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.
Like everywhere else, people are talking less and staring at their phones way too much, so they're being dumbed down rapidly. Even 20 years ago, you'd see novels by Hồ Biểu Chánh, a serious author from the 1930's, being sold in cheap editions at newspaper stands. In the 90's, contemporary fiction writer Nguyễn Huy Thiệp had three stories made into movies, so was known to the public. Now, current writers are pretty much invisible, like everywhere else.
We all know the internet causes poor reading and thinking habits, but its speed and constant shifting also ratchet up anxiety, thus anger, I think. Way too often, we see people become enraged through misreading. Spewing angry cliches, they feel momentarily less impotent and stupid.
P.S. There is a new movie here about song writer Trịnh Công Sơn. His best songs are poetry of the highest order, however, so it's good to see mass interest in this poet. Jimmy McGee has seen this much discussed movie. Yesterday, painter/poet Trịnh Cung was in Vung Tau, so a handful of us spent the day with him. Trịnh Công Sơn dominated our conversation. Trịnh Cung had a poem put to music by Trịnh Công Sơn, and they were very close when both were destitute young artists. In his 80's, Trịnh Cung is a dying breed. I kept badgering Trịnh Cung to write a memoir to depict a lost Saigon he knows so well.
P.P.S. Trịnh Cung's poem, with music by Trịnh Công Sơn, was used in Tran Anh Hung's À la verticale de l'été. The director never asked for Trịnh Cung's permission nor paid him. Not cool at all.
I missed the heyday of writers being taken seriously and their work discussed at least by a few in the USA. However when I was young, Gore Vidal would substitute host the tonight show and appear frequently as a guest. No way that happens now.
Hand in hand with the dumbing down of readers has been the dumbing down of writers. Now the publishing companies are simply another propaganda arm of our Jewish overlords so not much wortg reading there. I imagine Amazon will continue to Crack down on self publishers too so soon only samizdat writing will be available
Another aspect of this simplifying and dumbing down of the thought process that I find concerning has to do with an alzheimer's study in Philadelphia. A convent let a research team study alzheimer's among the nuns. Two key findings:
1. There was no correlation between the amount of placquing on the brain and the outward manifestation of alzheimer's.
2. The only predictor they could find is whether a nun would eventually exhibit alzheimer's was the essay she wrote when she entered the convent. The fewer ideas per sentence the greater the odds she would in old age have outward signs of alzheimer's. The more ideas per sentence, even with a lot of placquing on the brain, she would stay of sound mind
So what does that mean for our texting era? Which is the chicken and which is the egg? What role did reading complex sentences play?
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!
If you don't see the brutal, pure truth in what Dinh says about the degrading effects of the worldwide metastasis of Anglophone memes, that is only because you are fully, irredeemably, congenitally eaten away from the inside out by that very cancer.
For you to suggest that HE is self-unaware [even as you butcher phrase, tellingly] is truly rich...
Thanks, Freebie! Great ad hominem! Totally off the mark, but nice try!
The irony of an American immigrant (Dinh), using the American language to excoriate the effects of the American language on the language of his country of origin is rich beyond belief!
The irony metastasizes, though, when the reality is that Dinh's entire status is based on his work written in America, in the American language!
It's like a mirror looking at itself in a mirror, through a glass darkly, in a funhouse!
Were he a Vietnamese poet, whose work was in Vietnamese, reflecting on the damage done to his native language, the lament would be understandable and commendable, to some extent.
You're reducing everything to the personal. It's not about me, or the US vs. Vietnam, but the larger issues of linguistic hegemony, foolishly injected language as virus and how the integrity of each language needs to be protected and nurtured.
Why do you think I brought up the example of Gaelic? Or the quotation from Robert Burns? In Scots, it's a departure from Gaelic and so close to English, even we can understand it in the 21st century, and Burns is the national poet of Scotland!
In your second response, you have six exclamation marks for seven sentences, so it's not me or anyone else here who's "seething." Chill, my man, and step back a bit to see the larger picture.
No disrespect or animus intended, and I'm certainly not seething. I'm an animated guy and love rhetoric, linguistics, languages, culture, and logic--all reasons that I love to read your posts. Your insights and straightforward narratives of your experiences and observations are valuable and very interesting.
It's just that the irony of your double-barreled critique (of America/American language and of Vietnamese for using the language) is so jarring! You've mastered the American language, and can throw it around with precise impunity. Your Vietnamese compatriots have not--yet they desire the cred that comes with American lingo-tossing. So they do the best they can, imperfectly, innocently, and hilariously. Let them!
When you look again more slowly at these words you wrote, "Yet you seem to be blind to . . . ," do you notice your use of 'seem' here? If it seems that way, don't you literally recognize that you're only talking here about what things look like to you, not at all what you actually observe, certainly not what is reality for all of us? You are literally saying that you're talking about an appearance of things for you . . .
And you're the person who talks about the reflective age, about the person who lacks self-awareness?
Thanks, Polemos, interesting comment. I typed the words very slowly when I wrote them, so no need to look at them slowly. You're welcome to, though!
"Seem" acknowledges that I am not a mind-reader, but only able to use experience, logic, and extensive knowledge of human nature, culture, and behavior to observe and analyze.
I'm acutely aware that observations, assumptions, deductions, and analysis varies widely from person to person, and even within the same person.
Not quite sure what your point is. Hope that helps.
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.
"Linh, besides the interloping English words has Vietnamese been dumbed down since the birth of the internet and text messaging?"
Hi Al,
There's a sign at a Vung Tau restaurant, "don't let TECHNOLOGY DIVIDE us. LET'S TURN OFF THE PHONE and talk to each other LIKE BEFORE."
http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2022/04/dont-let-technology-divide-us-lets-turn.html
Like everywhere else, people are talking less and staring at their phones way too much, so they're being dumbed down rapidly. Even 20 years ago, you'd see novels by Hồ Biểu Chánh, a serious author from the 1930's, being sold in cheap editions at newspaper stands. In the 90's, contemporary fiction writer Nguyễn Huy Thiệp had three stories made into movies, so was known to the public. Now, current writers are pretty much invisible, like everywhere else.
We all know the internet causes poor reading and thinking habits, but its speed and constant shifting also ratchet up anxiety, thus anger, I think. Way too often, we see people become enraged through misreading. Spewing angry cliches, they feel momentarily less impotent and stupid.
Linh
P.S. There is a new movie here about song writer Trịnh Công Sơn. His best songs are poetry of the highest order, however, so it's good to see mass interest in this poet. Jimmy McGee has seen this much discussed movie. Yesterday, painter/poet Trịnh Cung was in Vung Tau, so a handful of us spent the day with him. Trịnh Công Sơn dominated our conversation. Trịnh Cung had a poem put to music by Trịnh Công Sơn, and they were very close when both were destitute young artists. In his 80's, Trịnh Cung is a dying breed. I kept badgering Trịnh Cung to write a memoir to depict a lost Saigon he knows so well.
P.P.S. Trịnh Cung's poem, with music by Trịnh Công Sơn, was used in Tran Anh Hung's À la verticale de l'été. The director never asked for Trịnh Cung's permission nor paid him. Not cool at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSY9z1_iC3c
Linh, the song shows a distinctly French influence as far as the tune and candance go. You better double down barricade the gates.
I missed the heyday of writers being taken seriously and their work discussed at least by a few in the USA. However when I was young, Gore Vidal would substitute host the tonight show and appear frequently as a guest. No way that happens now.
Hand in hand with the dumbing down of readers has been the dumbing down of writers. Now the publishing companies are simply another propaganda arm of our Jewish overlords so not much wortg reading there. I imagine Amazon will continue to Crack down on self publishers too so soon only samizdat writing will be available
Another aspect of this simplifying and dumbing down of the thought process that I find concerning has to do with an alzheimer's study in Philadelphia. A convent let a research team study alzheimer's among the nuns. Two key findings:
1. There was no correlation between the amount of placquing on the brain and the outward manifestation of alzheimer's.
2. The only predictor they could find is whether a nun would eventually exhibit alzheimer's was the essay she wrote when she entered the convent. The fewer ideas per sentence the greater the odds she would in old age have outward signs of alzheimer's. The more ideas per sentence, even with a lot of placquing on the brain, she would stay of sound mind
So what does that mean for our texting era? Which is the chicken and which is the egg? What role did reading complex sentences play?
Hi Al, that's fascinating. Now, we routinely have near zero idea per sentence, only ignorant emoting.
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.
There's amazing richness in any language you learn sitting on your mother's knee.
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"!
I knew a big black lady from South Carolina, Mary Stone, a lusty wench. She pronounced beautiful "beautifer"
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!
If you don't see the brutal, pure truth in what Dinh says about the degrading effects of the worldwide metastasis of Anglophone memes, that is only because you are fully, irredeemably, congenitally eaten away from the inside out by that very cancer.
For you to suggest that HE is self-unaware [even as you butcher phrase, tellingly] is truly rich...
Thanks, Freebie! Great ad hominem! Totally off the mark, but nice try!
The irony of an American immigrant (Dinh), using the American language to excoriate the effects of the American language on the language of his country of origin is rich beyond belief!
The irony metastasizes, though, when the reality is that Dinh's entire status is based on his work written in America, in the American language!
It's like a mirror looking at itself in a mirror, through a glass darkly, in a funhouse!
Were he a Vietnamese poet, whose work was in Vietnamese, reflecting on the damage done to his native language, the lament would be understandable and commendable, to some extent.
Hi Kent Clizbe,
You're reducing everything to the personal. It's not about me, or the US vs. Vietnam, but the larger issues of linguistic hegemony, foolishly injected language as virus and how the integrity of each language needs to be protected and nurtured.
Why do you think I brought up the example of Gaelic? Or the quotation from Robert Burns? In Scots, it's a departure from Gaelic and so close to English, even we can understand it in the 21st century, and Burns is the national poet of Scotland!
In your second response, you have six exclamation marks for seven sentences, so it's not me or anyone else here who's "seething." Chill, my man, and step back a bit to see the larger picture.
Cheers!
Linh
Thanks, Linh.
No disrespect or animus intended, and I'm certainly not seething. I'm an animated guy and love rhetoric, linguistics, languages, culture, and logic--all reasons that I love to read your posts. Your insights and straightforward narratives of your experiences and observations are valuable and very interesting.
It's just that the irony of your double-barreled critique (of America/American language and of Vietnamese for using the language) is so jarring! You've mastered the American language, and can throw it around with precise impunity. Your Vietnamese compatriots have not--yet they desire the cred that comes with American lingo-tossing. So they do the best they can, imperfectly, innocently, and hilariously. Let them!
Chuc may man, va hen gap lai sau.
When you look again more slowly at these words you wrote, "Yet you seem to be blind to . . . ," do you notice your use of 'seem' here? If it seems that way, don't you literally recognize that you're only talking here about what things look like to you, not at all what you actually observe, certainly not what is reality for all of us? You are literally saying that you're talking about an appearance of things for you . . .
And you're the person who talks about the reflective age, about the person who lacks self-awareness?
Get a job!
Thanks, Polemos, interesting comment. I typed the words very slowly when I wrote them, so no need to look at them slowly. You're welcome to, though!
"Seem" acknowledges that I am not a mind-reader, but only able to use experience, logic, and extensive knowledge of human nature, culture, and behavior to observe and analyze.
I'm acutely aware that observations, assumptions, deductions, and analysis varies widely from person to person, and even within the same person.
Not quite sure what your point is. Hope that helps.
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”.