Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Culture shock
What caught my attention when reading "Trip to Hanoi" is how long and difficult it was for the author to adjust to the culture shock of being in Vietnam. She said that "North Vietnam was unreal the first night. But it continued to seem unreal, or at least incomprehensible, for days afterwards." Aside from the vastly different culture she is immersed in, there is another reason why she sees everything as unreal. Because of the Vietnam War and the devastation it has caused to the land through bombings, she sees the Vietnamese carrying on their lives as if the war had not impacted their lives that much. She was expecting a war torn Vietnam whose people would stone her at the very moment of seeing an American. Instead, she was treated the exact opposite. People stared at her in amazement. She ate fine and was sheltered comfortably and became an honored guest at every home she visited. One of the best examples is when her travel guide stops at a burial site of an American pilot. She is told that the locals wanted to give a proper respectful burial for the pilot after the Vietnamese shot him down. Immediately, she wonders why would they do such a thing. Why would you bury someone who dropped a bomb on your people and caused so much damage to your country? She could not comprehend it at all. "What I'd been creating and enduring for the last four years was a Vietnam inside my head, under my skin, in the pit of my stomach. But the Vietnam I'd been thinking about for years was scarcely filled out at all." The unrealness she experienced in Vietnam was the collision of what she thought she was expecting versus the reality of Vietnam.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment