Now really, just how vulgar do you think I am? Cum is Vietnamese for rice. Actually, you spell it “com,” but you pronounce it “cum,” and if you say it wrong you’re not getting any.
Robert spends his last night in Vietnam at a hotel in the Tân Bình District of Saigon, close to where I’ve been staying and more convenient to the airport than the downtown hotels are. We find a quirky restaurant in a prettily lit courtyard with water fountains and songbirds in cages masking the sounds of the busy suburban street at the end of the alley. They have a menu in English, though I’m not sure they needed to bother translating the entire thing. I doubt anyone who can’t read Vietnamese has ever ordered any of the items listed under the category of “bull’s penis,” for example, so they probably could have skipped that whole section. “Blood… cooked in mud” is another item not likely to be a big seller with foreigners.
We skip down to the meat categories we recognize like chicken, beef and seafood, where we find plenty of things that sound appetizing. We order a red snapper with orange sauce, an eel and green banana hotpot, a gingered beef appetizer, and rice. At least, we think we ordered rice. We tried to order rice. For some reason we never quite figure out, our desire for rice is the hardest part of the meal to communicate.
If someone says to you, “Everyone in Vietnam speaks English,” I can pretty much guarantee you that that person has not ventured beyond the tourist districts written up in the guide books. It would almost be truthful to say “Everyone in Vietnam speaks some English,” but that’s only because “some” can be as little as a single word, and it’s true that a large number of people here can say and understand “hello.” But that’s not really speaking in my book. They also understand the French word “café,” but whether you get it black, white, instant, drip, sweet, hot or iced is a total crap shoot if you can’t muster up a few qualifiers.
To make things more difficult, Vietnamese aren’t very good at interpreting the feeble attempts of foreigners to speak their language. My guess is that they just aren’t as familiar with the whole concept of foreigners as we are in the West or in any cosmopolitan place. In California, we grow up around people who butcher the English language in every way imaginable. We just call it a thick accent and learn to figure out what the person is trying to say based on context. Vietnam, on the other hand, was a closed country for decades. It hasn’t experienced much in the way of international tourism or trade, so its people, even the tour guides, have had very few opportunities to learn how to communicate with foreigners. So when a Spaniard on our Halong Bay cruise asked if there would be “tools” in our cabins, I figured out pretty easily that he meant “towels.” He’s spending the night on a boat. He brought a really small backpack. He’s probably not that concerned about the location of the ship’s emergency repair kit. He packed as if he were going to a full service hotel and now he wonders if he missed something. “Towel,” I said, emphasizing the “ow.”
“Oh yes,” said the tour guide. “We have towels.”
Even in the most remote locations, however, it is true to say that you can almost always find someone who can speak enough English to get at least a rudimentary version of your message across. It may require a phone call, and you may have to do without details and nuance, but it can be done. Robert needs a room near the place where I’m staying, for example. He walks into a hotel, bag in hand, and approaches the reception desk. “Hello. Do you have a room?” he asks.
But Americans don’t stay at hotels in the suburbs. What could this big man possibly want? The receptionist gets on the phone and calls a friend or cousin who speaks enough English to explain that Robert wants a room in his hotel. God knows why, but that’s what he wants.
OK.
Robert finally has that situation more or less under control and then I walk in and really confuse things. It is useless to try to explain that I will not be staying in Robert’s room with him. I am obviously American. Robert and I obviously know each other. Our taxi has already driven away. It’s not even conceivable that an American tourist would spend the night in a private home in the suburbs – every taxi driver who had taken me to Vong or Van’s house had been confused about what I was doing there. One of them even reported my arrival, which prompted an immediate visit from the police. Vong and I had to spend twenty minutes chatting with the policeman over tea before it was all sorted out. After that I just started walking the last couple of blocks unless it was really dark.
The receptionist at Robert’s hotel doesn’t know what to do with me. He wants to register me, but I am not handing over my passport. Where else could I possibly be going from a hotel in a dark alley in the suburbs in the middle of the night? He is so confused that he stops checking Robert in so finally I just walk away and hope he will forget about me.
You don’t have that kind of problem when you check in to a tourist hotel in District 1, the city center. There it’s easy to order a wake-up call (not automated like in the states, though… someone literally calls your room and says, “It’s time to wake up!”) Tourist waiters speak at least enough English to say the names of the items on their menu, and some know enough to answer questions about the food, like what’s in it and how you’re supposed to eat it. Travel agents can communicate pretty well about your vacation plans. If you want to make sure you’ve booked something properly, District 1 is the place to check. You’ll also end up talking to plenty of tour guides there, and some of them are nearly fluent. If you hang around District 1 long enough you really might start to think that all Vietnamese speak English. But a three dollar cab ride will land you in a totally different world.
Once Robert gets his hotel arrangements squared away, we meet up for dinner. Walking down the alley at 449 Duong Truong Chinh, we pass two little girls who have probably never seen a six foot three man before in their lives. Their eyes get wide and they point at him and giggle… we turn around to watch them as we pass and they put their hands in front of their faces and scream as if they were pretending they’d seen a monster. Poor Robert. He takes it in stride, though, and eventually we find ourselves at the playfully lighted courtyard restaurant on Ap Bac Street with piles of fresh eel and beef stacked up between us. We have everything but the rice.
Robert flags down our waiter. “Could we have some rice, please?” No response. “Rice,” he repeats.
The waiter is frowning at us so I go for the hand signals. I pick up my empty bowl and pretend to scoop something into my mouth with my chopsticks. The waiter looks at our food and motions at us that it is OK to start eating it.
Hmm.
We persist, and he finally brings a menu. We point at the rice section, but there are several kinds listed… fried rice, sticky rice, rice with stuff in it. Robert points at the header. “Com,” he says. “Rice.” It sounds right to me. It looks like we are finally communicating. And that’s when Robert gets a little too ambitious.
“Plain white rice, please.”
He isn’t trying to be difficult. He isn’t trying to confuse things. He just wants to be polite. It’s not polite to bark single words at people. But now the waiter is frowning again. He goes to a group at another table and says something. They all laugh and one of them gets up and comes over to us with an I’ll-try-to-translate-for-you look. “We just want some plain white rice,” I say.
Oh. He dashes off a few syllables to the waiter and gets the look of recognition we’ve been hoping for. We thank him, make small talk for a moment, and then he goes back to his table. All seems well, except that no rice appears. We eat noodles with our hot pot broth. The eel is cut in slippery banana size chunks that are hard to manage with chopsticks so we just consider it flavoring. We eat some kind of sesame cracker with the beef, which is pretty good. But then the red snapper arrives, a beautiful whole fish glistening under a delicious orange sauce that we are dying to dribble over some RICE. Where could it be? We call the ice waitress over to see if she can help.
“We’d like some rice, please,” I say. “Com?”
“Com.” She repeats the syllable with a discouragingly flat look on her face. Oh no, I think… here we go again. How could it possibly be this difficult? We’re in a restaurant. We have heaps of flesh and sauce in front of us. We’re in Asia for god’s sake. What else that sort of sounds like “com” could we possibly want? If we were at a restaurant in Italy and we asked for posta, our cameriere would not scratch his head and wonder if we needed to mail a letter. If we were at a seafood restaurant in Guatemala and we asked for cabrones, our waiter would laugh at us for ordering shitheads but then he would bring us the camarones, shrimp, that we meant to order. But here in Vietnam it’s got to be just right. Not because they’re being picky or difficult. On the contrary, they’re usually trying really hard to understand. It’s just not in their cultural background to make that kind of contextual leap.
And unfortunately, Vietnamese is a really difficult language to learn, even at the most rudimentary level. Vowell tones can be pronounced in six different combinations of low, high, flat, falling, rising and broken. Whatshisname Rhodes, who created the Romanized version in the seventeenth century, didn’t make it easy. You would think if you were going to take the trouble to convert an entire language from Chinese to Latin characters you would at least make it more or less phonetic, but not old Rhodes. He came up with a version that is not phonetic no matter which mother tongue you start from. Dao is pronounced Zao. Zao is also pronounced Zao. Nguyen is pronounced Win. Pho is pronounced pha’a?, as if it was a question.
Even apparently simple words like photocopy, which is written “photocopy” or sometimes “photocoppy,” can be difficult to communicate. At one point in my trip I have one hour to make a copy of my visa extension for Van to take to the police station before I leave to catch a plane at the airport. I use every minute of it walking up and down a busy stretch of Truong Chinh asking where I can make a photocopy. All I get are blank stares. Maybe it’s my accent, I think. I try pronouncing it like a Briton, not mumbling over the “t,” and I have better luck. What I really needed to say was foe-toe-cup-pee. But I don’t figure that out until I find a young woman at the post office who speaks English. She directs me to a copy shop where I run off a single page from my passport and dash back to Van’s house just in time to catch a cab to the airport.
Pronunciation is so challenging that you feel like you could easily try something simple, like “do you have any mosquito repellent?” and find yourself saying something more along the lines of “your mother eats dirty crocodile skin.” If you’re lucky, they just walk away giggling at you. It does not seem to be considered rude to laugh at people here.
The best thing to do when it comes to pronunciation? Avoid it altogether by carrying around a pen and notepad. Of course, I had forgotten mine tonight. And I really want some rice to go with my fish.
I turn around to see if the same man who tried to help us before is still sitting at the other table, but the ice waitress is resourceful. She pulls out a notepad and a pen and hands it to me. I speak the letters as I write them down… “cee, oh, em.”
“Cum!” she says loudly, and suddenly everyone is happy, repeating the familiar word as if to ask why we hadn’t just said that in the first place.
“Oh, cum,” I repeat to Robert. “We’d like some cum, please. Yeah, that sounds sooooo different.”
- - - - -
I’m starting to get cranky. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living out of a suitcase for too long. Or maybe it’s because I’m not used to traveling with another person so intensely. Or maybe I’m starting to miss California.
No, I think it’s the suitcase thing. A week relaxing at the beach on Phu Quoc Island should do the trick. That’s only two days away now… just enough time to say hello to Van and her family and take care of some business in HCMC before getting back on an airplane and heading South. Robert gets on another plane and flies back to California so I am traveling on my own again.
Robert spends his last night in Vietnam at a hotel in the Tân Bình District of Saigon, close to where I’ve been staying and more convenient to the airport than the downtown hotels are. We find a quirky restaurant in a prettily lit courtyard with water fountains and songbirds in cages masking the sounds of the busy suburban street at the end of the alley. They have a menu in English, though I’m not sure they needed to bother translating the entire thing. I doubt anyone who can’t read Vietnamese has ever ordered any of the items listed under the category of “bull’s penis,” for example, so they probably could have skipped that whole section. “Blood… cooked in mud” is another item not likely to be a big seller with foreigners.
We skip down to the meat categories we recognize like chicken, beef and seafood, where we find plenty of things that sound appetizing. We order a red snapper with orange sauce, an eel and green banana hotpot, a gingered beef appetizer, and rice. At least, we think we ordered rice. We tried to order rice. For some reason we never quite figure out, our desire for rice is the hardest part of the meal to communicate.
If someone says to you, “Everyone in Vietnam speaks English,” I can pretty much guarantee you that that person has not ventured beyond the tourist districts written up in the guide books. It would almost be truthful to say “Everyone in Vietnam speaks some English,” but that’s only because “some” can be as little as a single word, and it’s true that a large number of people here can say and understand “hello.” But that’s not really speaking in my book. They also understand the French word “café,” but whether you get it black, white, instant, drip, sweet, hot or iced is a total crap shoot if you can’t muster up a few qualifiers.
To make things more difficult, Vietnamese aren’t very good at interpreting the feeble attempts of foreigners to speak their language. My guess is that they just aren’t as familiar with the whole concept of foreigners as we are in the West or in any cosmopolitan place. In California, we grow up around people who butcher the English language in every way imaginable. We just call it a thick accent and learn to figure out what the person is trying to say based on context. Vietnam, on the other hand, was a closed country for decades. It hasn’t experienced much in the way of international tourism or trade, so its people, even the tour guides, have had very few opportunities to learn how to communicate with foreigners. So when a Spaniard on our Halong Bay cruise asked if there would be “tools” in our cabins, I figured out pretty easily that he meant “towels.” He’s spending the night on a boat. He brought a really small backpack. He’s probably not that concerned about the location of the ship’s emergency repair kit. He packed as if he were going to a full service hotel and now he wonders if he missed something. “Towel,” I said, emphasizing the “ow.”
“Oh yes,” said the tour guide. “We have towels.”
Even in the most remote locations, however, it is true to say that you can almost always find someone who can speak enough English to get at least a rudimentary version of your message across. It may require a phone call, and you may have to do without details and nuance, but it can be done. Robert needs a room near the place where I’m staying, for example. He walks into a hotel, bag in hand, and approaches the reception desk. “Hello. Do you have a room?” he asks.
But Americans don’t stay at hotels in the suburbs. What could this big man possibly want? The receptionist gets on the phone and calls a friend or cousin who speaks enough English to explain that Robert wants a room in his hotel. God knows why, but that’s what he wants.
OK.
Robert finally has that situation more or less under control and then I walk in and really confuse things. It is useless to try to explain that I will not be staying in Robert’s room with him. I am obviously American. Robert and I obviously know each other. Our taxi has already driven away. It’s not even conceivable that an American tourist would spend the night in a private home in the suburbs – every taxi driver who had taken me to Vong or Van’s house had been confused about what I was doing there. One of them even reported my arrival, which prompted an immediate visit from the police. Vong and I had to spend twenty minutes chatting with the policeman over tea before it was all sorted out. After that I just started walking the last couple of blocks unless it was really dark.
The receptionist at Robert’s hotel doesn’t know what to do with me. He wants to register me, but I am not handing over my passport. Where else could I possibly be going from a hotel in a dark alley in the suburbs in the middle of the night? He is so confused that he stops checking Robert in so finally I just walk away and hope he will forget about me.
You don’t have that kind of problem when you check in to a tourist hotel in District 1, the city center. There it’s easy to order a wake-up call (not automated like in the states, though… someone literally calls your room and says, “It’s time to wake up!”) Tourist waiters speak at least enough English to say the names of the items on their menu, and some know enough to answer questions about the food, like what’s in it and how you’re supposed to eat it. Travel agents can communicate pretty well about your vacation plans. If you want to make sure you’ve booked something properly, District 1 is the place to check. You’ll also end up talking to plenty of tour guides there, and some of them are nearly fluent. If you hang around District 1 long enough you really might start to think that all Vietnamese speak English. But a three dollar cab ride will land you in a totally different world.
Once Robert gets his hotel arrangements squared away, we meet up for dinner. Walking down the alley at 449 Duong Truong Chinh, we pass two little girls who have probably never seen a six foot three man before in their lives. Their eyes get wide and they point at him and giggle… we turn around to watch them as we pass and they put their hands in front of their faces and scream as if they were pretending they’d seen a monster. Poor Robert. He takes it in stride, though, and eventually we find ourselves at the playfully lighted courtyard restaurant on Ap Bac Street with piles of fresh eel and beef stacked up between us. We have everything but the rice.
Robert flags down our waiter. “Could we have some rice, please?” No response. “Rice,” he repeats.
The waiter is frowning at us so I go for the hand signals. I pick up my empty bowl and pretend to scoop something into my mouth with my chopsticks. The waiter looks at our food and motions at us that it is OK to start eating it.
Hmm.
We persist, and he finally brings a menu. We point at the rice section, but there are several kinds listed… fried rice, sticky rice, rice with stuff in it. Robert points at the header. “Com,” he says. “Rice.” It sounds right to me. It looks like we are finally communicating. And that’s when Robert gets a little too ambitious.
“Plain white rice, please.”
He isn’t trying to be difficult. He isn’t trying to confuse things. He just wants to be polite. It’s not polite to bark single words at people. But now the waiter is frowning again. He goes to a group at another table and says something. They all laugh and one of them gets up and comes over to us with an I’ll-try-to-translate-for-you look. “We just want some plain white rice,” I say.
Oh. He dashes off a few syllables to the waiter and gets the look of recognition we’ve been hoping for. We thank him, make small talk for a moment, and then he goes back to his table. All seems well, except that no rice appears. We eat noodles with our hot pot broth. The eel is cut in slippery banana size chunks that are hard to manage with chopsticks so we just consider it flavoring. We eat some kind of sesame cracker with the beef, which is pretty good. But then the red snapper arrives, a beautiful whole fish glistening under a delicious orange sauce that we are dying to dribble over some RICE. Where could it be? We call the ice waitress over to see if she can help.
“We’d like some rice, please,” I say. “Com?”
“Com.” She repeats the syllable with a discouragingly flat look on her face. Oh no, I think… here we go again. How could it possibly be this difficult? We’re in a restaurant. We have heaps of flesh and sauce in front of us. We’re in Asia for god’s sake. What else that sort of sounds like “com” could we possibly want? If we were at a restaurant in Italy and we asked for posta, our cameriere would not scratch his head and wonder if we needed to mail a letter. If we were at a seafood restaurant in Guatemala and we asked for cabrones, our waiter would laugh at us for ordering shitheads but then he would bring us the camarones, shrimp, that we meant to order. But here in Vietnam it’s got to be just right. Not because they’re being picky or difficult. On the contrary, they’re usually trying really hard to understand. It’s just not in their cultural background to make that kind of contextual leap.
And unfortunately, Vietnamese is a really difficult language to learn, even at the most rudimentary level. Vowell tones can be pronounced in six different combinations of low, high, flat, falling, rising and broken. Whatshisname Rhodes, who created the Romanized version in the seventeenth century, didn’t make it easy. You would think if you were going to take the trouble to convert an entire language from Chinese to Latin characters you would at least make it more or less phonetic, but not old Rhodes. He came up with a version that is not phonetic no matter which mother tongue you start from. Dao is pronounced Zao. Zao is also pronounced Zao. Nguyen is pronounced Win. Pho is pronounced pha’a?, as if it was a question.
Even apparently simple words like photocopy, which is written “photocopy” or sometimes “photocoppy,” can be difficult to communicate. At one point in my trip I have one hour to make a copy of my visa extension for Van to take to the police station before I leave to catch a plane at the airport. I use every minute of it walking up and down a busy stretch of Truong Chinh asking where I can make a photocopy. All I get are blank stares. Maybe it’s my accent, I think. I try pronouncing it like a Briton, not mumbling over the “t,” and I have better luck. What I really needed to say was foe-toe-cup-pee. But I don’t figure that out until I find a young woman at the post office who speaks English. She directs me to a copy shop where I run off a single page from my passport and dash back to Van’s house just in time to catch a cab to the airport.
Pronunciation is so challenging that you feel like you could easily try something simple, like “do you have any mosquito repellent?” and find yourself saying something more along the lines of “your mother eats dirty crocodile skin.” If you’re lucky, they just walk away giggling at you. It does not seem to be considered rude to laugh at people here.
The best thing to do when it comes to pronunciation? Avoid it altogether by carrying around a pen and notepad. Of course, I had forgotten mine tonight. And I really want some rice to go with my fish.
I turn around to see if the same man who tried to help us before is still sitting at the other table, but the ice waitress is resourceful. She pulls out a notepad and a pen and hands it to me. I speak the letters as I write them down… “cee, oh, em.”
“Cum!” she says loudly, and suddenly everyone is happy, repeating the familiar word as if to ask why we hadn’t just said that in the first place.
“Oh, cum,” I repeat to Robert. “We’d like some cum, please. Yeah, that sounds sooooo different.”
- - - - -
I’m starting to get cranky. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living out of a suitcase for too long. Or maybe it’s because I’m not used to traveling with another person so intensely. Or maybe I’m starting to miss California.
No, I think it’s the suitcase thing. A week relaxing at the beach on Phu Quoc Island should do the trick. That’s only two days away now… just enough time to say hello to Van and her family and take care of some business in HCMC before getting back on an airplane and heading South. Robert gets on another plane and flies back to California so I am traveling on my own again.
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