I walked into an old theater in downtown Portland today, all geared up to see a documentary called “Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived.” The title seemed self-explanatory. The title was a lie.

Now obviously, with a movie like this, you expect to go in and see some sort of robo-CGI ghost president giving directives and saving the world all because he remembered to wear his magic helmet on November 22nd. That sounds kind of awesome, if you’re a history or politics nerd like me. You expect the director to eventually show a theoretical America of the future/present where the currency is candy and the world spontaneously holds hands and sings whenever a baby is born. Vietnam would have been solved by November 23rd.

But when the movie starts, you find yourself watching grainy newsreels with commentary, like you are watching The History Channel. “Okay, cool,” you say, “they’re just going to digitally add him in to the later scenes, like Fred Astaire with that vacuum.” That’s when you realize that each “chapter” of the movie has a ticker at the bottom “1 year to assassination,” “2 months, 7 days to assassination.” This is starting to get a little suspicious. Kennedy is going to survive, right?

Then, without warning, you get a clip of a reporter reading the announcement that President Kennedy was shot dead today. The movie then shows you scenes from LBJ taking charge and fucking up Vietnam, and then it ends. What the fuck?

The whole point of the movie seems to be that this historian believes that if JFK hadn’t been assassinated, he would have prevented the Vietnam war from being the intractable quagmire (read: clusterfuck of pain) that it was. No shit.

They let this guy make a movie? In my version of “Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived,” the first half hour would be set on November 22nd, the day JFK pulled an AK-47 on some weird dude in a book depository. The motorcade would proceed as usual, until, with no warning whatsoever, JFK whips around, gun in hand, and fires a single shot. Crowds scream, Jackie O does that OMG thing from the Zapruder film, but JFK acts like nothing has happened.

Or, if we’re going to make up history, why not go crazy:

The motorcade proceeds as normal, but out of nowhere, in comes reanimated ex-president Teddy Roosevelt–the universe’s biggest bad ass (I would have an especially severe historian describe him this way, so that there would be no dispute by the peons). Roosevelt runs in front of the bullet on the way to the book depository, and doesn’t pause for a second when the shot hits him. Before anyone knows what the fuck is going on, Teddy is on Lee Harvey Oswald, and he’s pissed. Oswald is thrown out of the book depository, only to land on Roosevelt’s fist. (Yes, he ran that fast). Roosevelt then hands the shattered remains over to the police while he flies off to fight crime elsewhere.

Roosevelt would probably also prevent the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, too.

Then, Kennedy would prevent the Vietnam War; not only sign, but write the Civil Rights Act; write a provision for gay marriage into the Constitution; invent a robot that does nothing but fix the ozone layer; balance the budget; tear down the Berlin Wall; and win the Cold War with a five minute speech on manliness.

He’d probably also bang Marilyn Monroe. A lot.

Viet Nam is a quickly changing nation; one employee at the U.S. Consulate told my class that the assessment of the country she was giving us was completely different than the assessment she had given to another group six months earlier. I intend my comments here, then, to be a snapshot of the nation, limited not only to the early months of 2009 but also limited by my experience as a monolingual American student. I intend what I write here to be merely descriptions of my experiences rather than positive or negative judgments (unless explicitly stated).

Read More >>

For the past four months, I have studied issues of development and culture in Viet Nam. I wish to share my observations with The Melon community in a three-part series. The issues included are education, gender, and the government.

The Educational System: A Hot Topic

Everyone agrees the educational system is seriously messed up and needs to be fixed if Viet Nam wants to become a leader in, well, anything in the near future. But giving truth to the phrase “the devil is in the details,” how exactly the problem should be addressed is making the debate arduous and the progress tortured.

Teachers

The first issue here, as everywhere, is low teacher pay. University professors with terminal degrees in their field (usually earned abroad) can expect to make no more than $10,000 a year, while most other professors earn between $3,000 and $4,000. For comparison’s sake, the average annual income in Viet Nam is over $5,000. Teachers at lower levels make less, forcing them to moonlight as tutors.

The ones most forced to find outside income – the youngest, least experienced teachers – also have the greatest workload. In public universities, each department is assigned a certain number of class hours to teach, which are divided up within that department. More experienced professors with more seniority are able to choose a reasonable number of hours to teach, and they also choose their own areas of interest and expertise. However, the younger professors must teach any additional hours left over once the department’s seniors have chosen theirs, which are usually too many to adequately prepare for. They do not necessarily get overtime pay for this. The departments are pressured to have a lot of classes because the demand for them is so high; currently Viet Nam’s higher education system particularly is struggling to meet demand. Every year more students want to go to university, and since the government intentionally keeps education on the cheap side, more students apply than the infrastructure can possibly support. As a result, teachers are flooded with huge classes at every level, distancing them from student outcomes.

In high school, teachers may feel superfluous. Grades in high schools do not necessarily matter for university admissions (though private universities have different admissions standards). Instead, at the end of the year there is a standardized National Examination which high schoolers take. This is the government’s one tool for lowering the number of university applicants. It is extremely difficult and stressful – newspapers report things such as the number of students who faint from the stress of taking them. However, cramming for this test, rather than longer-term learning throughout high school, seems common. Everyone hates the test, but no one knows how to replace it for university admissions. As a socialist state, Viet Nam is loath to deny education to anyone that wants it. In fact, Ho Chi Minh once declared that the two major problems of the country was occupation by the French and illiteracy. There are plans for each city to have its own public university so as to reduce the travel costs of students in the nation.

Even with those stresses, many people may choose to become teachers from a sense of altruism and the prestige being a teacher brings in Viet Nam. There is one major drawback that stops even these people: the societal attitude toward how teachers must conduct themselves. Teachers are thought of as serious and intellectual people. Education students must wear sober clothing – the women wear ao dais, the national clothing, which is hot and restrictive. Moreover teachers cannot act in ways that compromise this image. If they joked too much in class, students would not take them seriously. And if a student saw them drinking in public – well! Combined with low salary, an overwhelmed infrastructure, distance from student outcomes, and no fun in one’s personal life, it is no wonder that Viet Nam struggles with a teacher shortage.

Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi

In about two weeks I will take my first flight across the Pacific and begin a semester abroad in Viet Nam.* I am very new to world traveling – only this past summer did I take my first unchaperoned trip abroad, to the not at all threatening continent of Europe. Culture shock only took vague form when interacting with occasionally rude Poles.

Here are a few things I’m looking forward to and a few things I am nervous about.

Reasons for an anticipated excellent experience:

-The food. With a delicious abundance of regional and ethnic styles, I anticipate regretting no meal. As a coastal country, the seafood will be superb. I’m also a fan of street vendors, so much so that waiting the recommended six weeks until my stomach gets used to local bacteria may be a challenge.

-This year’s Lunar New Year (Tet) celebration occurs in February, when I will be in Da Lat. The celebrations include, of course, specialty food, fireworks, and general revelry. However, this is also a family holiday, and I look forward to getting to know my homestay family as well as the other students in my program in a cozy family dinner.

-The environment. Viet Nam is incredibly diverse, with ocean habitats, tropical forests, mountains, temperate forests, the Red and the Mekong river deltas, and much more. Like most of the rest of the world, many of these areas are threatened by development, but there remains much to see. Viet Nam is a biodiversity hotspot, with several new species discovered last year.

-The people. From what I’ve read thus far Vietnamese culture is relatively friendly and relaxed. It is nearly impossible to have business relationships within the country without first making friends with one’s Vietnamese partners, because of the culture of personal connection. There’s less of a division between personal and professional life than there is here, and I am excited to get to know people.

-Learning about Vietnamese perspectives. Non-Vietnamese writers are anxious to paint the Vietnamese people as totally friendly and open-minded (if socially conservative), with many admirable qualities, and minimal communist tendencies. But these writers are clearly reacting to the negative images of Vietnamese that we in the U.S. gained during the war; the image of them as enemies has not been erased from a lot of peoples’ minds. I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to actual Vietnamese people directly and hear their thoughts on their own country, on mine, on what they care about, on the social trends and developments that are happening right now. On world events. On feminism. On, well, anything. I love learning about why people think the way they do, and I am quite excited to be immersed in a culture I have very little knowledge of.

-Learning about communism. In high school I studied the epic pissing contest that was the Cold War fairly extensively, but I don’t think I learned much about communism, and certainly not communism from a non-Soviet perspective. For one thing, the historians and politicians who wrote about communism clearly believed that to take any position other than a polarized one was equivalent to de-manning themselves. For another, we discussed only the big events, not the minutia of day-to-day existence (except where it “proved” that capitalism is better). Well, my personal identity does not depend upon my unrelenting defense (or attack) of capitalism, so I feel like I will be able to examine Vietnamese communism with a relatively fresh gaze. And what “communism” is now is very different than what “communism” is at any other point in history. I’d like to see what’s going on with that.

-Studying disease prevention. During my program I will write an independent paper on whatever I wish. I have chosen to examine epidemic diseases and the way that healthcare workers educate people in rural communities about prevention. Particularly, I want to compare knowledge and education about HIV/AIDS to another epidemic that has little to do with human sexuality – malaria, say, or Japanese encephalitis.

-Tea. I’m a fan, and in the U.S. it’s just not as ubiquitous as it is in Asian countries. I love that tea is going to be a drink option no matter where I go.

Halong Bay

Things I’m not looking so forward to:

-Struggling with the language. Vietnamese has six tones and is notoriously difficult. My passion as a student does not lie with the study of language, so I anticipate difficulty.

-Talking about sexuality for my research paper. Everything I’ve read so far just advises that I never even bring up sexuality with any Vietnamese person. Yet I must do so in order to evaluate knowledge of HIV/AIDS and its prevention. The cultural barrier + awkwardness about sex + people not trusting a stranger (me) + the language barrier + etc. = extreme potential for failure after it’s way, way too late to fix it.

-The almost certain bout of traveler’s diarrhea I will experience.

-Mild psychotic nightmares from taking the anti-malaria medication. Also the possibility of contracting rabies, worms, or any other gross tropical disease.

-Being regarded as a boorish, loud, uninformed, slutty, rude, insensitive American. In defense of people who may regard me as American and therefore uninformed, it is extremely difficult outside of an academic library to find anything on Viet Nam (not the war). There’s only travel books and war books, and the war books are 100% dominated by the U.S. perspective. Come on, America. We frickin’ doused the country in Napalm and bombed people and set up an embargo until the 1990s and we struggle with homeless PTSD veterans. We seriously can’t stock even one book in public libraries or bookstores from the Vietnamese perspective? In any genre? Come on.

Check out my travel blog for semi-regular updates.

*In Vietnamese, “Viet” and “Nam” are actually two different words. Like Chinese, most of the words are monosyllabic. “Viet” is the primary ethnic group in the nation, while “Nam” means south, which refers to the country’s position as south of China, its occasionally invading and always pushy neighbor. In English the words were pushed together in newspaper headlines by editors who didn’t know/care that the words were separate. This reflects a time when journalistic integrity apparently only applied to people of one’s own culture; should someone nowadays attempt to display such cultural ignorance, that person would rightly be called a dumbass.

photo credits http://flickr.com/photos/andrewhuxtable/