Don't the Vietnamese hate Americans? The consummate question I am asked

30 April 2006

Don't the Vietnamese hate Americans? The consummate question I am asked

Posted by Bob Keith at 4/30/2006 1:30 AM 

Categories: Vietnam - the study of

The consumate American centric question
       Once people find out about my study of Vietnam and my visits there, their faces usually scrunch up and the perfect American centric question just involuntarily spills out their mouths.  "Don't the Vietnamese hate us?"  I can only answer that not once while in the southern part of Vietnam (I am going north in August of 2006) did I feel the least bit sense of hatred toward me.          There wasn't much of any sense of animosity of any kind.  In fact both my wife and I noted that we were not even singled out as "American."  We were just looked at as "others" in a group of world visitors that needed to be guided to local commerce and have our economic potential exploited.  We were rarely pegged as Americans unless we brought it up and then only to rather bored acknowledgment.  "Ya what ever - now let me give you a scooter ride and let me show you around town for a couple bucks please. We go now, ok?"
       In regards to the initial question of do they hate us, Americans seem to be annoyed when they find out they are not the most reviled and hated people on earth.  We must be the most of everything apparently.  Yet, in a country we battled in openly for fifteen years (1960 to 1975) and funded the French War for another ten years prior to that (1945 to 1954) (please don't split hairs over the dates) the Vietnamese seem rather over it.  At least if not they are amazing actors.  

Looking past the hate
       Perhaps I did not meet the offended, hateful ones.  Yet, my journeys are journalistic.  I take no packaged tours where all the faces are smiling per marketing necessity.  Rather, I walk the back streets - search the catacombs of neighborhoods in the old parts of the cities.  "Hello, Hello," the children always say as they smile and the adults always smile and nod.    
       Heide and I rented a motor bike and drove out to the coast near Na Trang and visited the fields that harvest sea salt.  A man ran out from his house on the water, surrounded by salt piles, and insisted we drink homemade rice vodka with him.  After we visitors honored his request he was even more happy.  It was an interesting afternoon after that. We were already lost.  And, it is already hard to drive a motor bike in a country of millions of vehicles on unregulated, unpaved streets - now enter in the fact the rice vodka got us more lost.  
       People have suggested to me that Vietnam has a lower life expectancy and the old guard is fading away.  So those that may have vehemently hated America are becoming less visible.  And, after all, it may be easier to overlook hate if one actually wins a war.