Each language is a unique vision of the world. You have no idea what I’m talking about. You’re not supposed to. I’m not speaking your language.
Eternally young, or so they think, sexpats frequent hostess bars, massage parlors and whore houses, slur dumbed down phrases to jaded liars, swap jivey smiles and have minimal interactions with those who don’t lick dicks for a living, so they can spend years in a foreign society without learning shit about it.
Traveling through any country, you can generally get away with speaking English, even badly, for the locals will deem their own bad English as a failing. Unjustly, English has become an international standard. Worse, native speakers of English can too easily lapse into the farcical illusion that any foreigner’s retarded English is a sign of his native stupidity.
A virus, English infects alien societies to corrode their integrity, dignity and virility. Due to English, foreign genitals shrivel and even disappear. Just search on YouTube to witness innumerable examples of this, in real time even. A Pashtun mom sobs as her son’s dick falls right off as soon as he utters, “Hello, my name is Andam. How do you do?”
On Ba Cu Street, more than half of the shop signs are contaminated by English, often bad. There’s “P.O.N.—PEOPLE OF NOW,” “MECIA-FASHION OF FUTURE,” “Doctor Teeth Dental Clinic, etc. Lamell's Pet Shop has a poster of a white couple with two toddlers, just sitting on a bed and grinning. Despite its name, it’s a Vietnamese chain selling cutesy clothing, bedding, backpacks and masks for kids.
Just like English, whiteness is ultra-cool and implies a higher quality, if not transition to a better life. Though few items sold in Vietnam, or the USA, for that matter, are made in the USA, English reassures buyers these made in China, Vietnam or India merchandises are good enough for white people.
On Lê Lai, there’s a hair and nail salon called Beautifur! On Trương Công Định, there’s Fuku Café, and though inscrutable is no longer kosher when it comes to Orientals, it may apply here, perfectly. Since Fu Yu or Phu Yu means nothing in Vietnamese, and there isn’t even an F in the Vietnamese alphabet, Fuku is clearly foreign-inspired, as in Fuk U, perhaps, but why? In any case, patrons are responding in kind, for out of 50 times or so I’ve walked by there, I’ve seen no more than half a dozen customers. Fuku too!
On Sô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh, there's a drinking joint, “wèo wéo weo,” which is a comic Vietnamese spelling of the English “well, well, well.” Nice joke.
Listen, I’m no purist. Every language has been infiltrated, thickened, expanded and enriched by loan words, many quite charming, transplanted. The Vietnamese for waiter is “bồi bàn,” with “bồi” derived from “boy,” as in garçon for waiter in French. The colloquial “ghệ” is derived from “girl” and means girl, girlfriend or the similarly flippant “chick” in English.
In the end, though, each language contains a slew of words that can’t be translated cleanly, if at all, because, again, each language is a unique vision of the world.
Walking by Vung Tau’s wet market, I noticed a missing person flyer. He’s 31-years-old, without most front teeth and mute. He wears a baby blue shirt, “ATILENTIC,” with “Happy” in cursive just visible.
What’s really odd is his name, Cu. Meaning literally “penis,” it’s a familial term of endearment for little boys. No grown man should be called this in public, which means Cu didn’t get around much, so how can he be missing, or end up in Vung Tau, 60 miles from home?! Unable to tell stories, joke and banter, Cu clearly looks retarded, but dumb also means mute for a reason. Since he’s least likely to be kidnapped, this sad man probably just ran away. I hope you’re OK, Cu.
Moving away from calling their little boys Cu, many Vietnamese parents now give them English nicknames. I know a kid in Saigon called Pepsi, and another, Cô Ca, which is Vietnamese for Coke.
Just now, Jimmy McGee walked by. Fifty-one-years-old, bald and stocky, Jim shows up at Café Ca Dao maybe three times a week. Usually with a headphone on, he’s trying hard to learn Vietnamese. I suggested he pronounce each word with his entire body. Like, really speak it.
Born in Glasgow, Jim spent a decade in Brighton. There, he started Poetry Brothel, an event where each poet is paired with a listener then left in a room for ten minutes. At the end, said listener can tip, or strangle, perhaps, the poet.
Before Vietnam, Jim never spent more than two weeks in a foreign country. Jim’s been here seven years.
“Have you been back to the UK since, Jim?”
“No, I’m afraid what I might see. Vietnam changes and modernizes year-by-year, not always in a good way… The UK is going in the other direction, and seems to always be getting worse.”
I’d say that’s true of the entire American sphere. The tighter the American grip, the more degraded, insane and deracinated a population.
Jim admits to knowing less than five words of Gaelic, “I don’t even know how to say hello.”
“Man, that’s bad.”
“You could get your head chopped off for speaking Gaelic.”
Fumbling through a language usually takes decades. Seeing “cá chiên” [“fried fish balls”], Jim thought chiên was derived from the French chien, for dogs. Overhearing someone ask for “thịt nguội” [“cold cuts”], Jim assumed it was “thịt người” [“human flesh”]. “My God, I thought. I’m up for anything, but human flesh?!”
Nothing Jim eats in Vietnam can be as alarming as deep-fried Mars bar or battered pizza. It’s pizza crunch for supper. You’ve got to love them Scots. Robert Burns:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.”
Chien et al. What the Scots no longer hae is their own language in circulation, and that’s a grand tragedy.
During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong had a slogan, "Chống Mỹ, Cứu Nước," meaning "Fight America, Save the Country." It's time for a new movement, "Chống Tiếng Mỹ, Cứu Nước." Fight America's language, save your country.
Jun 28, 2022·edited Jun 28, 2022Liked by Linh Dinh
I learned Danish and found words with no translation, such as Fuske, which sort of means the personal projects one might do via one's workplace, but can also mean fiddling around with stuff, and other new windows onto the world. I have learned a bit of German, and Arabic too and especially with the Arabic new ways of seeing the world come with almost every word.
Maybe we should revive Latin as a universal language. I’ve read that English is a bastardised version of Latin. By the way, what happened to Esperanto?
Here in South Africa my language, Afrikaans, is overgrown with English weeds like “venue”, “amazing”, “cool” and “awesome”. It probably won’t be long before there will be unaborted children with names like Fuck and Shit.
I’m so tired of the f-word that I’ve taken to “schijtvogel”, Dutch for a bird emptying his alimentary canal.
Thanks for your wonderful writings! But for English I wouldn’t have been able to read and understand them. Always the paradox and duality, see?
Tot siens van ‘n sonnige en moorddadige Suid-Afrika!
I stumbled into a Youtube algorithm where I get recommended all these Philippines expat videos (and Thailand too). It is gross and disgusting, but I can't look away, because it is deeply human and humbling. Those old farts, all white and English-speakers, started a new trend where they interview each other's stories. All the clichés are there: fat ugly ex-postal workers with horribly ugly Philippine girlfriend with the bodies of teenagers, ex-marines and now ex-convicts who ran from the law, con artists and sex addicts... so funny. So, I would call that 'expat literature'. Might be a category on Amazon some day, who knows. 😅🇺🇸
Linh, besides the interloping English words has Vietnamese been dumbed down since the birth of the internet and text messaging?
When I still lived in the US in a big, blue city, I noticed that people, especially the young college students, were increasingly talking like text messages: short, generic statements. Young women were especially wedded to "like" and "awesome."
Louis CK observed that if your hamburger is awesome how do you describe experiencing the Sistine Chapel for the first time?
Listening to these short little text message like conversations, I wondered how stripping the language of anything interesting and truly descriptive would change the culture. All I could see it leading to was a dumbed down populace.
In Thailand, travelling as backpackers, my long since Ex, Danish wife and I saw a T-shirt. "My pigeon flies high, it's vasectomised" and I just thought of that, as I totally got it. Why men's and boys' dicks fall off when they utter the bastardised language of my heritage. I rail against it all the time. With a now former Pakistani wife, I saw it all the time and could not get through to these people, whose language I would have learned with pleasure if I'd had the time. Their feeling of second class or worse existence, simply because they were not white English speaking, and the unearned respect and regard I seem to find everywhere my white English speaking presence is a novelty. I try to tell them there's nothing special about "The West" about Australia, Canada, USA, UK etc. They need to live here for a while before they realise this is true.
They seem to be selling us though in foreign places, even as they are deleting us in our homelands. Everybody should be fighting the American language and culture which is permeating, poisoning everything. If anybody is to blame for the crass selling of white culture, as well as the bastardisation of the English language directly, as well as by accident in foreign places, it is the USA.
It's just propaganda, this is not the promised land and we're neither rich, free or least of all happy and that nor will they be just because they move here. It reinforces the presumption of so many from here, but for me it just makes me cringe. Even in Denmark, white Western and with a rich and far older culture, there were traces of the same envy and pie eyed awe just because I was from Australia. I and a British as well as an American friend I had there would be introduced by our respective partners and their families as "special" because of something that only exists as a Hollywood myth. The richness of the history and culture of South Asia dwarfs our paltry few hundred years of mostly usurped invention and civilisation, yet it is our poverty stricken puppy states which somehow fascinate the people.
Children learn in childhood how to form sounds. If you don't master the phonics then, it is tough in later life. There are a couple of funny incidents from the time of the Vietnam War.
First the background story:
I walk into a Saigon bar. The bar girl sits down next to me and puts her hand on my knee and says "You buy me Saigon tea". Which means, spend five dollars to spend some time with me.
I respond "Sorry, no have money."
She looks at me funny. "Why don't have money?"
"No have payday."
She looks at me very very funny. "Bull Shit. You civilian. No have payday. Have money alla time."
Which provides the setting for another:
Two of us walk into a Saigon bar. The bar girl sits down next to me and put her hand on my knee.
"What your name?"
"Larry Revolver"
"Wary We Wol Wer?"
"Almost right. Larry Revolver.
"Warry We Wolll Werrrr"
<we break out laughing>
<walks away disgusted>
But it happened elsewhere. Here's a contemporary joke from America.
A guy phones a sorority at Sunday afternoon visiting hour.
"I'm looking for Mike Hunt."
Sorority girl on the microphone:
"Ahm lookin' for mah cunt"
<break out laughing>
The Marines at red Beach had a second lieutenant Charles Cox. They enjoyed having him paged by the cute young Vietnamese My Linh.
"May I speak to Second Lieut. Cox?"
"Suck a lieutenant's cock? Suck a lieutenant's cock?"
The Scots have Scots Gaelic, derived from Irish. Though that's our 'official' first language in Ireland only a minority can speak it. Significant effort is given to keeping the language alive. We have Irish only TV and Radio stations, Irish is still mandatory to learn in school from an early age also. And areas of the country known as Gaeltacht areas are where Irish is still used daily by most of the population. Still, the majority of us only know bits and pieces, it's a shame. The English did a good job in suppressing the language for hundreds of years.
Great article as all Your travel blog entries, Dear Linh Dinh! And if I will ever be asked for a good and funny name for a dog grooming parlor, I will suggest "Beautifur"!
When the page said see the discussion for one wild moment I fantasized that there would be a video of you having a conversation with wee Jimmy McGee. Oh well. Love your columns as always.
"Each language is a unique vision of the world. You have no idea what I’m talking about. You’re not supposed to. I’m not speaking your language."
"A virus, English infects alien societies to corrode their integrity, dignity and virility."
While your observations and musings are, at times, interesting, and your posts are worth reading, your worldview is corrosively un-self-aware.
So, you got a bad deal in the USA. You also got a leg-up on the vast majority of non-Americans around the world, especially those in the 3rd world locations you like to haunt.
The English skills you demonstrate are to your advantage. Yet you seem to be blind to that--seething with hatred and contempt for the language and culture, even as you manifest your skills in the language and culture!
When I trot out my limited Mandarin in Taiwan, it always leaves me feeling like the natives you describe--as though my less-than-perfect skills somehow represent a personal failing.
I think the dawn of understanding occurs when you reach a point at which your skills in the native tongue are adequate, yet not at a level that enables you to express or understand more complex thoughts. (That is where I seem stuck.) At that point, the self-aware may start to feel a humility that dispels that "farcical illusion that any foreigner’s retarded English is a sign of his native stupidity."
Any time someone is tempted to feel this way, he should be asked "How many languages do YOU know?" Even many of the "uneducated" in the native populations around the world, most of whom have to expend most of their personal time and effort just to get by, have managed to achieve at least limited competence in a skill that most "educated" Americans will never have.
I know what you mean about the nicknames. I watched a Taiwanese film the other night, and the main characters had names like Belly Button, Pickle, Peanut, and Gucci (at least in English translation).
I learned Danish and found words with no translation, such as Fuske, which sort of means the personal projects one might do via one's workplace, but can also mean fiddling around with stuff, and other new windows onto the world. I have learned a bit of German, and Arabic too and especially with the Arabic new ways of seeing the world come with almost every word.
Maybe we should revive Latin as a universal language. I’ve read that English is a bastardised version of Latin. By the way, what happened to Esperanto?
Here in South Africa my language, Afrikaans, is overgrown with English weeds like “venue”, “amazing”, “cool” and “awesome”. It probably won’t be long before there will be unaborted children with names like Fuck and Shit.
I’m so tired of the f-word that I’ve taken to “schijtvogel”, Dutch for a bird emptying his alimentary canal.
Thanks for your wonderful writings! But for English I wouldn’t have been able to read and understand them. Always the paradox and duality, see?
Tot siens van ‘n sonnige en moorddadige Suid-Afrika!
I stumbled into a Youtube algorithm where I get recommended all these Philippines expat videos (and Thailand too). It is gross and disgusting, but I can't look away, because it is deeply human and humbling. Those old farts, all white and English-speakers, started a new trend where they interview each other's stories. All the clichés are there: fat ugly ex-postal workers with horribly ugly Philippine girlfriend with the bodies of teenagers, ex-marines and now ex-convicts who ran from the law, con artists and sex addicts... so funny. So, I would call that 'expat literature'. Might be a category on Amazon some day, who knows. 😅🇺🇸
Linh, besides the interloping English words has Vietnamese been dumbed down since the birth of the internet and text messaging?
When I still lived in the US in a big, blue city, I noticed that people, especially the young college students, were increasingly talking like text messages: short, generic statements. Young women were especially wedded to "like" and "awesome."
Louis CK observed that if your hamburger is awesome how do you describe experiencing the Sistine Chapel for the first time?
Listening to these short little text message like conversations, I wondered how stripping the language of anything interesting and truly descriptive would change the culture. All I could see it leading to was a dumbed down populace.
In Thailand, travelling as backpackers, my long since Ex, Danish wife and I saw a T-shirt. "My pigeon flies high, it's vasectomised" and I just thought of that, as I totally got it. Why men's and boys' dicks fall off when they utter the bastardised language of my heritage. I rail against it all the time. With a now former Pakistani wife, I saw it all the time and could not get through to these people, whose language I would have learned with pleasure if I'd had the time. Their feeling of second class or worse existence, simply because they were not white English speaking, and the unearned respect and regard I seem to find everywhere my white English speaking presence is a novelty. I try to tell them there's nothing special about "The West" about Australia, Canada, USA, UK etc. They need to live here for a while before they realise this is true.
They seem to be selling us though in foreign places, even as they are deleting us in our homelands. Everybody should be fighting the American language and culture which is permeating, poisoning everything. If anybody is to blame for the crass selling of white culture, as well as the bastardisation of the English language directly, as well as by accident in foreign places, it is the USA.
It's just propaganda, this is not the promised land and we're neither rich, free or least of all happy and that nor will they be just because they move here. It reinforces the presumption of so many from here, but for me it just makes me cringe. Even in Denmark, white Western and with a rich and far older culture, there were traces of the same envy and pie eyed awe just because I was from Australia. I and a British as well as an American friend I had there would be introduced by our respective partners and their families as "special" because of something that only exists as a Hollywood myth. The richness of the history and culture of South Asia dwarfs our paltry few hundred years of mostly usurped invention and civilisation, yet it is our poverty stricken puppy states which somehow fascinate the people.
Children learn in childhood how to form sounds. If you don't master the phonics then, it is tough in later life. There are a couple of funny incidents from the time of the Vietnam War.
First the background story:
I walk into a Saigon bar. The bar girl sits down next to me and puts her hand on my knee and says "You buy me Saigon tea". Which means, spend five dollars to spend some time with me.
I respond "Sorry, no have money."
She looks at me funny. "Why don't have money?"
"No have payday."
She looks at me very very funny. "Bull Shit. You civilian. No have payday. Have money alla time."
Which provides the setting for another:
Two of us walk into a Saigon bar. The bar girl sits down next to me and put her hand on my knee.
"What your name?"
"Larry Revolver"
"Wary We Wol Wer?"
"Almost right. Larry Revolver.
"Warry We Wolll Werrrr"
<we break out laughing>
<walks away disgusted>
But it happened elsewhere. Here's a contemporary joke from America.
A guy phones a sorority at Sunday afternoon visiting hour.
"I'm looking for Mike Hunt."
Sorority girl on the microphone:
"Ahm lookin' for mah cunt"
<break out laughing>
The Marines at red Beach had a second lieutenant Charles Cox. They enjoyed having him paged by the cute young Vietnamese My Linh.
"May I speak to Second Lieut. Cox?"
"Suck a lieutenant's cock? Suck a lieutenant's cock?"
Such are the foibles of language.
The Scots have Scots Gaelic, derived from Irish. Though that's our 'official' first language in Ireland only a minority can speak it. Significant effort is given to keeping the language alive. We have Irish only TV and Radio stations, Irish is still mandatory to learn in school from an early age also. And areas of the country known as Gaeltacht areas are where Irish is still used daily by most of the population. Still, the majority of us only know bits and pieces, it's a shame. The English did a good job in suppressing the language for hundreds of years.
Great article as all Your travel blog entries, Dear Linh Dinh! And if I will ever be asked for a good and funny name for a dog grooming parlor, I will suggest "Beautifur"!
When the page said see the discussion for one wild moment I fantasized that there would be a video of you having a conversation with wee Jimmy McGee. Oh well. Love your columns as always.
"Each language is a unique vision of the world. You have no idea what I’m talking about. You’re not supposed to. I’m not speaking your language."
"A virus, English infects alien societies to corrode their integrity, dignity and virility."
While your observations and musings are, at times, interesting, and your posts are worth reading, your worldview is corrosively un-self-aware.
So, you got a bad deal in the USA. You also got a leg-up on the vast majority of non-Americans around the world, especially those in the 3rd world locations you like to haunt.
The English skills you demonstrate are to your advantage. Yet you seem to be blind to that--seething with hatred and contempt for the language and culture, even as you manifest your skills in the language and culture!
When I trot out my limited Mandarin in Taiwan, it always leaves me feeling like the natives you describe--as though my less-than-perfect skills somehow represent a personal failing.
I think the dawn of understanding occurs when you reach a point at which your skills in the native tongue are adequate, yet not at a level that enables you to express or understand more complex thoughts. (That is where I seem stuck.) At that point, the self-aware may start to feel a humility that dispels that "farcical illusion that any foreigner’s retarded English is a sign of his native stupidity."
Any time someone is tempted to feel this way, he should be asked "How many languages do YOU know?" Even many of the "uneducated" in the native populations around the world, most of whom have to expend most of their personal time and effort just to get by, have managed to achieve at least limited competence in a skill that most "educated" Americans will never have.
I know what you mean about the nicknames. I watched a Taiwanese film the other night, and the main characters had names like Belly Button, Pickle, Peanut, and Gucci (at least in English translation).
“nicknames. I know a kid in Saigon called Pepsi, and another, Cô Ca, which is Vietnamese for Coke.”
There’s a girl in my area named “pancake”.