“Những điều bạn chưa biết về trai Tây – Introduction, part the second
I know I’ve just said some wildly positive things about relationships between Western boys and Vietnamese girls.
Contrary to what you may have been thinking when reading Chapter 1 however, this book is NOT an attempt to sell you on the idea of going out with a Westerner.
I just sang the praises of sophisticated Western boys. Who I said would be perfect for sophisticated Vietnamese girls to meet, get to know, possibly even marry. The bad news is that sophisticated Western boys make up a minority of the male population in Western countries. And they make up an even smaller minority of backpackers and expats living in Vietnam.
Here’s the bad news condensed into some simple figures (which I made up off the top of my head after 5 years hanging out with Westerners in Vietnam, not by doing serious research).
The reason roughly 30% of Western men come to South-East Asia is because it’s a part of the world they’re genuinely curious about or because they got offered a job here or because they’re genuinely in despair about the way life is lived nowadays in Western countries – just maybe because they’re confused about the way men and women relate to each other nowadays back in the West.
The other 70% are drawn by the lure of cheap hotels and cheap sex, cheap booze and cheap weed. Once they get here they find they also like the cheap, sometimes weird-tasting food. And above all they find they just LOVE having teams of small, obliging people running around after them. They revel in the pleasure of being treated, on the basis of little more than skin-colour and an ability to speak English (and a vague smell of money), like SOMEONE WHO’S MADE IT.
In other words, 70% of Western men who come to South-East Asia are here FOR FUN and because they get treated by Vietnamese people like they’re special.
Let’s be clear from the start. This book, as well as trying to explain to Vietnamese girls how to meet, talk to and generally understand the sophisticated, suitable Western boys (roughly 30%), has some pretty clear advice about the other boys I’ve just mentioned – let’s call them the 70%.
The advice is this. Learn to recognise the 70%. And avoid them like the plague.
This advice may seem easy to follow, but it’s not, for one simple reason. The West often gets seriously IDEALISED in Vietnam. It’s something a lot of Vietnamese people have a host of vague rosy ideas about that are not backed up by knowledge of the West or direct experience with Western people. This in turn often makes Western men seem much more desirable than they really are.
Let me take another leaf out of the book by Joe Ruelle I mentioned in Chapter 1: Vietnam, according to Joe, performs a kind of magic trick on your average Western man. It turns him into what Joe calls “Charisma Man”. That is, it translates all his mediocre, ugly and downright yucky features into secret sources of attraction.
If a Western boy looks poor to Vietnamese eyes – it’s because he’s actually modest (or else because he’s got large amounts of money tied up in real estate back home).
If a Western Boy looks ugly – then he more than makes up for it with a seductive style all of his own. Or rather the ugliness IS some sort of style – just one that Vietnamese girls have never heard of.
If he’s a sloppy dresser – it’s because he knows how to enjoy himself, isn’t too uptight; because he’s way too in touch with his feelings to care about his appearance.
And if he sounds dumb – it’s either because he’s hiding his smarts or because… you’re dumb. If he says something that sounds cretinous, there must be something hidden behind it that Vietnamese girls can’t understand. How COULD they understand given that they haven’t had the benefit of a marvelous Western education?
All right so far?
Take it from a Western boy who has been observing other Western boys in their native environment in the West and in Vietnam for a long time – all that is ABSOLUTELY WRONG.
*
If you need a crash course in getting these magical ideas about Western men out of your head, my advice is: head out to Bùi Viện St in Ho Chi Minh on a Friday or Saturday night. Buy yourself a beer or a bubble tea, sit a little way back from the street and observe the scene. After an hour or two, take a stroll around the block to get a sense of the whole.
Among the foreigners, the first people you might notice are the pairs of Western girls with backpacks, or maybe the older couples looking a bit lost.
The girls can seem both beautiful and strange. Their various boney, flabby, slender and statuesque bodies hover in the air, half-covered by sarongs and topped by Asia-inspired hairdos. By Vietnamese standards, their long legs and fair hair are glamorous. Their hyperventilated, roast-pink complexions clearly aren’t.
A few of the girls might be in Vietnam with their boyfriends.
But most of the boys, you will notice, are unaccompanied.
Most of the crowd hanging out on Bùi Viện St are in fact boys.
And most of them, it seems, are doing pretty much nothing at all.
Some are drinking heavily, sometimes with big smiles on their faces. Some are regaling each other with backpacker narratives, casually clinking beers.
Most of them though are just LOOKING.
Like most allegedly relaxing stop-overs on the backpacker routes through South East Asia, all there is to do a lot of the time in downtown Ho Chi Minh City is sit around watching other backpackers. Or find something to spend your money on.
The last thing you’ll notice are the Vietnamese locals who provide the things to spend money on: the touts and street vendors trying to interest the crowds in their various goods and services (Vietnam-themed beer holders, Vietnam-themed headbands and Vietnam-themed bread rolls that cost 50K and taste horrible.)
There are two local characters who are a little harder to spot: the Vietnamese girls selling a different kind of product (starting with S and ending -X) and the Vietnamese guys on motorbikes who drive past and swap 500K notes for soft transparent plastic bags of weed.
The girls won’t be making a show of themselves – they’ll be sitting in street-side bars fiddling with their phones sucking on orange juice. The boys on bikes by contrast are fast-moving objects. If you blink, you’ll completely miss what they’re up to.
The Western boys themselves will probably be doing a fair bit of blinking.
That’s because being on Bùi Viện can feel like you’re missing on something that’s a bit hard to define.
If thoughtful tourism means more than booze, sex, smoking grass and talking to the kinds of people you already know from back home, then being on Bùi Viện means missing EVERYTHING about Vietnam.
But, as I say, it’s a place which showcases most of the less attractive Western men who come to Vietnam – so let’s break down what you’re seeing a bit further.
On the backpacker and the wider expat scenes in most Vietnamese cities, there are a variety of regrettable types of Western men that you need to be able to recognise. Recognise and deal with in a romantically appropriate manner.
The first type has his own special name in English, the sexpat – an EXPAT (resident foreigner) whose main goal is, you guessed it, to HAVE SEX.
Let me emphasise: I am NOT talking here about all men who are keenly interested in sex, or the many men who believe that sex is one of the few simple pleasures left in a complicated, often far from happy world. Nor am talking about men who occasionally employ the services of the women who sell sex out of the bars of Bùi Viện.
I’m talking specifically about men who are in South East Asia because they think that in South East Asia they’re on an easy wicket and all they have to do to have sex several times a week with several different girls is to play up their status as tall, rich, white men. To pick out various naive Vietnamese girls with various rosy ideas about Western men. And to bullshit them into cheap one-night stands.
You might’ve heard somewhere on the internet that there are Western guys in Vietnam whose main aim, in coming to Vietnam, is to take advantage of Vietnamese girls in various ways. What you might not know is that they use the internet to openly discuss HOW TO CON VIETNAMESE GIRLS INTO COMING BACK TO THEIR HOTEL ROOMS FOR SEX.
So, just to be clear what the mentality is, let me give you a small sample. Read it carefully and have a think, ladies:
“If you’re from a Western country, you will get laid without having to pay for it if you use Vietnamese Cupid.
It’s perfect for tourists who are coming here on holiday for a few weeks, and want to see what the country has to offer and get a few free girls along the way. You can join up and start messaging Vietnamese girls a few weeks before you arrive, get there [sic] details and set up several dates, and even ask them to be your free tour guide if traveling alone.
If you’re good with words, you can get them to meet at your hotel (for free) and stay the night while you ummm ‘watch a movie’.
It’s also a great place to find yourself local tour guides who will spend the day with you and show you around, then at night…well you know.
On my last 2 week visit, I jumped on the site 2 weeks before landing, set up around 12 dates, only ended up meeting 6 girls and slept with 4 of them. etc etc”
(By the way, just to be clear, this is ONE OF THE MORE POLITE POSTS OUT THERE about how to sleep with Vietnamese girls for free. If you want to read stuff that will make you fell truly sick at heart, trying Googling “free sex” “Vietnam” and one of the nastier words for women in the male vocabulary.)
So that this book doesn’t become any less fun than it needs to be, in the remaining 18 chapters I’m going to mention the bums who write this kind of stuff AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. Actually, this is probably a good point to give you my first major tip: if you’re interested in a relationship with a Western guy based on a degree of mutual respect and understanding and emotional openness, as I imagine some of the 12 girls mentioned in the above shitpost were, then DON’T go back to a Western guy’s hotel room to, ummm, “watch a movie” the first time you meet him.
Don’t show him round town and then at night… well you know… GET COOLLY MISUSED BY A SMOOTH-TALKING MAN-BOY WHO THINKS OF VIETNAM AS A WHOREHOUSE THAT HIS SMARTS GIVE HIM A FREE PASS TO.
Clearly, you need to avoid this type of Western guy like the plague.
*
Let’s move on to type 2: THE POTHEAD. This guy comes in two basic forms. Firstly, the backpacker whose main aim on Bùi Viện or Phố Tây Hạ Tiện is to score pot at a fifth of the price he buys it back home. Secondly, the long-term expat whose main aim in life is to dull the pain of teaching English to rowdy Vietnamese teenagers and who achieves this by scoring weed, going home and straying round on the internet with his headphones on for 6 to 10 hours a day.
Sexpats and potheads are quite different. Sexpats can be perfectly charming, but beyond the surface you’ll quickly detect a NAKED PURPOSE. With a pothead, on the other hand, if you look beyond the erratic lifestyle, you’ll often find a sensitive intelligent core.
The sexpat is the type of guy whose sexual obsessions keep him busy. The pothead is a guy with time and talent that he is patently wasting.
The reason you shouldn’t date a pothead is that his pot habit will rob him of mental and emotional focus. It will turn his social life into a mass of fragments, part giggly, part terrifying. It will prevent him from getting on at work, from cleaning up his flat and from learning even the basics of the Vietnamese language.
Often it will rob him of the energy to even finish his sentences.
The pothead is slightly more difficult to identify than the sexpat, but not that difficult. He’s the type of guy who’s often a bit bleary-eyed, moody, whose conversations are always a bit off-key.
Plus, the second or third time you meet him he will probably invite you to share in his bad habit.
My advice about this character would be – even if he has a core of niceness or charm, again you need to avoid him like the plague.
*
On to type 3: THE EMOTIONAL WRECK.
The third type of Westerner to avoid is the guy who comes with a long list of ex-girlfriends. Or possibly a long list of ex-wives (plus the heavy debts and tense relationships with children that often come with ex-wives).
Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. It isn’t so much Western men with exes you need to watch out for, but Western men who can’t forget about their exes. Men who DON’T WANT TO FORGET THEIR EXES. Men who have come to South East Asia – not to forget the past, but to REMEMBER THE PAST IN A PERVERSELY BEAUTIFUL LOCATION.
Men in short who are still working through what happened with their exes. And who want to talk about it ALL THE FKN TIME.
Put it this way, after a while the talk about exes will get to you. Firstly because it will make having a normal loving relationship with you seem impossible. Second because what will become clear from all the talk about exes is that these men think of themselves as wounded soldiers on the battlefield of love. While in reality they’re more like self-pitying teenagers who need a good kick up the pants.
Let’s just be clear. If you want to date a Western guy, then it’s almost certain that he’s going to have some sort of past. (Unless you want to go out with an 18 year old who’s in South East Asia for his gap year, and even then… he’ll probably have a past!)
The point is – if they have a past that is clearly still going round and round in their heads in the present then – again, avoid them like the plague.
*
Last of all, we have type 4 – let’s call him the manically self-obsessed guy.
This is the Western guy who starts every sentence with the word “I”, who laughs loudly at his own jokes and who on dates never asks you a single question (at least not one that betrays his fundamental ignorance of the people or the language or the culture of the country he is currently living in).
The sort of Western guy for whom life is basically about the fast-paced acquisition of experiences. Whose life in Vietnam is part of the acquisition process: a relatively short interlude in a vaguely cool location that he can wax knowledgeable about in the next vaguely cool country he moves to.
Unlike the emotional wreck, who will tell you about his exes, the manically self-obsessed guy will TELL YOU ABOUT VIETNAM. You, the attractive, intelligent Vietnamese person who has lived all her life in Vietnam, will get to hear about the essence of Vietnam from a fast-talking white guy who, in his short time here, has done a range of things with other fast-talking white guys which to you just sound stupid and dangerous.
That’s right, he climbed Fan-xi-pan with his underpants on his head. He went camping in jungles that were littered with unexploded mines from the War. He drove at 180km/hr in the Central Highlands, where he escaped the traffic police by hiding in a ditch. And when he got back to Sài Gòn, he organised a wild party in a Circle K and really made the Vietnamese guy behind the counter piss his pants.
If you meet a lot of manically self-obsessed Western guys on the expat scene, you’ll fast realise that not all things about Vietnamese men are bad. They may not be moving all that fast, as we saw in chapter 1. But the way their lives revolve around a range of conventional activities and communal obligations has something reassuring about it, at least when compared to the nonsensical ranting of some of the 70%.
That’s right. Like the sexpat, the pothead and the emotional wreck, you have to avoid the nonsensical ranter, together with all his friends, like the plague too.
*
Beyond the typical Western personality patterns, there are a range of bad attitudes which Western boys either bring to Vietnam or acquire over time once they’re here.
There are the sexpats who think they are God’s gift to women. There are the potheads who think that pot is God’s gift to the universe. There are the smartarse young men who think that the spending money they’ve brought with them is God’s gift to the Vietnamese economy. There are the annoying older men who think the same way about the retirement money they are slowly spending on bargirls, 3 star hotels and Heineken.
Then there are a whole lot of Western men (and a few Western women) who think that the English language, or Western work habits or Western-style social lives are God’s gift to Vietnamese modernity, who fail to engage with the Vietnamese language or Vietnamese work habits or Vietnamese social life during their time in Vietnam and who have a terrible habit of thinking Vietnamese people are plain dumb because they don’t automatically understand Western ways.
If you get out there among Westerners in Vietnam, you will meet plenty of men who in their first year learn to say “trời ơi” with authentic passion – and who can’t say anything else.
Men who think they know all about Vietnamese culture because they’ve been to Hội An and a few weddings.
Men who don’t have the wherewithal to meet and talk to Vietnamese people (apart from the ones who work with them or service their needs) and who live in self-enclosed expat bubbles, desperately trying to recreate Western levels of creature comfort.
They may not all belong to the 70%. They may in fact be perfectly nice people. But that’s not the point. In spite of being nice, they are probably not going to be suitable friends, boyfriends or husbands. Because their basic attitude to Vietnam is patronising. And because they’re unlikely to bother trying to engage with the reality of who you are and where you come from: the Vietnamese reality.
The moral of the story? If you detect any traces of the attitudes I’ve just mentioned, then… well, you don’t have to avoid their holders like the plague, but at least think twice about whether you want make friends with them or date them.
Instead of getting into a relationship with a member of the 70%, in the end it might be simpler to get into a relationship with a nice Vietnamese boy. Who may not be running very fast, but whose language you speak perfectly. And whose range of sloppy habits you already know like the back of your hand.
*
30 years ago in Vietnam it was considered shameful to be in a relationship with a Westerner. And it’s a sign of how far Vietnam has moved beyond its past that relationships with Westerners are now considered – not just attractive but downright fashionable.
With the number of Western boys coming to Vietnam at record levels, it’s certainly much easier to find a Westerner to get into a relationship with than it was in the past.
But unfortunately a lot of Vietnamese women are still pretty clueless about what Westerners are like: they’re unaware both of the positive possibilities, as well as the common limitations, of cross-cultural relationships with Western men. They’re not helped by Western pop culture and its idealised picture of the Western gentlemen. Nor are they helped by other Vietnamese girls who have dated 1.5 Western guys and who gush on their Vlogs about how beautiful Eurasian babies are with their little long noses and their little round butts.
The purpose of this book is to help you to junk all the cliche’s about Western men that you might’ve picked up online or gleaned from Western pop culture.
More positively, the purpose of the book is to help you to understand the psychology of Western men and thus enable you – not just to avoid the many bums out there, but to meet and have good conversations with the sophisticated few: to get to know them and to be attractive to them if you want to be.
The positive point of the book is to recognise the differences between your way of seeing the world and Western guys’ ways, to recognise which differences matter, which differences don’t, which can be overcome, which have to be carefully worked around or just left to rest – which can be beautiful and interesting and which can cause large-scale explosions in relationships.
Yes, there will be a couple of chapters in the book about Western men’s ideas of love and romance and how they differ from standard Vietnamese thinking.
I’m not going to just talk though about what you might fail to see when you’re looking across at a Western boy on a date though. I’m also going to try to show you what Western boys see when they’re in Vietnam: how they see your world and how that’s fundamentally different from the way you see it.
Who knows, if things go well, this book might just help you get into a stable, happy-making, long-term relationship with one of them which results, in the long-term, in beautiful, bilingual Eurasian babies with dual passports.
Babies not just with long noses and attractive round bottoms, but with views of the world which reflect the equal but different sophistication of their mummies and daddies.
That’s the hope anyway. The rest is up to you.
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