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But I’m really digging the rice paddy hat. Me wearing it is a bit taboo in both cultures. To the west, it looks like I’m being a living stereotype, getting my chinky on. To Viet folks, I come off as a wacko since I am not a market lady. But why do market ladies get all the fun? It is so hot here, everyone tells me to wear a hat to block the sun. I hate wearing hats! It makes my head all hot (especially if it’s already sweltering outside), and my hair all matted. But TA DA! Here comes the rice paddy hat: it does a marvelous job of blocking the sun, while allowing a good amount of ventilation for the head, and it only minimally mats one’s hair. It’s the only hat for me! (Except maybe a fedora, but only if I have matching shoes and zoot suit).
That photo may look effortless but it is the result of years of hard work! Do you know how difficult it is to smile with one’s eyes? Also, try finding the light for your face when you’re wearing a giant broad rimmed cone on your head! I live my life by the WWTD code (What Would Tyra Do). I cannot wait until the ANTM video game comes out. I will do whatever it takes to play that game…and win!
Note how the cloth strap for the hat matches my very loud shirt. When we were doing VIA training in HCMC (Ho Chi Minh City), a bunch of us lady like folk went to get clothes tailored. Some got ao dais, and some (like me) got ao ba bas. I somehow was able to convince Connie that a) it was a fabulous idea to get exactly matching ao ba bas and that b) it would an even more amazingly fabulous idea to get them in the most garish, loud fabric. When we chose this fabric, the cloth vendors thought we were quite strange. But little did they know that strange is just a precursor to awesome:
My favorite part is in the picture, when we’re standing next to each other it’s kind of hard to tell where one person ends and the other begins. It’s like we’re a two headed fashion beast! Connie and I went to the market together once in these outfits, only we didn’t stand next to each other. People were very confused because they would see one of us walk by and then a little later, “Uh? That girl again? Only now she has glasses and is much shorter?”.
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5 minutes ago i saw a spider the size of my hand crawl into my bed. hopefully it’s gone by now. i went through the sheets and flipped the mattress and it seemed like it was gone…..
i am so very sleepy.
addendum (written two hours after the original post):
oh giant spider, why did you have to crawl ON to my bed? if you were on the floor or the wall, we could’ve cohabited amicably. you could do your own thing, and i can do my own. now that i have the knowledge that you trespassed on the most sacred of places in my room, i cannot fall asleep.
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What’s gayer…
This cake I found in Chiang Mai…
or Clay Aiken….
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Last post I talked about how I liked bumping into my students outside of class. Now I have finally taught all four of my classes at least once. Each class has between 30-35 students, so that means I have 120-140 students. That is a lot! Which means I see my students ALL the time! Every time I am out and I see young adults, I’m like “Are they my students?”. The downside of seeing students all the time, everywhere is this: I am pretty awkward, clumsy, neurotic and confused most of the time. Take this and multiply tenfold because I am in a new country, new culture, new town, where I don’t know things work, I don’t know what things are, and I can barely speak the language. I’m just a walking embarrassment. This is fine for the most part when it’s in front of strangers whom I won’t interact with on a regular basis. Making a fool of myself in front of my students, that’s not so fun. However, it’s not like I can turn off my awkwardness. I definitely do not want to be in teacher mode all the time. I need the freedom to be anonymously incompetent several times a week!
It’s especially bad because I have to bicycle everywhere. I haven’t really ridden a bike since I was 10. Traffic here, basically if you can physically do something, you can and will. Going any which way down the street, u-turns in the middle of traffic, blah blah blah. Needless to say I have to do a lot of weaving and dodging. This is even worse when you are riding your bike through the market. There are these narrow alleyways between stalls so you can just drive your motorbike, ride your bike, or walk through the market. On my bike, I clumsily dodge all of the above to avoid a collision. The fact that my legs are so short, so even on the shortest setting I have to be on my tip toes when I stop makes this all the more graceless. On the first day of class, one of my students said with a laugh that she recognized me from riding my bike in the market. Also, the other day Jeff and I were riding our bikes, and riding alongside turns out to be two of my students. Since I was saying hi to them, I wasn’t paying attention and collided with Jeff….in front of my students. They don’t need to see me making an ass of myself! It doesn’t help that the bike I am using, which the University by contract has lent me for the school year, is hella busted. The chain’s always falling off, the kick stand doesn’t really work (I have to pray every time that the bike won’t fall). The other day while Jeff and I were riding home the left pedal just up and fell off the bicycle. I had to run into the middle of the street, dodging traffic, to go retrieve it. Luckily this happened right in front of a bicycle repair shop, and by shop I mean a guy on a street corner next to a sign that says “Bicycle Repair”. It wasn’t so bad. While the guy as fixing the bike, his friends offered Jeff a shot of rice alcohol. Why didn’t he offer me a shot? I’m the one with the bad day! This happened a few days after I had already had my bike and pedals fixed. Aiyaaa.
My first day of teaching was last Monday. I have three sections of the same course, and on that day I taught two of them. After that, I preceded to have a 7-day weekend (yay for holidays and exam-related class cancellations). My first two classes were not….horrible, but by no means were they great. On average, maybe people could understand me half the time. The students were nice, but I think in my head I couldn’t separate them from how unpleasant the teaching experience was. It’s one of those things one can feel guilty about. By no means is this even remotely on the same level, but it kind of reminded me of the accounts I read about post-partum depression. You give birth to this baby, you’re expecting this instant connection, this instinctual love, and when you don’t feel it you feel guilty, like you’re a heartless person. On a vastly, vastly smaller scale that’s how I felt about related to my students. Going into this, I just keep on hearing about how amazing the folks are, the incredible connections you’ll forge, how excited and nice they are, etc. After my classes, I felt kind of bleh. I felt bad that at first I did not heart my students and was definitely, DEFINITELY NOT in love with teaching. Initially I thought the students were nice enough, but not nice enough to warrant warm, fuzzy feelings. There are so many of them, and only one of me.
However, after having gained some distance, I realize maybe they did manage to crack through the frosty fortress of ice that surrounds my all too small heart. A few nights ago I went to a coffee shop with a colleague and some of his friends, and our waiter was one of my students. A bit of a troublemaker at that, but I was happy to see him! My heart might have melted a miniscule amount when he still called me “Cô”, (teacher). Today, I was riding my bike down the road, and suddenly two of my students were riding along side. I felt a bit parental, like “Aw, it’s my kids. They’re so cute”. These encounters make me think that maybe I like these rapscallions after all. We’ll see how long these feelings last once I have to start teaching from the book and give tests.
After a week of doing nothing, I had my second go at teaching today. It went swimmingly, at least compared to my first attempt. I completely changed my lesson plan, and pretty much just copied my postmate Jeff’s lesson plan (we teach the same course). At first I felt bad about copying but not anymore since class went so much better. Teaching in both Vietnam and Thailand, my students are always asking me to sing a song. Today I indulged and sang the Itsy Bitsy Spider (the shorter the song, the more painless for everyone involved), but only if the students sang. One girl did and she was really quite good. I still can’t get over the fact that asking the teacher to sing a song is such a common request.
Exciting discovery: Co Gai Xau Xi aka Vietnamese Ugly Betty.
I tried to watch it. I don’t really understand Vietnamese, and it was mid-episode, mid-season, suffice to say I had no idea what was going on, but hey it’s Ugly Betty, there’s fashion, models, that’s all I every ask for. By Betty, I mean Huyen Dieu. The article I linked says the show will run for 169 episodes, so I guess I’ll have plenty of chances to dive into the series.
It was bound to happen! There are so many versions of Betty La Fea all over the world. That would have been a great proposal for the Watson, to study different productions of Ugly Betty, the cultural and commercial reasons for what changes and what stays the same between the different shows, and the viewer response.
I am living at TVU (Tra Vinh University). They have special housing for foreign teachers on campus. It’s like a studio apartment, but a bit more prison like (an honest description, I’m not complaining). I have a washing machine, air conditioning and cable TV (which works on an off), so it’s a pretty sweet deal. It’s a row of rooms, one each next to each other. Kind of like the first floor of a motel. Anyways, the main switch that controls the cable was in this guy’s room, and for the first few weeks I lived here, he would unknowingly turn the cable off for the entire building. But I think he knows better now, for the cable is now more stable (though it still comes in and out sometimes). I know you’d rather hear exotic descriptions of the markets where I buy my rambutans from, or the golden Khmer temples with tons of trees, than me talking about something as banal as my cable, but hey I’m a media studies major, and TV is important. Though there are quite a few English-language channels, I am starting to get a taste of Vietnamese television. In addition to Co Gai Xau Xi, I try to watch game shows, and I definitely love watching Vietnamese music videos (in moderation, my brain can only handle so much). The other day there was a contest between different dance crews, with such names as “Cute Hunters” and my favorite, the succinct “Boom”. Now that I am beginning to be exposed to Vietnamese pop culture, I feel like I am finally connecting with the country a bit! Maybe in a few months I can write media nerrrrdy papers about what I see! Then I will feel like I’ve really spent significant time here.
Back to the real point of this post: Many of you have probably heard this story already…One or two years ago, back in the States, I was in the airport, going through security, where I was stopped by a guard. She had to tell me something incredibly urgent; that I looked just like Ugly Betty. Not the actress (the attractive American Ferrera), the guard made very clear, but the ugly character herself, Ugly Betty. Afterward when I had already started walking away and had thought the interaction was over, she stopped me to tell me not to tell anyone that I wasn’t the real (in reality fictional) Ugly Betty, so she could tell her friends, since I looked JUST like her. Apparently, frumpiness is able to transcend differences in race. However, since now there is a Vietnamese option, tell me who do I look like more, Betty Suarez or Huyen Dieu? ((This will seem similar to a post I did on my other blog where I demonstrated how I look like a combination of Ugly Betty and Kim Jong-Il))
Dirrrty South. . . . Mekong Style 
