Not “weird,” but “different”: Part II

I had some new thoughts on adapting to a different culture.

I was with my friends Dave and Lauren in Ho Chi Minh City’s Chinatown on Friday, seeing some of the mosques and Chinese pagodas in the area and just generally enjoying the city life. At this point, we’ve learned some basic Vietnamese and are starting to try out some of the local behavior.

Photos— As we’ve learned from our Vietnamese program coordinator Ky, it’s not actually rude here to take pictures of people without asking (Vietnam seems to be, comparatively, a very casual country). Dave is a great photographer and is taking full use of this freedom to take some great shots of people. On the one hand, I understand that he’s not out of line from their standpoint to be snapping away, but I have a hard time breaking with what I feel is acceptable by American standards. I think this is part of a larger problem I’ll have with “doing as the Romans do.”
(Right: One of Dave's photos of a woman on a boat at the floating market in Chau Doc in the Mekong River Delta.)

Litter— Ho Chi Minh City has tremendous amounts of litter in the streets, to the point where it detracts from what would be otherwise beautiful places. I’m fairly repulsed by the normalcy of littering here, even though along major roadways there’s usually a road crew cleaning up. I’ve heard, however, that some Confucian traditions may be playing into how the Vietnamese regard public space. Apparently, in China the concept of public space has arisen only in recent decades, so I’m told [I really need work on finding better citations!]. As a consequence, the public spaces outside homes are treated like something of a no-man’s-land, with less public regard for keeping the streets clean. I’m still stuck, however, on the fact that dirty streets lead to public health issues and less community pride from my American perspective.

Diet — I had thought that I’d be able to just accept eating meat while in Vietnam, but in the last week it’s become more and more difficult to continue doing so because of my reservations about the use of animal products. It doesn’t help that my diet is now more out of my hands as my homestay gets underway! I think I may attempt to go vegetarian by the end of the week, and it may be somewhat feasible with egg and cheese dishes and fresh fruit always close at hand. However, I've had something of a mental block doing so: after so long being a vegan, I see all animal products as being morally equivalent. So, if I'm eating cheese, I feel like there's not really a jump to eating meat as well!
(Right: Fish farm in the Mekong River. We're in sort of a floating structure in the middle of the river.)

All told, I was hoping that while studying abroad I’d be able to adapt to this new culture, but I’m surprised to find myself resisting like this. Our sociology classwork has been helping me with this dilemma tremendously, however. One concept that helps is that of participant observation, which entails “subjecting yourself, your own body, and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation, or their work situation, or their ethnic situation.” So now, instead of feeling like some kind of ethnocentrist for sticking to my cultural norms, now I just feel like a poor sociologist!