“What do you do when you speak Vietnamese to someone and they respond in English?”

the answer is complicated. surprise, surprise.

About two weeks ago, I was getting lunch with some of the other foreign classmates in our program in the school cafeteria. One of them asked the group something to the effect of “What do you do when you speak Vietnamese to someone and they respond in English?”

       When my classmate asked that question, I totally got where he was coming from. This happens to me a lot, though a lot less now that my Vietnamese is pretty good. And if this is your first time in this type of situation, it can honestly be pretty frustrating, especially if you’re hyper-focused on acquiring the language.

       It can feel really shitty when you say something in Vietnamese and the person responds back in English, and then there’s this whole negotiation/power struggle over what language is going to dominate the conversation. And at some level, it might feel nonsensical that in Vietnam if you use Vietnamese with someone to initiate a conversation that they would respond back in English (I used to think it was nonsensical, but I don’t anymore, but I’ll come back to that later).

       The answer I gave my classmate was “I don’t really care. I just move on.” Which is mostly true. But the answer is honestly a lot more complex than that and highly dependent on context. His question is the starting point of this essay but it branches out a lot into different thoughts I have around this idea of language and context. First, some personal history.

       I’ve gone through a lot of phases with caring and not caring about what language people use with me.

       During my gap year in Taiwan, I would get so annoyed with local people that always responded to me in English. That was when I was at one of my most intense and focused stages of language acquisition, and I had this very narrow view of my relationships with people. I saw every interaction with Mandarin speakers as a potential to speak Mandarin, to hear Mandarin, to improve my Mandarin.

       I got really good at Mandarin over those nine months, but I do think I could have had a more expansive and open relationship with language and people. I completely dismissed Taiwanese as worth learning because I was going to be majoring in Mandarin anyway. Ironically, I ended up devoting a big chunk of time to learning Taiwanese later because I saw it as having incredibly important sociocultural value.

       My next time living in a Mandarin-speaking environment was when I was in Xi’an for eight months in 2016-2017. I also had this focused intensity going into that program. I gave myself a rule – I will either be hanging out with Mandarin speakers or I will be alone. Ugh. So intense. I like to think I’ve chilled out. Who was that person prescribing misery?

       I did sometimes hang out with the other foreigners in Xi’an. And we did have a language pledge (where you all agree to only speak the target language), but I am always one of the first people to break the language pledge (more on that later, too). Anyway, I did end up getting taken in by this kind older group of people in Xi’an who organized a Mandarin club, which was awesome. One of the couples invited me to their house a few times and showed me their collection of butterfly specimen and fed me food and treated me with such kindness. Though I did speak a lot of Mandarin in Xi’an, I also spent a lot of time alone. I love alone time, but avoiding people just to try to speak Mandarin more was not good for me.

       When I spent 10-months in Nanjing in 2018-2019, I cared a lot less about what language I was speaking to people in. That was the point in my Mandarin learning experience where I was probably at the peak of my fluency. I was using it in class a lot and socially as well. I had a close friend who was great at English, so she didn’t care what language we spoke in, and since I wanted to improve Mandarin, we defaulted to that a lot.

       I was dating a guy from Nanjing, and we switched languages a lot depending on social situation (English with my friends, Mandarin with his). What we were talking about dictated the language too. Because I was at my most confident in my Mandarin then, I also cared so much less what language I was using with people. And I was finding that building relationships based on the content of the relationship and not the language of the relationship was leading to me more expansive and interesting experiences.

       A small semi-related note here. I hear the advice “date a local to learn the language” or “marry a Vietnamese woman to improve your Vietnamese” a lot, and I just want to put here that I hate hate hate this advice. First off, partners oftentimes make terrible language teachers. Any time I asked my ex something about Mandarin he would just tell me to look it up, which was his right. He wasn’t my language teacher. Second, to view a person simply as a tool for language growth is so reductive and why would you want to use a person like that? Lastly, I would argue that the number of white men here dating Vietnamese women that do not speak Vietnamese is evidence that this is simply bad advice. Anyway…

       I came to Vietnam with a mixed mindset. I knew I needed to take some of the intensity of those first experiences abroad into my learning here in order to establish a foundation, but I also knew to give myself space to use other languages and to value people as more than just opportunities for linguistic growth.

       I still actively put myself into situations where Vietnamese is the dominant language. That’s a huge part of why I’m doing this MA in Vietnamese Studies at a local university where the language of instruction is Vietnamese. But I also give myself space to hang out with Mandarin-speaking friends and English-speaking friends. I do think I could have acquired Vietnamese faster had I taken a more intense approach, but that level of intensity isn’t sustainable for me. I’d rather take a slower pace and be happier.

       Happiness was a huge factor in choosing Ho Chi Minh City over somewhere rural. Yes, when I first moved here I could have easily moved to somewhere more rural and taught English. And yes, that environment would have been more “ideal” in terms of language acquisition. But no, I don’t think I would have been happy. I need to live somewhere more metropolitan and queer-friendly to live the life I want. I’m not bashing other places in Vietnam. They just aren’t for me at this stage in my life. And also, it’s fully possible to acquire Vietnamese living in Ho Chi Minh City, and anyone who claims otherwise is wrong. You certainly have to be more proactive about using Vietnamese here than you might have to be in other places, but you’re literally surrounded my Vietnamese speakers all the time. It’s not that hard to find opportunities to use the language.

       Now back to my classmate’s question. “What do you do when you speak Vietnamese to someone and they respond in English?”

       How I respond really does depend on context, and I want to think about a few different contexts where this happens and how I choose to react.

       One of the most common places this happens to me is when I go to a restaurant or a coffee shop with young workers. If the place reads as more Western (e.g. Tartine) then I actually anticipate that the wait staff will initiate the interaction in English. Or that if I start the conversation in Vietnamese, they will respond in English. And here’s the thing that’s a big shift in from all those years ago in Taiwan – I don’t make a big deal about it. I don’t get angry. I just respond back in English.

       Here’s where I’m at right now mentally with this type of interaction—This person is a service worker, and their job is simply to ask what I want, report that to the kitchen, and give me my drink/food. They have no obligation to be my language practice opportunity. The interaction is so quick and small that it’s not really worth my energy to make some stance about proving my Vietnamese language skills and insisting that’s the language of the conversation. If their English is good enough to complete their job, I can’t and shouldn’t ask for more.

       Now, that is an important distinction to make. If the interaction is not going well because of language, I sometimes will ask if we can switch to Vietnamese to make it easier. I only do this sometimes because I also know this can be really damaging to the psyche of the person getting asked to switch language. It doesn’t feel good when someone implies your language skills aren’t good enough to do your job.

       The context where I’m most conscious of language being used is language exchange events. There are ones I will not go to the in the city because it’s very clearly not an exchange for the locals going. They want to speak English. Props to them for seeking out foreigners to speak to, but in a space set up as an exchange I expect to be switching languages.

       With friends, I don’t care that much because, like, they’re my friends and I value them as people first! Also, in my experience, making friends with locals in English is fine because at some point or another, they’ll invite you to chill with their other friends, where the language of conversation is Vietnamese.

       One situation I actually feel super weird in is when I tell other white people I speak Vietnamese and then they want to use Vietnamese with me when it’s just us. This doesn’t happen often, but it did happen in China a lot when I was on programs with language pledges. I’m the worst student for that type of program because I think language pledges are stupid. Why would I struggle to communicate with my classmates in Mandarin when I could just go talk to local people out and about in the real world?

       I really value learning how highly proficient speakers of a language use it, and I’ve never been on a program where everyone is in that category. Usually this weird Mandarin emerges with English-language influenced puns and jokes and communication strategies that don’t make sense outside of an American context. All that is fun, but I just don’t value it.

       Another weird one is using English words in Vietnamese. I’m super open to code switching in casual situations. But I also interact with some learners who are super strict about only using the target language. Once when I was in China, I was talking to a friend in Mandarin. I used the English word “email” in my otherwise fully Mandarin sentence, and an American on my program corrected me by providing the Mandarin word, 電子郵件. But like, highly proficient Mandarin speakers do use certain English words in conversation, “email” being one of them. There’s actually a word in Taiwanese Mandarin called 晶晶體 making fun of people who switch to English too much, but I wasn’t doing that. By using the English word “email,” I was making a linguistic choice that was appropriate for the system I was communicating in, not making a mistake (can you tell I’m still a little salty about being corrected about this?).

       A similar situation. I recently was getting a drink at a relatively expensive bar with a white American friend who also speaks Vietnamese. When we ordered, I ordered in Vietnamese but said my drink name “vodka tonic” relatively American. He asked me, “When are you going to start Vietnamizing your words?” The question wasn’t from a place of correction, but it confused me because I do Vietnamize English words all the time. But we were in a nice bar, and so again I made a linguistic choice to use a more American pronunciation. Now there’s a whole essay to write unpacking what that says about my relationship to code switching, pronunciation, and status, but I’m going to think about it more before putting words to paper. I bring it up as an example of an instance where I think sometimes people have really rigid relationships with language, whereas I take a context-based approach.

       I’m not saying my way is right. This is just my philosophy on language constructed from my experiences. It works for me, but it might not work for someone else.

       Part of how I’ve arrived at this whole idea that I should care a lot less about what language people use with me, is I’ve started to try to see the world from the perspective of a Vietnamese person who minimally interacts with white people who speak Vietnamese.

       I sometimes have this issue of falling into false equivalencies. For example, I used to think of this issue as “Well, in the US if a Chinese person started a conversation with me in English, I wouldn’t just respond in Mandarin without asking first or discussing it first.” That logic just doesn’t apply to Vietnam.

       I’m white. Literally why would anyone think that I speak Vietnamese? No, seriously.

       Yes, in my ideal vision of the world, the expectation would be that people who live in Vietnam long term do learn the language. My ideal world has every conversation starting in Vietnamese and then negotiating later if English would be better. Because I use to hold this vision of the world so dearly, I would get genuinely angry when I spoke to someone in Vietnamese and they responded in English.

       More than a year ago I was buying roast duck in D5, and I asked the worker for half a duck in Vietnamese, to which she shook her hands and said, in English, “No English.” To which I responded, “Em đang nói tiếng Việt mà chị.” (I’m speaking Vietnamese). I got my duck after that, and I also felt annoyed over the whole thing.

       To woman selling duck saw a white person, and her mind immediately went to “this person must be speaking English.” Which based on her understanding of how the world works is perfectly logical. Why would this random white man on a bicycle speak Vietnamese?

       Like, in my head, it is totally normal that I speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, and sometimes Taiwanese (it really depends on the day, my friends). In my interiority, these languages are part of who I am and how I express myself. Road rage almost exclusively happens in Taiwanese. I sometimes draft essays in Mandarin because I love how Mandarin prose flows. I listen to Hong Kong music and almost always sing at least one Cantonese song at KTV. All of these languages are old friends that I love.

       But if I go into every interaction only holding my values of my ideal world and assessing my interior world as some objective norm, I will go through the world in a constant state of frustration. I have friends who have literally told me, “I can’t speak Vietnamese to foreigners [read as: white people]. It feels too weird.”

       I’ve worked really hard to try to accept that, in reality, my norm is actually the outlier. I’m actually a lot more at peace if I go into new interactions assuming people will think I don’t speak Vietnamese. I think this is part of why I’m so drawn to my regular places in the city where the owners know me and know that I speak Vietnamese.

       I do have one context that’s totally new to me that I’m working through a lot of feelings on. Though Vietnamese is the language of instruction for all my classes, teachers do use English a fair amount for academic words. I’m fine with this, as it helps me know what they’re talking about instantly. It also is important, I think, for my classmates who didn’t receive academic education in English to also familiarize themselves with some key words since so much research is published in English.

       All that being said, there are some things I find frustrating in the classes. The biggest one is that teachers treat me as the representative for the English language in class. I get that I’m the only native English speaker in class, but we literally have a student from Honk Kong who was educated in English, and I know the Japanese student speaks excellent English as well. Some of the Vietnamese students speak great English too.

       Some specific things the teachers do is – when giving us an English word for a concept, pointing at me or naming me. Asking me if words are spelled correctly. Asking me the definitions of words or to explain a word to the class in Vietnamese.

       I am actually most annoyed with the last two, because the words are oftentimes not spelled correctly but I feel weird correcting my teachers. And the other one is annoying because oftentimes the teachers pick words with many definitions, and I don’t know what one they want. Just this week, a teacher asked me to define “artifact,” to which I said “expensive objects of historical value oftentimes found in museums.” The teacher just went, “No, that’s not it.” He wanted the definition used in the social sciences, which is great, but I can’t know that when asked a word without context.

       One of the other teachers is a huge fan of using English names of Chinese dynasties and historical figures. I almost never understand them. I just want the Vietnamese names because I usually know what characters go with historical words.

       Honestly, this brings up a whole issue of language in the classroom that I wish teachers were more cognizant of. That is, I wish teachers remembered that I speak Mandarin, because so much academic Vietnamese comes from Chinese, and a lot of my education about China happened in Chinese, so English actually isn’t always the most convenient language for me to make a connection with a concept. If we’re talking about Ngũ Hành and the teacher goes, in English, “Five Phases, Brendan,” I will have no idea what they’re talking about. But if they go “Ngũ as in five and hành in the world hành động,” I can immediately picture “五行” in my head and know what’s going on.

       Anyway, the absolute root of all this though, the real reason I think it bothers me so deeply is that I really resent this idea that white native English speakers are somehow the authority on the language. This resentments comes, in part, from my work in the English-teaching industry here where highly qualified Vietnamese people are getting paid 1/5 or even less than the white native English speakers who can walk into most English centers and get a job with minimal effort.

       More generally, though, I think centering all English-language discussion in the classroom on me shows a lack of imagination of who can speak what language. Shouldn’t the student from Hong Kong be given the opportunity to comment on an English-language topic? And if the local students are given the chance to negotiate meaning of an English word, aren’t they also gaining something from that interaction?

       And if the professors can only imagine me as the authority on English, what does that say about how they feel about the Vietnamese skills of non-native speakers? I would argue it means they also can’t imagine any of the foreign students, regardless of proficiency level, as legitimate users of the language with valid opinions on it. And if that line of logic is true, then why should foreigners in Vietnam ever learn Vietnamese if they won’t ever be seen as being actual users of the language. This does not fit into my ideal world of how language works, but I think it might be how the world actually is working, to some extent.

       (I want to add here that this paragraph above is a new thought that I’m still iffy on, and this is just my current hypothesis on this issue. I’m putting it in here because I personally believe, deeply, that people should learn Vietnamese here, and I’m interested in barriers to learning it, one of which I am hypothesizing to be that anyone not Vietnamese does not fit into the imagined system of what makes up a “Vietnamese speaker,” which can be incredibly frustrating to the learner. I could be totally wrong on this hypothesis/line of logic, and I’m very open to critiques on it.)

       So here we are, back to the origin of all of this issue for me. Who can we imagine speaking what language? The vast majority of people will never imagine that I speak most of the languages I speak. And why would they?

       “What do you do when you speak Vietnamese to someone and they respond in English?” I am faced with a choice – to get angry frustrated or to accept it as a reality outside of my ideal construction of the world. The latter feels healthier for me in the long-term.