The Logic of the City and Anticipation

When I live somewhere, something I really like to learn about is how the city works. I’m interested in getting some information about the fundamental logic of a place. Part of it comes from a place of curiosity. I’m the type of person whose YouTube recommendation page is mostly Wendover Productions on logistics, Tom Scott videos on weird things in the world, and Drag Race content. The last one isn’t really relevant to this essay, but it is relevant to me as a person.

The other side of learning about how a place works is it just makes life easier there. A classic example of this for me is how, in the US, most things are open M-F but some things are closed on weekends. In Taiwan, however, the library is closed on Monday, something I learned from experience and will never forget. (being excited to go to the library only to find the doors shut is a true sadness.)

This ability to anticipate things really improves my quality of life. I get easily fixated on a plan, and when things don’t go the way I imagine them, I get upset and stuck, unable to do anything else. This issue has gotten a lot better for me, but it really used to ruin my entire day if I showed up at a coffee shop I’d planned on working in and it was closed.

I want to talk a bit about two things here that are sometimes connected and sometimes not. The first is just some general logic about living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The things I’ll talk about are not comprehensive, and they’re drawn purely based on my experience and issues I’ve run into living here. I think a lot of them probably apply to other major cities in Vietnam, but since I haven’t spent extended time anywhere else but here, I don’t want to claim them as being generalizations for the whole country.

The other thing I’m going to talk about is anticipating things, and how I personally find the ability to anticipate a situation helps me be able to control how I react to a situation. Some of that anticipating is related to how people act towards me, but a lot of it is also just about really basic thing like anticipating when things will and won’t be open.

Geography

I’m fascinated with how people talk about where they’re from. Where I grew up, we talk about our town in terms of landmarks and street names. My neighborhood in Mississippi is filled with curved streets and it’s frankly really hard to navigate if you’re not from there. We locate ourselves in relation to major pieces of infrastructure. I grew up near a pool, so that’s where I told people my house was near.

            Xi’an, China, was perhaps one of my favorite places to talk about when I lived there because people talk in terms of cardinal directions. The city center was within the city’s ancient wall, and the city was laid out where north, south, east, and west are very clear. Manhattan feels kind of similar, where you can give out a location with just giving an intersection.

            Ho Chi Minh City is a little harder to talk about because there are many different neighborhoods and they have different ways of being organized. I find this exciting, though. I find myself talking about the city in a few ways. My most common way, I think, is just giving a street name and a number. At this point, I know the names of a lot of major streets. A great thing about the city is that buildings are pretty consistently labeled with an address containing street name/number, ward, and district. I also talk in terms of major landmarks.

Swimming

            One of my first months here in the city, I went to check out a pool near my apartment. I felt prepared. I had a cap, just in case it was required. When I used to swim in Taiwan, a cap was required even for people with short hair.

            I paid for my entrance ticket and walked up to the pool. The woman taking tickets wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t speak Vietnamese at the time, but she gestured to my swimming trunks. Instead of wearing a skin tight suit, I was wearing board shorts. I hadn’t swum seriously in years, so I didn’t have anything else. Things like this used to really really upset me. I had set aside time to go swim, had biked to a pool, and here I was getting turned away for a rule that didn’t make sense to me. At that point, I was determined to swim, so I went ahead and headed downstairs to where I bought my ticket.

            A great thing about Vietnam is that it’s pretty easy to buy stuff for whatever activity you’re doing right where the activity is. There was a lady selling swimsuits at the pool, so I bought one and within five minutes was in the water. That’s still the swimsuit I use today.

            I still don’t know why this pool in particular requires a specific type of swimsuit, and honestly I don’t know if I’ll ever learn why, but at least I learned something new to anticipate at pools here.

            Something at the intersection of this story and the thoughts about geography above is that I love how logical store placement is in this city. Pharmacy crop up around hospitals. When I need art supplies, I just walk near the architecture school until I find a shop I want. Need sports supplies? There’s a whole street near Tao Đàn park selling sports equipment.

At the same time, there’s something I don’t understand about the density of these shops. A few weeks ago I was walking with a friend around District 5 and we wandered into this alley that had at least twenty different shops selling aquarium supplies. I appreciate the convenience, but aren’t they all competing against each other? Must be really convenient for wholesalers to only deliver to one street, though.

An Interlude on Calendars

            I remember this one time I was with some other foreign friends out taking pictures for this social media thing they were doing. I was just kind of along for the ride (and food). They wanted to go to this famous soup place in D4. We drove up, and it was closed. It was the fifteenth day of the month according to the lunar calendar.

            Living here, I’m not really that conscious of what day it is on the lunar calendar, but I am reminded to check it every so often. When I see a bunch of vegetarian places selling more than normal, I always check to see what day it is. If I see more people than normal burning joss paper in my neighborhood, I check it too. It’s not something that affects my life that much, but I do like to know why people are doing things and when.

Coffee Shops

            There are a few things about coffee shops here that I still struggle with. The first is minor. The second makes me genuinely uncomfortable.

            First – The culture of paying as you leave

            So obviously this doesn’t apply to all coffee shops, but some coffee shops have a culture of paying when you leave, not when you order. From my observations, you always pay first at chains like Starbucks or Highlands Coffee. At more local places that aren’t franchises, you typically pay when you’re leaving. There are exceptions to this. And at some places you can either pay when you order or when you’re ready to leave.

            The main issue is that I worry about forgetting to pay. I can’t fully enjoy myself because in the back of my mind I have something to do. I haven’t “paid” for my space in the coffee shop yet, so it feels like a place I can’t settle down in. Of course, there’s another interpretation of this culture where, by the owner trusting you to pay and not rushing the process, they are in fact welcoming you in and making you feel at home. And there’s an added benefit to the owner where you might be more motivated to order more if you hasn’t settled your bill yet.

            This first one is minor because I acknowledge it’s mainly a personal problem, and I’m getting more used to paying later.

            Second – Why is this person standing so close to me and why are they asking me what I want when I haven’t even looked at the menu

            Last week, I went out for coffee with friends at a pretty upscale place in District 1. I walked up to the counter and picked up a menu. The worker then stood next to me and before I had even looked through the menu started asking me “Do you want tea or coffee?”

            My generous interpretation of this is that they are trying to provide good customer service. They want to help me pick something and not make me be stressed out about the number of choices. The issue for me is twofold. First, I do not want someone standing so close to me, especially a stranger. The second thing is that for me, good customer service isn’t in the immediacy of the service. It’s about letting me take the time I need to read through the menu. I don’t actually know what the Vietnamese consumer likes, but I feel uncomfortable every time this happens. It happens at restaurants, too.

            Another similar customer service thing that makes me uncomfortable is the way the workers in shops follow you as you look through them. I will actually leave a shop if this happens, because I just don’t enjoy being followed like that. I can assume they’re doing it because they want to be helpful as quickly as possible. Or they’re trying to prevent theft. Either way, I am not used to it.

            Look, reading through these now, I get that they’re silly, and for some people might feel like nonissues. And they mostly are, but they do cause me discomfort in my daily life.

Xe Ôm

            I’m not in counseling at the moment, but I was doing it for a little over a year here with a local therapist. I started because I was going through some unrequited love I couldn’t handle on my own, but once I’d mostly worked through that, I started working on these small daily discomforts in my life. I appreciated that my therapist was local because he could help explain some cultural things that were happening and help me at least understand a bit better what was going on in the world around me.

            Before going on, I think there’s a legitimate question to think about. If I have to spend so much time and energy working through these small discomforts here in Vietnam, why even live here? It’s something I have thought about before. I think my essay on Why Vietnamese Studies partially answers the question. There’s just so much I’m interested in here that I can’t imagine being anywhere else right now.

            There’s more to it though, too. I don’t think I’ve ever been fully comfortable anywhere I’ve ever lived in my life. In Mississippi, I felt too faggy. In Taiwan and China and here, I stand out because I’m white, and that draws unwanted attention to me. Honestly, everywhere I live I meet so many people that I just don’t like. I can be a bit of a curmudgeon, despite my bubbly personality.

            And in all these places, I’ve also met lovely, amazing, and wonderful people. I also have deep affection for all of these places. I don’t think there’s anywhere in the world perfectly right for me. So, I’m going to continue to live here for now, and I’m going to keep working to understand this place, because through that understanding I find some sense of comfort.

            Back to when I was doing counseling.

            We had this one session I think about often, where all we talked about for the entire hour was xe ôm. I was living in District 1 at the time on Lê Thị Riêng. It’s the street with the famous bánh mì place, and it’s not too far from Bùi Viện, the city’s party street.

I was running four or five times a week at the time. I would get up early and put on my Decathlon running shorts, queue up a podcast or audio book, and run around downtown. I didn’t have a set route, but I usually ended up on Nguyễn Huệ, the walking street with wide sidewalks. In the morning, parts of it are shaded, and it’s usually pretty empty around six or so.

I sometimes got bored with that route, so I would run down through Bùi Viện or along the river. On longer runs, I would cross over into District 4. Since it was such a touristy area, there were almost always xe ôm, motorbike taxi drivers not affiliated with any app or company.

I dripped with sweat running through the streets. I was clearly on a run, clearly had no intention of taking a xe ôm anywhere, but every time I passed within eyesight of a xe ôm, I heard them over the sound of the podcast calling out to me, asking where I was going, trying to get me to take a ride.

For me, their behavior was totally irrational. I was clearly not a potential customer. I also struggle with having any attention on me in public spaces. The big thing, though, was that I didn’t know what to do when they called out to me. I am very conscious about not ignoring people. Maybe this comes from growing up in a small town where when you pass people, you always say hello. (This is a culture I also feel deeply uncomfortable with, but it’s what I was raised to do.)

I felt guilty not acknowledging the motorbike drivers, but I felt annoyed and confused at how irrational the behavior felt. It was a small issue, but I was running multiple times a week, so this was happening frequently. When I was in counseling, I had this list of things to figure out, because I if am to live here a long time, I can’t let the little things build and bother me.

My counselor wasn’t exactly sure why the xe ôm were doing this, but he guessed they probably did this for every single opportunity for business they saw. They didn’t see me as a runner. They saw me as an opportunity. Even if the likelihood I was going to ride, there was still a chance, however small, that I was a chance to make money.

If I enter a space, people will perceive me as more qualified than I am just because I’m white

I’ve already talked about how people will never assume I speak Vietnamese, and how that is kind of reasonable. There’s another assumption I struggle with though, which is that people will assume because I am white that I hold power or expertise in areas that I frankly don’t. I can anticipate this, and I try to be conscious of not taking advantage of this assumption.

The kind of smaller way this happens is if I’m just like standing in line somewhere, sometimes parents will have their kids go up and say hi to me. This happens far less here than it did in China, but it happens enough that I know to expect it. Whenever this happens, my first thought after smiling at the kids (they’re kids, they don’t know better) and then glaring at the parents (they’re adults, they know better), is “Just because I’m white does not mean I’m nice or a good person. I know plenty of English teachers who do things you would not approve of. I am a stranger. Stranger danger!”

This relationship between whiteness and perceived power shows up in other places in my life too. Last week, I was at a conference just as an audience member. I had a feeling the moment I walked in that if I sat with the students, someone was going to approach me and ask if I was a presenter. I thought about dressing down before coming in order to come off as clearly as possible as student, but I also felt weird not wearing something somewhat professional. I sat in the student area, towards the back because, let’s be honest, most conferences are incredibly boring, and I had all intentions of sitting in the back and doing work.

As I was sitting there, typing away at my little essays, a conference organizer called to me from the aisle and asked if I was with the conference and not an audience member. I said that I was just a student and had no affiliation with the conference. He then asked if I needed a headset to hear the simultaneous translation, which was a kind gesture, but I told him I didn’t need it and thanked him. A minute later, this man has walked across the aisle behind me, in front of all the people sitting there, and is tapping me on the shoulder telling me I can go get a headset. The first ask was a kindness. Getting touched and asked again annoyed me, honestly.

But anyway, the root of all of this is that whiteness here means that, in professional settings, I will be perceived as having more qualifications than I do. I read as older, too, which adds to the power dynamic. I anticipated being pointed out at this conference, but I didn’t expect the degree to which I would be pointed out. And honestly, it kind of left a sour taste in my mouth. The conference was all about engaging with Vietnam, but I still felt there was this big disparity between how locals/local institutions were being treated versus how institutions abroad were being treated. Like, the majority of the key note speech was given in English, and it seemed to me like there was no language accommodation for the non-English speakers in the crowd.

At the same conference, I attended this session on accreditation of PhD art programs in Vietnam. The topic was cool, but most of the talks weren’t overly interesting to me. The audience only had about ten people, and my friend and I were the only white people in the room.

One of the people in the audience seemed to be a conference organizer. She asked questions after nearly every lecture. The way she positioned herself, I think she is affiliated with a university in the US, and she is from Vietnam.

Some of the lecturers talked about the need for students to learn theory in art programs. The woman in the audience asked them if any of them had every studied abroad before, to which none of them had. At the end of the final lecture, the woman stood up and took a mic. She was not a presenter. She asked for a pen to start writing on the board, and then started lecturing. The presenters did not look happy about what was going on. I found the audience member’s behavior honestly shocking. I felt so uncomfortable witnessing this academic who works in the US talking at all the Vietnamese presenters. I learned something new to expect here about how some Vietnamese people are treated at international conferences, and I didn’t like what I saw.

On that professor that has been annoying me

            One of my teachers has been really annoying me. Her class is early on Saturday morning, which feels important because who wants to study starting at 7:45 on Saturday? She’s particular, which in some ways makes her interesting to me. I like people who have idiosyncrasies. She talks openly about things she likes and doesn’t like in Vietnamese culture. I want to like her because I think she does have some interesting things to teach us, but I have been finding it hard to develop any sense of appreciation for her.

            In class, she says things I find…annoying…she almost always comments that we seem bored or tired. I left one class really upset over this because she literally went through and ranked who looked the most bored. I was ranked second, which perplexed me because I’m one of the most active students in class. I usually do the reading, and I answer questions. I ask questions. I interacted a lot that class, so I left thinking, “What the fuck, even when I interact a lot I get criticized, what’s even the point of interacting then?” For me, she broke the unspoken student-teacher contract that if the student is able to interact, it doesn’t matter what they’re doing or what they look like in class.

            This week in class I was drawing and she pointed it out. My annoyance with this has been building and building and I know to anticipate that she’s going to do these things, but I decided this week to try to understand why.

            The good thing about this teacher is she is the type of person who can take a step back and explain her culture and behavior to an outsider. When I talk to most strangers here, I don’t really find it useful to ask very direct questions of “Why did you do that?” or “What was your motivation for saying that?” For people who are in their own culture, behavior seems so normal that it doesn’t warrant explanation. That’s reasonable. But with this teacher, I can ask more meta questions about behavior and get an answer.

            After she pointed out that I was drawing in class, I told her that drawing helps me focus. I then followed up by asking, perhaps a little too directly, “What is your goal when you point out that we look bored?”

            She explained that she is trying to remind us indirectly to pay attention. She said that, when she is actually angry at students for not paying attention, she speaks very directly to them. She banged the desk as she said that, pretending she was actually scolding a student, modeling the behavior she would have. She went on to say that when she asks students and they don’t answer, she has a lot of empathy for them, and she can imagine plenty of reasons for why students can’t answer. She understands we’re busy, and that for some students there isn’t enough time in the week to do the reading. Her method of pointing us out is her way of trying to make the class environment lighter, more humorous and fun.

            I didn’t ask the follow-up questions I wanted to ask which were, “Is that an effective method to get students to pay attention in class? Have you considered how students feel when they do this? If you’ve been doing this for years and students still aren’t doing the reading or paying attention, is there another way to get students more engaged in class?” Her answer interested me because she clearly sees a problem with class engagement but it feels like there’s a big gap between acknowledging the problem and identifying a solution.

            Anyway, I found that, upon hearing her answer, I felt significantly less annoyed by her pointing us out in class. I fundamentally disagree with it as at teaching method, but I at least understand her intentions. And more importantly, I understand that she understands us more than she was letting on. Something she added that helped me personally is that she said specifically about me that she knows that I am paying attention even when I don’t look like it because I always answer her questions immediately. I’m trying not to care as much how my teachers and classmates perceive me, but part of why I was upset about her behavior was in part because I felt like she was minimizing my own hard work.

A light anecdote on printer ink before the coda

            I semi-inherited a printer from a friend who left the country. I say semi-inherited because I did pay her for it, but it was at a heavily discounted price.

I know. I know. Printer ink isn’t the sexiest topic. But I was recently talking to a friend about how I brought my ink and she seemed surprised by the process, so I thought I’d talk about it to kind of wrap up this essay on logic and understand and assumptions.

The fact that I even have a printer is honestly a luxury of fate. It’s something I would never buy outright, especially because a two minute walk from my apartment there are about five printer shops (one with a cat!). I think the going rate is 1,000 VND per page. I sometimes feel silly going to the print shops just to get one page printed, but I always thought it was easier than buying a printer.

It’s actually become one of my best purchases here. I forgot how much small, random printing I do. Visa to Cambodia? Print it! Bagel recipe? Print it! I am honestly more motivated to bake now that I don’t have to hand-copy recipes down.

When I inherited the printer, it was pretty low on ink, so I went ahead and bought more. I first checked Facebook marketplace, because a lot of shops list stuff there. You can message the shop directly, transfer to their bank account, and it’s usually delivered within the hour. That’s how I order my coffee beans.

I couldn’t find it on Facebook, so I went to Shopee next. I found the ink, but it seemed like it was going to take a while to deliver it to me. That’s when I noticed the pictures the shop owner uploaded had a telephone number watermarked across the image. I pulled up Zalo, Vietnam’s messaging app, and checked to see if there was an account associated with that number. And voila there was!

I messaged the shopkeeper who was quick to respond and sent out a shipper with the ink at the time I asked. So convenient. So fast.

The coda

The more places I live, the more logics I learn, the better I am at anticipating. There’s so much more to write about Vietnam, like how I’ve redefined bookstore to be toy store first, bookstore second. Or how I’ve had so much small talk with strangers, I can anticipate most questions I’ll get asked. I only have so much time/energy to write, so I’m going to stop here. I might revisit this topic later because it is one I think about often, and there’s so much more to think about.