I really love it when I meet a Vietnamese person who has travelled to Australia. I’m eager to hear their opinion of my homeland, and to ask them about their experiences there.
Their perspective provides a unique insight into a country which I thought I already knew everything about. Things which are so commonplace to Australians become noteworthy and novel through the eyes of a foreigner. I find myself in these conversations often saying, “I never saw it that way before!”
One Vietnamese friend told me all about his experience as a student in Australia working as a fruit-picker in the holidays. This work is usually only carried out by travellers as most Australians - including myself - think it’s too physically demanding, and the conditions too tough to be worth the pay. But my Vietnamese friend’s face lit up when he reminisced about his time in the countryside of New South Wales, picking cherries.
Now back in Hanoi, he says he dreams about the orchards and the friends he made there, and that it was one of his greatest Australian experiences.
Listening to him, I realized that his perspective was the completely correct one. He knew better than an Australian how to make the most out of this very Australian experience, maybe precisely because he’s from Vietnam, where a romanticism of rural life runs deep in the culture.
Another Vietnamese friend told me that when studying in Melbourne he tried living with an Australian family, but it was too difficult for him, and he ended up moving out into an apartment of his own.
The difficulty lay in the Australian family’s approach to mealtimes. He described, in very critical terms, how this particular family ate dinner while sitting on sofas and watching television, with their food on their laps. He couldn’t bear this.
This is actually a pretty typical way for many Australian families to eat dinner, but my friend said the Vietnamese preference for eating communally, sitting on the floor, with the family sharing both food and conversation, is a much better way of eating. So he chose to move house instead of adapting to the behaviour of his host country.
Despite being Australian, and knowing a lot more than him about Australian eating habits, I agreed with my friend. Through his eyes I could see just how anti-social this Australian family appeared in comparison to what he was used to in Vietnam. In my opinion, he was right to say that Australians could learn a lot from the Vietnamese model of family mealtimes.
The value of this cultural exchange got me thinking: do the Vietnamese people I come into contact with here similarly gain a new perspective about their own country through my foreigner’s eyes? Whether they agree or disagree with my point of view, do they think I can contribute something to their understanding of their homeland?
The answer, I’m sorry to say, is mostly no. Over and over again in Vietnam I am told “You don’t understand” or “That’s not how it’s done here” or “You don’t know how to do it”.
I am a foreigner, so I won’t ever understand Vietnam like a Vietnamese person, but does that immediately invalidate any contribution I might make? If I do things differently or interpret situations differently to a Vietnamese person, does that make me ignorant, or foolish, or wrong, or simply different? And isn’t it at least interesting to hear a different perspective, even if you don’t agree with it?
Should I have said to my Vietnamese friend who so enjoyed fruit-picking in the countryside, “You don’t understand because you’re not Australian. In Australia nobody likes doing that work. There are much better jobs you would have liked more”? Should I have said to my friend who preferred his own way of eating to the Australian way, “You don’t know how to do it properly. You don’t understand Australian culture so that’s why you thought you didn’t like it. You should learn more about Australia before you make judgments like that”?
How would you feel if all your opinions, preferences and habits were deemed null and void just because you had moved to a new country? Wouldn’t you like to play a more productive role in your new society than a mute child who doesn’t understand what’s going on around them and has no right to speak up?
Living in Vietnam, I have kept an open mind to new values, respected cultural differences, and learned so much from being inquisitive about unfamiliar perspectives and experiences. I have much more to learn, but every time I hear "You don\'t understand!" I think of an unhelpful, closed mind. Isn’t cultural exchange by its very definition supposed to be a two-way street?