the true value of the time you spent there.
In Viet Nam, the sense of optimism and renewal is almost tangible. The country is literally reinventing – remanufacturing – itself every few years. The experience of living inside such a society at this time was invaluable and the memories, one year later, are still fresh. And so is my affection for friendships I formed while I was there. The women who worked in our program, with the exception of a few, will all have been released by now – quietly and unceremoniously deposited outside the gate of the prison like many before them where they wait for a bus to take them to the nearby city. I rode that bus, stifling and crowded in the summer heat, every week coming back to Ha Noi which is a unique experience in itself. Some former inmates are greeted by friends and the hesitant smiles of family and some are stoic and simply stare out the window. They are like the country itself, with many bad memories behind and so much turbulent development left ahead. They have confidence in the tide of progress they have been swept up in and yet fear their inability to properly control the course it will take them on. But like Viet Nam as whole, I think most of those women seem sure they are at least heading in a direction better from where they came.
Anthony Navaneelan is a Canadian of Sri Lankan heritage who worked in Viet Nam from February to August 2006. He is currently studying for his law degree at the University of Toronto.