Can I ask you a personal question?
Being as he was dressed in hospital garb, I first assumed the kind gentleman who knocked then game into our room was there on hospital business. Wrong. There must have been some buzz about the American healing in room 513, because he had come in to practice his English. To begin the conversation he asked “Can I ask you a personal question?” None of the questions were particularly personal, so I suppose it was his way of asking if he could impose on my personal space. I didn’t mind a bit.
Most of his questions related to the ease or difficulty of finding work in America, and of getting a visa to come to the US. It is extremely difficult for Vietnamese people to get visas to the US, he explained, and while he would very much like to move to the US and work, he is still unable to. Furthermore, learning English in Vietnam is very difficult for him, as his teachers are all Vietnamese, not native English speakers. His English showed this, as his grammar and vocabulary aptitude were leaps and bounds above his pronunciation accuracy. He had been studying English for many many years.
This guest to our room wasn’t the only English language student in the hospital. The entire staff is in some stage of learning English, and this aspect of the quality of service is the subject of at least four points on the customer satisfaction survey I was given at the end of my stay at FVH. This is interesting as the vast majority of the hospital’s clientele are rich Vietnamese, not English speakers.
Besides the man who tended to me immediately after surgery who was interested in talking politics, we had one other eager language student. Her daughter was working in Washington DC, and she met Laura waiting in line at the hospital coffee shop. She was checked in to the hospital for some sort of nasal surgery. After complimenting Laura for her beauty, she found her way to me while I was online and proceeded to ask every question she could – how long have you been in Vietnam, are you married (the answer to which was “yes” as Laura and I were faking it so she could be with me at the hospital), do you have children, what do you do for a living, etc. This was all well and good except I was trying to work out getting new flights back to Bangkok and quite frustrated at the time. Laura got back up to the floor with the computers and the woman assaulted her with questions too. It got awkward as we were frantically trying to get our flight worked out before our 30 minute internet pass expired.
Nearly everyone we interacted with in Vietnam seemed eager to speak and learn English, much different than Bangkok. For a country that only one generation ago was raped and pillaged by the United States, the Vietnamese people were incredibly warm, welcoming and eager to make us Americans feel at ease.
If I ever do decide to go abroad and teach English, Vietnam will be at the top of my list of possible locations.
