Why don't the locals hate me

This is a remnant of the War I accidentally captured on a morning run in Hue. I stopped to take a photo of the stylish motor bike rain gear and after I took the photo I saw the other pedestrian walking towards me. What I thought was something around his neck was actually a birth defect. Probably from the Agent Orange dropped during the war which he inherited from his parents.

I’ve been in SE Asia for almost three weeks now, first in Cambodia and now Vietnam. We all know about the sordid past of US involvement in Vietnam, but we also bombed the $hit out of Cambodia in the early 1970s, paving the way for Pol Pot (for more on this see my Killing Fields blog post here: https://blyon18.wixsite.com/brettsbattical/blog/holiday-in-cambodia-pol-pot-it-s-hot-a-crash-course-on-the-khmer-rouge-genocide). For a little bit more on the Vietnam War, check out my Instagram Post from the visit to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City: https://www.instagram.com/p/BhbJK4fgXWH/?taken-by=brettsbattical. I've also just finished reading Frances Fitzgerald's "Fire in the Lake" which I would highly recommend if you have interest in a 400 page non-fiction book about the Vietnam War.

As a result of all this, when I arrived here I fully expected to get an earful from locals about all the terrible things Americans have done. I was OK with this though since I have studied and lived in France and figured if it got to the point where I couldn’t handle it anymore I could always just say I was from Vancouver, BC. I liked Gastown when I visited, or at least the name of the district.

However, in my time here virtually everyone I have met has been genuinely excited that I am from the US. In talking with other people and from my own observations there are a few reasons for this here they are in list form:

1. People are very young here and the memory of the war is fading quickly and not what people think of necessarily when they hear of the US. In Vietnam the average age is 30 and Cambodia it’s 24. In Comparison in the US it’s 37.8. I heard this from an expat living in Saigon as well as several of the guides, homestay hosts, and drivers I talked to with good English.

2. Most people here are thinking about the future at the moment. Both countries, after years of foreign intervention (for Vietnam hundreds of years from China, then France, then Japan, then France again, then the US, for Cambodia it was France, Japan, France, the US, Vietnam) finally have their political independence. In Vietnam, the US was just the last foreign interloper and once they got rid of us the world left them alone. The economies of both countries are growing quickly and people seem excited and proud of this. The war is old news. This I also heard from people I talked to.

3. People see a distinction between the actions of the US Government and its people. In the War Remnants Museum in Saigon there was a very prominent display about the anti war movement in the US. The message of this exhibit was basically that the war was unpopular with Americans too which I think gives us street cred.

4. People do still look up to the US (at least for now). Many people have relatives there and still see the US as a place of economic opportunity. They are curious about it. The guide on my motorbike street food tour in Saigon has applied for a Visa three times to visit her aunt in Seattle. In spite of being repeatedly denied she is going to keep trying. As an aside, she told me that it’s very hard for Vietnamese citizens to travel anywhere further than Thailand because of Visa policies. A cooking class instructor in Saigon said, before she knew where my buddy Douglas and I were from, that she wanted to go to a culinary school in Portland.

5. There are relatively few Americans here compared to pretty much any Western European country. I am also friendly myself and interested in talking to people. Both of these things make me a bit of a novelty. When Douglas and I were in Saigon we were sitting on a park bench escaping the heat and a group of there college students approached us. At first I was nervous, this kind of thing is what I am conditioned to believe will end in a mugging. But they seemed friendly, Douglas and I were bigger than they were, and I can run pretty fast. It turns out they just wanted to practice their English and learn about the US. We talked for about 15 minutes and took the selfie below before saying goodbye.

6. Maybe people actually do hate me but are being polite. Being from the Pacific Northwest I know a little something about passive aggression. I’m also not thrilled when I see people walking along the Portland waterfront carrying box of Voodoo Donuts so I can understand if this is the case.

7. I was traveling for a week with an Asian American. Douglas’ parents came to the US from Hong Kong and many people we saw wanted to know where he was from. This was often a segue into other conversations. It is probably rare to see someone who looks European traveling with someone who looks Asian and people were curious about us.

Selfie Douglas took with the friendly Vietnamese university students we met in Saigon.

Now that I’m traveling by myself again I wonder if people will be less friendly towards me. Overall though, I have been blown away (maybe not the best word choice for this region…) by how curious and receptive people have been to me when they find out I’m American. It’s definitely better than France, which I find particularly ironic because I met a French woman about my age who HATED Vietnam because of how unfriendly the people were to her, and most other places I’ve been. Yes, you see signs of the war and you hear people talk about it but they don’t seem to want to hold a grudge that they want to take out on me personally.