INK ARIA

AN AMERICAN SICKNESS AS VIEWED FROM VIETNAM

Renee Gehman

In nine months, I have sought to understand many a mystery of Vietnamese culture, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Now, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, I have again been experiencing culture shock—but this time, the culture that’s left me baffled is that of my own nation.

It was actually months ago I first felt it creeping up on me, when nine-year old host sister Thu Giang confided in me that she was scared to go to America because of the guns and bombs. On another occasion my host mother asked if it was true that people get shot in cities near my home.

I hesitated to respond to questions and comments like these, not wanting Vietnamese people to misperceive my home as an unsafe place, with unsafe, uncivilized people. It’s never felt that way to me, especially since all I’ve seen guns used for at home is hunting and shooting for sport.

Then came the tragedies of Nickel Mines and Virginia Tech. As Vietnamese people approached me with their condolences, they also pressed me for an explanation of trigger-happy America. Why, they wanted to know, after so many school shootings, hasn’t the government changed anything?

Again, I hesitated to respond, but now it was due to embarrassment at what I was just beginning to realize: It is America—not the world—that is having these problems with shootings. I was embarrassed at having presumed that because gun violence is normal in America, it must also be a global problem.

And I was embarrassed at the presumptions I had made about Vietnam, even as I have tried to live here with an open mind. Many of the cultural differences that initially shocked me about Vietnam planted in my subconscious the belief that America, the developed and advanced country, was somehow more "civilized" than this developing country.

In Vietnam, you must boil the water before you drink it, and a lack of sanitation makes it much easier to get sick from the food you eat. In Vietnam on the sidewalks I sometimes see women shampooing their hair, men relieving themselves, or mothers holding up their babies over the curb so they can go to the bathroom in the gutters. In Vietnam, the bathroom facility is often just a "squat toilet"—a hole in the ground—and no toilet paper. And in Vietnam, it’s fine to pick your nose in public or to throw trash on the streets.

But how is gun culture any more civilized than a shampooing-on-the-sidewalks-and-getting-sick-from-unsanitary-food culture? Things like the shooting at Virginia Tech just don’t happen here. There just aren’t gun deaths. People are not killing other people. An Internet search for gun statistics yields nothing for Vietnam, but a search for gun violence in America produces over a million results, several of which say: "Every two years as many people die from gun violence as Americans who died in the Vietnam-American War."

In the case of Virginia Tech, several guests of America were drawn into that statistic. Parthai Lumbantaruon’s family had sold cars and property so that he could go to America from Indonesia to pursue his doctoral degree in civil engineering before returning home to teach.

Daniel Perez Cueva was actively involved in swimming, singing, and dancing in Peru, but he left because he wanted a degree from an American university. Juan Ortiz was a Puerto Rican grad student studying education who had barely been in the U.S. with his new wife for a year. Minal Panchal was another grad student, with hopes of becoming an architect like her father in India.

And Henh Lee, whose story hit me the hardest. His parents, of Chinese ethnicity, had emigrated from Vietnam when Henh Lee was six and none of the family knew English. Years later Henh would give a speech in which he talked about the difficulty of sitting in a classroom and not being able to talk to anyone, about living in America with immigrant parents and how much of a struggle it was to learn the language and the culture. (This speech, which Henh gave when he graduated from high school as salutatorian with a 4.47 GPA, can be found at www.roanoke.com/multimedia/
video/wb/114450)

One way to deal with culture shock is to educate yourself on the culture, as knowledge tends to cultivate understanding. I like to think this is what helped make Henh so successful.

So I’m reading. I’m reading about the grief of the families that has spread throughout the nation. I’m reading about funeral bills that were covered, dinners cooked, and lawns mowed for families of the victims. I’m reading about a search for a solution.

I’m also reading about the violated right to defend ourselves. People are outraged that the students of Virginia Tech were forced to stand by defenseless while their classmates were shot down. To stop school shootings, we must allow guns in the schools, many people are saying.

I’m even reading about how, sometimes, guns are not only a right, but a requirement. In 1982, the town of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a gun ordinance making it mandatory that all heads of a household own a firearm. Since then, an amendment has granted exceptions to convicted felons, conscientious objectors, and those who cannot afford a gun.

The culture shock is still there.

I wonder if something like Kennesaw, Georgia, would be as surprising to the rest of the world as it is to naive me. Or perhaps this gun culture has become so much a part of America that it wouldn’t surprise global citizens at all, because guns are just another one of those things that go with America. Like fast food. Like big cars. Like Christianity.

One danger I’ve realized in this life abroad is that in wanting to understand, we can easily convince ourselves that we do understand when in fact we do not. I’ve been in Vietnam almost a year now, and, aware of this danger as I am, I still have to constantly remind myself that things are not necessarily what they seem to be. That I don’t necessarily "get" this culture just because I live here.

How much harder must it be, then, for us to admit some of the flaws of our own culture. How much harder must it be for America as a nation, a superpower, to admit that, in some ways—in some scary and shocking ways—we have a sickness in our culture that needs attention.

We turn to our government, our psychologists, and our school officials for a reason why and for a solution. What if we turned to other cultures not afflicted by our particular sickness and asked them for advice?

—Renee Gehman, DreamSeeker Magazine assistant editor and columnist , is completing 11 months with MCC’s SALT program in Hanoi, Vietnam, as English Editor for the World Publishing House.