Camp Champions Blog

My good friend Scott Brody noticed a typo in my comparison of Vietnam and China. Certainly, I have more than my share of typos, but this one was fairly relevant to a point I was stressing.

I was comparing the ages of the two populations and saying how much younger Vietnam was versus China. I wrote that the medium age of China was 25.5 years old when in fact China’s median age is 35.5 years old.

In other words, China’s median age is roughly 7.7 greater than Vietnam’s, not 2.3 years younger.

Thanks for the catch Scott!

Steve Sir

Hello everyone, and welcome to the First Annual Vietnam Cultural Oddities Awards.  Texas Monthly has the Bum Steer Awards.  Think of this as the Bum Yak Awards.

During our show, we will recognize the most noteworthy of traditions of the people of this fine country.

We have seen many intriguing oddities, but here are the best of the best.

FUN WITH FOOD

Lassie for Lunch

Since we have already described the dog-eating habits of the Vietnamese people, I feel little need to add additional detail here.  I will never see Fenway the same way again.

Ant It Awful?

Our first homestay here raised ants in a tree next to the house for his salad.  Just what the hostess with the mostess needs to spice up that drab spinach salad!  Careful when you bite them, as these critters bite back.

If you look closely, you will see the ants

Truly Magic Animal

One of my favorite lines from the Simpsons came after daughter Lisa declared that she was becoming a vegetarian.  Homer responded, “You mean you will not eat ham or bacon or pork chops?”

“Dad, those are all the same animals.”

Dripping with sarcasm, “Oh yeah.  There is some wonderful magic animal that provides all that wonderful food!”

Homer did not even come close. The Vietnamese have their ham, bacon and chops.  But wait, there’s more.  You can also get pigs’ feet, snout, ears, organs and tail in addition to the usual items you can get at HEB.

I know this is a repeat, but I could not resist

Soylent Green is People

All I can say about this photo is that I hope and pray that this is the worst health code violation and not a new delicacy!

This is, er, less than appetizing

THE AGELESS ONES

Grooming the Gray

We might dye our hair in the US, but they take a more labor-intensive approach.  Every beauty salon offers “Plucking Gray Hair” as a common service.

What are friends for?

All the Men Want the Terrapin

I already showed the terrible picture of the man extracting blood from a turtle, so it will not be repeated.  I, however, must include this brutal attempt to stimulate virility in these awards.   I just hope these guys discover the pharmaceutical alternative for their issues soon.

“Happy Birthday Dear Everyone”

Vietnam only recently started to celebrate birthdays.  Until recently ( the last 5-6 years) everyone just became one year older on the same day – Tet (their New Year Celebration.  Our guide is 21ish, but does not even know what day she was born.  She knows the year and the month, but “her parents cannot remember the day”.  We were to introduce this tradition in the US; Hallmark Cards, bakeries and party stores would all be gone overnight.   We would have a lot less cake-on-the-face at Camp Champions.

DEALING WITH DEATH or FUN WITH FUNERALS

Cash for Reincarnation

The Vietnamese people believe that the dead must have money to help in the next life, so they leave money at funerals and when visiting family shrines.  But, perhaps not too much money (I guess you do not want to spoil them in the next life).  So what is the offering of choice?  Here are the top three offerings:

1. 100 Dong note (worth half a penny)
2. 200 Dong note (you can do the math)
3. Photocopied $100 bill.  Yes, that would be copied US money have no idea how we went from being the enemy to having Ben Franklin invited to almost every Vietnam funeral.

If You Liked It the First Time . . .

We underachieve in the US.  We only bury people once.  Here, they overachieve.  Soon after death, the body is buried much as they would be in the US.  The family then exhumes the body after 3 years “because it can be unpleasant if you do not wait long enough”.  They then clean the bones with water, then rose water and then herb water, so that the dead will now be clean in the afterlife. The now very tidy remains are reburied in a shorter, second tomb.  As we drive past the rice fields, we often see these second tombs in the middle.

The second burial is twice as nice!

Well, He Liked It When He Was Here

Each home has an altar in the middle of it that honors the ancestors.  Also, most stores also have smaller altars as well.  Each day, they put out water, incense and offerings that the ancestors would appreciate.  The offerings are really worth looking at.  We have seen candy and fruit.  I have seen a Fanta with a straw in it (the straw is an odd, if not awkwardly optimistic, touch).  Some people leave a pack of cigarettes (what if they died of lung cancer?).  Here is the altar from our tailor’s shop.

Tastes Great, Less Filling

Both Chivas and beer?  I guess the ancestors like to have a chaser.  By the way, when we returned 8 days later to pick up our suits, the “333” beer had been upgraded to Heineken, I guess this is an upgrade for Tet.

Driving with Darwin

This award does not initially seem to make sense in the “Dealing with Death” section, but if you spent any time on the roads here, you would agree with its inclusion here.

When we were in Europe, I had a great deal of fun with the Italian drivers.  After spending time in Germany, Austria and Sweden, the Italian approach to “lanes” seemed deeply impaired.  I marveled as they drifted from one lane to another on the highway as if being in a line insulted their freedom of expression.

Yet I realize now that they did seem to respect one lane – the center lane that separates from oncoming traffic.  They rightly determined that they should limit their drifting to those lanes traveling with them.

Not so the Vietnamese.  In our 2 ½ hour drive today, we spent 20% in the right lane, 60% straddling the middle and a full 10% in the incoming lane while it was packed with scooters and bikes.

We now understand that there is a pecking order on the roads.  The determining factor is simple, your place in the pecking order is a function of your maximum momentum.  As a reminder from your high school physics, momentum is a function of mass and speed.  Here is what you would get:

• Walkers
• Bikes
• Scooters
• Motorcycle
• Car
• Van
• Truck
• Bus
• Tank (OK, we never saw a tank, but I am just guessing here).

If you are bigger than the people in front of you, you honk and pass.  If you are bigger than the oncoming traffic, you just go over into their lane and they will get out of the way.

I said “their lane”, but it clearly is not their lane.  It is the big guy’s lane.  We were in a big 15 passenger van, so the lane was our lane.

Steve Sir

As we are halfway through our trip in Vietnam, I find myself wanting to compare it to China.

I am not bothering with a comparison to Laos or Cambodia because 1) we were not there as long, 2) we only visited the most sacred/touristy of their cities and 3) they are still weak economies.

I am not comparing to Thailand because they are simply so different. Perhaps a later blog will detail these differences, but they include the following:

• Thailand never fell to communism
• They deeply embrace the culture of the west, from the good (our freedoms) to the bad (their tolerance for pornography).
• Thai beach resort areas are exactly like those you would see in Hawaii or Cancun.
• The Thais just love their monarch.  I mean really love.  Imagine William and Kate all the time.  That is about right.

I am comparing Vietnam and China because they have so many similarities, but some interesting differences.

Lets start with the similarities.

Both China and Vietnam are communist states of the same flavor.  By this I mean that they have only one political party that is totalitarian when it comes to freedom of the press.  Both had an iconic leader (Mao in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam) whose ubiquitous image stares lovingly from buildings, bills and monuments.

[Note: I blanked on the word “ubiquitous” moments ago and asked the family for the word.  I said it is like “omnipresent”.  Susie suggested a sentence, “In New Zealand, sheep are BLANK.”  Terrill guessed “benevolent”.  I look forward to being aided by loving ewes when we arrive in Auckland.]

Both China and Vietnam have seen impressive economic growth after liberating their economies.  The markets are free even if the people are not.

Both encountered a crippling, population-pruning events in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  In Vietnam, it was the war.   China’s struggle was self-imposed with the scourge of the Cultural Revolution that purged the country of many of its best minds and business people.

The countries share many of the same ethnic minorities.

Both companies eat everything – dog, monkey, organs, slugs, and things unmentionable.

They both have strong Buddhist and Confucian roots.

But I have seen some real differences.

First, Vietnam’s economy has been less successful than China’s.  Or, more precisely, its growth and its upper end have been less successful.  Two decades ago, many of the clothes and toys sold in the US said “Made in China”.  Now, more and more come from Vietnam.  The Chinese workers have come to expect higher wages, so Vietnam has become the ‘communist’ country of choice for reliable, inexpensive, well-trained labor.

I do not yet know why China has passed Vietnam so much.  I suspect it is a combination of several reasons:

1. They have more natural resources
2. The Vietnam war was more crippling than the Cultural Revolution
3. China was ahead going into the 1960’s so they were on a better foundation since then.
4. China has had better leadership.  In the mid-1980s, China’s premier (Deng Xiaoping) led an intellectual revolution that included the acquisition of Hong Kong and the “liberalization” of the Chinese economy.  He essentially mapped the course that China (and later Vietnam) is now on: Communism, just without the communism or socialism part.  In other words, they aggressively embrace the free market even more than Europe and parts of the US.  The only vestiges of “Communism” are the Mao/Ho Chi Minh worship and the one-party system.  They want their economies to grow and to stay in power.  Free-markets coupled with few social freedoms have proven to be a pretty good answer so far.

Another difference is their approach to religion.  When Mao came to power, he did so with Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” firmly in hand.  Like Lenin before him, this included the belief that religion is the “opiate of the people” and should be eliminated.  They both declared their countries atheist and oppressed many people of faith.

Ho Chi Minh, on the other hand, never seemed to make atheism a core principle of Vietnamese communism.   The Single Column Pagoda remained at the complex that he lived in.  I think he understood that Vietnam is a deeply religious (and superstitious) nation and that atheism really did not do much to help or harm Marx’s ideas.  I am guessing that he decided that this was not a battle worth fighting.  [Note: I say this based on what we learned form Hien, our first guide.  I acknowledge that she might be spouting revisionist history.  Perhaps Ho Chi Minh started trying to make atheism work, changed his mind and changed the history books. I, however, doubt this.  I believe any attempt to purge Vietnam of religion would have left scars that she would have been aware of.

China is catching up here.  They do not seem to care as much about religion than the early years.  You cannot rise up against the government or print anti-China magazines, but you can worship using the major faiths.  There is one religious sect that seems to be persecuted, but they seem “out there” in their beliefs.  Somehow, they have really angered the Chinese government.  This is never a good idea.

The biggest difference, however, is the population age and growth.

China did the math on being the most populous country in the world with a) decreasing child mortality, b) increasing longevity and c) improved fertility.  Their answer was to curb fertility and introduce a one-family, one-baby policy.

Vietnam did no such thing.  For most of its history since the war, their view seems to be “if one baby is good, two is better and 4+ is great!!”  3 or 4 years ago, the Vietnam government introduced a 2 baby maximum, but the effect of years without any such policy is clear.

Vietnam’s population was deeply culled form the war.  China purged their intellectuals, but not all their people.

These two differences (loss of lives in Vietnam, loss of babies in China) have made Vietnam a very young country while China is much older.  The median age in China is 35.5 years old, while Vietnam is 27.8 – a staggering difference.   In the cities of China, we saw older citizens practicing Tai Chi and walking about in their Mao jackets and pajamas (a habit that is simultaneously baffling and amusing).  The few children that you saw were almost always in arms – carried by proud parents and beaming grandparents.

In Vietnam, we see children everywhere: infants in adults’ arms, toddlers shadowing their siblings, young children playing and swarms of bikes pedaling to and from school.  The herds of children contrast with a dearth of older people since the war depleted their numbers.

I have no idea what the disparate population policies of these two countries will lead to, but it will be interesting to watch.

The final difference, and perhaps the most important, is their approaches to education.  China has a elaborate system of exams.  As we noted earlier, their schools teach a unified curriculum that is disciplined and rigorous.  They start with callistenics at 8AM and stay in class until 4PM.   We did not see any children that were not in school.

Vietnam schools seem to have a fluid start time.  Some children go in the morning and others in the afternoons.  We saw this approach in Cambodia as well.  We suspect that it is partly because the population explosions in Cambodia and Vietnam might have over-crowded the existing schools.  In order to accommodate all the children, they might have chosen to teach partial days rather than build more schools.  The Vietnamese also seem to see education as optional, especially in the villages.  Free school ends after middle school rather than high school or college in China.

I suspect that as more companies use Vietnamese workers, there will be more value placed on education.  Also, as the nation moves to cities, more children will see classrooms.  Until then, the wealth gap between China and Thailand will surely widen.

I hope this country addresses this issue soon.  They have much going for them, but they need to transform their swarm of children into knowledge workers.

Steve Sir

We are in our last day in Hanoi.  We came back for one day after our northern Vietnam homestays.  Sadly, Hien is not with us.  She has been pulled to escort a 3-day trek.  The tour company had a guide pull out of the trek due to a family emergency.  They were able to secure a substitute for one day, but not all three, so we have the substitute.  The replacement is a lovely woman from the Red Zao ethnic group.  She has taken us to see lacquer-ware and embroidery factories.

Each stitch is individually done by hand - wow

Wiley's face embodies the kids' excitement about embroidery!

Ironically, she also escorted us to have lunch with Hien’s family (grandmother, father, mother and sister).  Another feast, but this time it was with people that we have been hearing about for the last 5 days.

A wonderfully friendly foursome - we felt incredibly welcomed

We missed Hien today.  Last night, we had a tearful goodbye.  We had become so found of her.  We were delighted to realize that she had also become fond of us.  She lingered as we said goodbye.

As we were eating our last meal, we asked her to compare us to other families that she had toured.  She started with somewhat non-committal generalizations like “Americans like to ask questions.”  We told her to give her opinion about us specifically.  After some coaxing, she gave us this assessment.

• Your are not as fat as most Americans
• I like you, so I am honest with you.  Our company does not like us to say, “I do not know”, but you make it OK to say when I do not know.
• You ask more questions than any family I have ever met.
• You are the loudest group any of us has had.
• BUT, I like being with you.

Sounds like a pretty fair summary of our clan!

The Omnivore’s Market

Our new guide (Mayhom) also took us through a local market.  Actually, this detour was not on the agenda, but we asked to go when we drove through it on our way to the handicraft village.

The market lined the street and was utter chaos.  The streets are typically crowded, but are even more so as the nation readies for their Tet celebration.  Tet celebrates the Vietnamese New Year and is unquestionably the biggest celebration of the year.  From what we can gather, it is New Years, Christmas and Thanksgiving wrapped into one, only with fewer parades and football games.

Some of the items were specific to Tet, including “Happy Water” sold in earthenware vases with long straws.

In the foreground, the jug full of happy water with 20+ straws, none of which are for this fellow (at least I hope not)

They also make a special rice cake with pork wrapped in soy, rice and bananas leaves.

Traditional Tet food. They emphasize "plain" to honor the ancestors. That is really unfortunate. I want spicier ancestors (does that sound wrong?)

While we walked, I experimented with one of the lessons we learned from Shawn Achor (Harvard professor who wrote “The Happiness Advantage” who is also a consultant to camp).  He told us that we are equipped with “mirror neurons” that lead us to “feel” what other people are feeling.  They are the reason that we yawn when others yawn.  What he told us is that smiles are contagious.  Even more interesting is the fact that smiles release dopamine that improves our mood.

In summary, if you smile, others smile.  When they smile, they feel better.

This guy wanted to talk with us. When we did not understand, he T-A-L-K-E-D L-O-U-D-E-R and S-L-O-W-E-R, but he kept smiling.

He was just tickled to see smiling foreigners

I spent the day smiling at everyone.  This market does not see Westerners, so we were quite the oddity.  People were once again taking our pictures.  We responded by smiling and giving huge “CC thumbs up” (as demonstrated by Liam and a local boy here).

Some are easier to cheer than others

We engendered hundreds of smiles and laughs.  It was special.

Today, the market was bursting.  Since most people here have no refrigeration, they go to the market daily for food, often more than once.  This is one of the reasons that the food here is so good – everything is completely fresh.

How fresh, you ask?  Let me tell you.  [Note: the following section is an effort to share the very odd sights and sounds that we encountered on our excursion through the market.  Some of it is a bit brutal.  I hope you accept my effort to share the sights and take no offense.  In any event, you might not want to be reading while eating.]

Fruit and herbs were everywhere.

Dragon fruit - perfect for the Year of the Dragon!

Like Central Market

The butchers are “processing” the meat right there on the street.

OK, this is NOT like Central Market

We saw pig heads

She was a little TOO happy to share this photo with Susie

Pig tails

These are a lot longer than I would have guessed.

Miscellaneous entrails.

I will make no effort to identify these parts

Ducks.

AFLAC?

Frogs.

Is that you Kermit?

Fish.

The live ones are 2 feet away and destined for the same fate

Chicken condominiums.

These are stacked on the back of scooters and driven around

Before I share the following photos, I must take you back 5 weeks to Thailand.  As we were driving in a mini-bus as a cute midsize dog ran across the street.  Wiley quipped, “Aww, that is the most adorable meal I have ever seen.”

We chuckled, but did not see anyone in Thailand or Laos or Cambodia eating dog.

Vietnam is a different story.  While driving with Hien, a dog strikingly similar to the one Wiley had spotted ran across the road.  Hien was more terse than Wiley, “Lunch.”  She was also not joking.

We strive to be as non-judgmental as we can be.  I believe it is unfair to impose our eating ethics on people that earn less than $1500/year.  Having said this, eating dog is a hard idea to swallow (sorry for that).  We are the land of Sounder, Old Yellow, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Underdog.  Here, Sounder is sautéed (and you hope that Underdog is not underdone).

Since we adore Hien, we asked her about dog.  Why eat them?

“They do not do much.  Once you have one guard dog, the rest just sleep, eat and poop.  When they are puppies, they play with the children, but as adults, you just need one.”  Also, dogs are everywhere.  I mean everywhere.  Add to all of this the fact that roughly 10% of Vietnam’s dogs carry rabies.

“So you eat it because it is readily available?”

“Yes, but you must understand one more thing – dog tastes good.”

With this mildly disturbing intro (and with apologies to all dog lovers), I share this picture that took us aback.

You might find this hard to believe, but this is the least offensive picture.

I think I’ll have tofu tonight.

Steve Sir

Yesterday, we joined eight other people on a Vietnamese junk (boat) for 2 days and a night in Ha Long Bay.

One couple is in their 60’s, speak only French and seem incapable of smiling.  Of course, if I could understand no one, but was sharing a boat with 3 teens and a 10 year old who all operate at top volume levels, I might not smile a lot either.

Two others are Hien and the French-speaking guide with this couple.

The remaining four passengers are all in their late 20s to early 30s:

• A lovely Vietnamese woman who is “Black Hmong”, one of the ethnic minorities of Vietnam.  In China, her people are called the Miao and are the creators of the most interesting textiles I have ever seen.  Look, when you can get a football-loving Texan to notice and care about textiles, you know that you are doing something unusual.
• A man from Amsterdam who has a ready smile and fun stories.
• A German who speaks very little.  He has an arm that is a complete “sleeve” (tattoos covering the length of it) that is meant, I think, to suggest that he is a rebel.
• An American ex-pat who grew up in California and has been living abroad since she was 20.  She lived in Ireland for 6 months, London for while and Cambodia most recently.

She has led us to a couple of teachable moments.

The first regards the fact that she is sharing a room with and appears to be romantically attached to the German, whom she met 3 days ago.  I was happy that both girls independently noticed this fact and asked Susie about it, giving her a chance to talk about appropriate attachments and selectivity.

The second lesson came while we were asking about her travels.  After she had detailed the places she had lived, Terrill asked if she would ever return to the US.

“I will never live there again.”

I found myself irritated, but I could not initially pinpoint why.  It took me an hour to think about why this bothered me so much.  Sure, I am a fan of the US and do not like people criticizing it recreationally, but this was not the issue.

I was also bugged a tad by her in-and-out Irish accent.  She only she lived there for 6 months over 5 years ago, yet the brogue would emerge suddenly only to disappear moments later, popping in and out like a skiddish woodland creature.   The accent stuck me as an affectation, and not even a particularly good one.

Perhaps my irritation came from her tendency to share expletives even when Virginia was standing next to her.

But none of these were ultimately the primary source of my reaction: it was the negativity implicit in her comment that most irked me.

I struggle with negativity.  Had she said “there are so many places in the world I want to live, I do not think I will have time to return to the States”. I would have deeply admired her.  She was not moving toward new exotic locations, but away from the US.

I must thank her for helping me understand how strongly I prefer positivity to negativity.

When a person says “I hate onions”, that makes me want to tell them why onions are great.  My father, on the other hand, had a gift in this department.  He did not like onions, so he would say the following, “Oh, I wish I like onions.  They sound so crunchy and fun to eat.  I feel like I am missing out.”

When he attended our elementary school plays, he had a wide array of creative sayings to describe the performances.  As anyone that has ever attended a 3^rd grade production can attest, these events are rife with children forgetting lines, wandering off stage and even crying spontaneously.

But Daddy always had a positive spin to things.  His commitment to never lie (so he could not say that the acting was good or the plot riveting) burdened him.  He had to be creative.

“Wow, that sure was something!”

“You did it again!”

“I bet you worked on that for a while, eh?”

“I loved those costumes.”

It took me years to realize the enthusiastic and excitatory way he spun these productions.  Rather than being offended, I appreciated his efforts to find the positive in these subpar productions.

I was talking to Liam about the attractiveness of being positive.  We discussed the difference between “I will never return to the US” vs “I want to travel so many places I doubt I will ever return”.  I said that it is always more appealing to hear about what someone wants to do rather than what they do not.

Unfortunately, he has trouble seeing this as a teenager.  Teens have a culture that is deeply rooted in negativity.  It is generally more “cool” to seem bored or critical than to be effusive and affirming.  This habit stems from a fear of ridicule.  Most children worry that they will be mocked if they say that like something.

“How can you like the Lion King?  That is a kid’s movie?”

“Man, I cannot believe you listen to Selena Gomez.  She is popular with kids that wish they were teens.”

As a result, the safest approach is to be critical and negative.  In this way, they never put themselves out there for criticism.

Given this pervasive teen habit, Liam had trouble grasping my point.  I gave him an example that I hoped would resonate: choosing a movie.  When a group is trying to select a movie to watch, it is more attractive to say “I would love to see a comedy” rather than “I do not want to see a chick flick.”

He responded, “What if I say ‘I am good with anything as long as it is not a chick flick?  I am showing that I am flexible, but I am avoiding the movie I do not want to see.”

“You are missing the point.  The key part of your statement is still about what you do NOT want rather than what you do want.”

“But what if I am truly OK with anything but a certain movie?”

“You can get what you want and still be positive.  Lets say there are 5 movies to chose from and you want to avoid the boy-meets-girl-loses-girl-redeems-himself-wins-girl formula movie.  You could say the following: ‘I would love to see a comedy, or an action movie.  In fact, I think it would be awesome to check out a mystery or the animated movie.  I would be excited to see any of those.

That enables you to be positive and express your preference.  If someone then says ‘What about the Drew Barrymore flick?’ you can say ‘I am much less excited about that one, lets look at the others.”

I am not sure how much he heard me, but it does help that I he is associated negativity with the Californian-turned-Cambodian woman.  Every time that she cursed in front of Virginia (6 by Virginia’s count) or pontificated on the superiority of non-American cultures, negativity becomes less appealing.

OK, now that I myself have pontificated, let me give you a short update on our day.

Ha Long Bay is profoundly gorgeous.  Unfortunately, we did not have great weather, but the mountains remained memorable despite the mist.

The Bay from our junk

These are the same karst mountains that rose from the rice fields

We visited a floating village and kayaked around another.

A village of fishermen

Here is our crew as we concluded our cruise.

Loving the Bay

A return to Hanoi is the next stop on our agenda.

Steve Sir