Some thoughts about Microfinance and Andhra Pradesh

I have been thinking a lot about microfinance recently. This volunteering has allowed me to spend more time researching about microfinance and other aspects of the world economy. I have now read over a dozen accounts of what happened in Andhra Pradesh and why the Indian microfinance sector is imploding on itself and I think I have a decent mental framework of the situation.

Andhra Pradesh was the initial hot bed of microfinance in India and expanded much faster than the rest of the country. The microfinance institutions (MFIs) generally followed Yunus’s example and his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. One of the larger MFIs in Andhra Pradesh is known as SKS and is run by a man named Akula. He made a controversial move which apparently upset Yunus. He decided to make the MFI public and allow foreign investors in the picture. Yunus was against this because he thought allowing foreign investors to have a stake in an MFI would askew the essential mission of an MFI. To be clear, Grameen bank is also a for-profit MFI but there are some important differences. Grameen bank has a policy of forced savings and borrowers are forced to buy a share of the company, giving them partial ownership of the enterprise. The savings serve as equity to cushion against the risk of loans defaulting as well as allowing poor people access to saving as a financial service. The idea that the borrowers also own a part of the bank is a nice idea but I get the feelings that this is really just smoke and mirrors. I think that the vast majority of managerial decisions made at Grameen Bank are still made behind closed doors. The borrowers do occasionally get some return on the shares however which is definitely a good thing.

The regulatory environment in India is a completely different story. The MFI’s in India are not legally allowed to take any deposits as savings. I believe that this policy can be attributed to a legacy of Indira Gandhi and her program for nationalizing banks. At this point the government of India still has a grip over the financial industry; both macro and micro. It seems there was tension between the entrenched government authorities and the private MFIs; some kind of petty political fight over control. If MFIs could take deposits and thus operate like legitimate banks they would threaten the dominance of the state controlled banks.

Akula himself used to work for an NGO funded through development grants and philanthropy and he was apparently disillusioned by how little outreach his organization was able to accomplish. They had to continually turn people away because of lack of funds. He found this really frustrating and decided to try and develop his own for-profit, financially sustainable MFI. He thought that if it could expand on its own that it would grow much faster. I sympathize with this idea but the problem really came with the inability of private MFis to take savings. In order to maintain steady growth and keep up with growing demand he was pressured to open the doors to foreign capital. Once these doors were open he was subjected to even stronger pressure from these investors. Investors expect a return on their investment. Investors generally have a herd mentality and so if SKS would show signs of slowing down than some would jump ship which would pressure others to do the same. Some investors jumping ship would cause the shares to decrease in value and thus make the prospective lack of financial liquidity a self-fulfilling prophecy. The microfinance industry continued to boom in Andhra Pradesh and it became clear that there was a bubble forming. The market was getting saturated with MFIs. SKS in order to placate its weary investors was forced to become more aggressive in its loan collecting methods. They used much more coercive means to collect the money.  There were around 300 suicides in India by microborrowers which ignited this crisis. At this point I believe there have around 13 suicides attributed to SKS’s “coercive techniques”. One story goes something like a microborrower was struggling to pay off her loan to SKS. She took out numerous loans from other MFIs but she could not get out of the spiral of debt. One of the loan collectors told her that if she could only get out her debt if she drowned herself. The next day she did.

The Indian government has been cracking down on MFIs and the entire industry has been collapsing. There are some lessons to be learned from the crisis in India. There is a difference between growth bubbles and actual development. Just because there was a lot of money circulating around the rural communities of Andhra Pradesh doesn’t mean that there was real wealth creation. The kind of financial bubble that occurred in Andhra Pradesh could prove to be more harmful than beneficial. Without a sustainable policy of savings/deposits MFIs could end up becoming mere pyramid schemes.

MACDI vs. Bloom

So I have eased my way into a pretty decent schedule. I teach full time on Saturday and Sunday from 8 AM to 6 PM and I have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class in the evening, I volunteer at MACDI in the mornings Tuesday to Friday, and I meet with three different Vietnamese ladies (trust me it’s all very innocent) throughout the week to practice my Vietnamese. I wake up at 6 AM every day except for Monday which I can sleep in to 7. All in all it’s a pretty busy schedule and I spend most of my time trucking around the city. As I continue teaching I will inevitably take on more classes and I will get even busier which unfortunately will probably interfere with my studying of Vietnamese. I really enjoy this life style. The challenge and stress of each day inspires me. Melancholy no longer hangs over me as it did during the month where I had literally nothing to do. I have to continuously stay busy to escape my history of depression.

Anyway, I have been volunteering at this microfinance organization known as MACDI (Microfinance and Community Development Institute). I have been brought in to help MACDI set up a tourism program. I’ve been doing some research and apparently the government of Vietnam has been actively pushing rural tourism as an important tool to alleviate poverty in rural areas of Vietnam. Anyone who has travelled around Vietnam can attest to the stark disparity between the quality of life in the rural provinces and the city centers. Vietnam is developing fast but the wealth creation has been concentrated in larger cities such as Hanoi and Saigon. I believe this phenomenon is quite common in developing countries.

Microfinance has an important role in helping the economic development of rural Vietnam. MACDI operates in provinces surrounding Hanoi. Last year MACDI commissioned a small charity known as Bloom Microventures to set up a tour to some of the villages in which MACDI operates. The tour is a day trip out to the Vietnamese countryside. Bloom organized the itinerary of the tour and it consisted of picking up tourists in Hanoi, busing them out to a small idyllic village where they met with a woman (98% of MACDI’s clients are women) who is an example of microfinance success story. The tourists can hear her story via translators and then they are guided around to points of interest in the surrounding area. Then they enjoy a traditional Vietnamese lunch and lastly visit a person in need of a microloan. This microloan in theory comes from the money the tourist paid for the tour itself.

It is a very nice idea and is definitely a good attempt at sustainable tourism. The tour was going great for about a year but Bloom let their success go to their head. At the beginning of the tourism program, the tours usually consisted of about 10-12 people and the customers only had to pay $40 per person. The deal was that Bloom had to pay MACDI $100 for each tour (this money would go directly to the microfinance operation) and the rest of the money should just cover their expenses. Bloom is a registered UK charity after all and not supposed to be in the business of making money. Bloom itself is not a microfinance institution and is only granted access to the rural commune because of their contribution to MACDI which is the actual microfinance institution. The tour was so successful and the popularity of the tour grew so much that they even will get a mention in the next Lonely Planet Vietnam. They have subsequently raised the price to $75 dollars per person and run tours 1-2 times a week with 15-20 people each. The problem is that the cost of running the tours has only marginally increased because of the increased volume of tourists but they still only pay MACDI $100 per tour. This means that there is a great deal of money that is unaccounted for. The director of MACDI has asked Bloom to renegotiate their agreement and she asked for more transparency about Bloom financial status. The head of Bloom refused both and thus MACDI has formally cut them off. There are two scenarios which initially come to my mind. Either they are merely pocketing the money which would be highly unethical or they could be raising capital with the profit in order to become an actual microfinance institution which is less bad but still is taking advantage of MACDI. I am very puzzled by the decision of the guys at Bloom. It seems to me that either they let their success get to their head and disregarded the danger of biting the hand that feeds them or I am only getting one side of the story. I am leaning towards the latter because I don’t think the people at Bloom can be that irrational or unethical.

This is where I come in. MACDI wants to set up a tourism program independent of Bloom and I am part of this effort. At this point I have only drafted some brochures and other fact sheets and flyers to post around. I am going to help them create and promote this tour. It will be pretty much the same tour as what Bloom had so it shouldn’t really be difficult to set up. It’ll just take some legwork. I haven’t really done all that much since I have started volunteering there so I have used my idle time there to do further research about microfinance in Vietnam and around the world. I found the microfinance crisis of Andhra Pradesh very interesting and I think you should check it out.

Microfinance is not yet a mature market and is developing around the world very differently. Some people view it as a tool to empower women, others see it as mainly a tool to alleviate poverty, and plenty of others see it as a new market to make money in. I have my own ideas about microfinance but I try to avoid being dogmatic. I do believe that microfinance has had a positive impact of the world and has raised millions of people out of poverty already. There have also been market failures, such as Andhra Pradesh, and other abuses of the system. I am so happy to be able to see how microfinance works from inside an actual microfinance institute. My real reason for coming to Vietnam was to understand how microfinance works which is kind of funny since Vietnam is one of the worst markets for microfinance. I’ll tell you about that later. 

Vietnamese Language

I thought I would write a bit about Vietnamese language and my progress so far. I did do some self-studying while I was in Pittsburgh before I arrived so I could familiarize myself with the grammar and writing system. This has really helped me since I have a basic level to start from. Now that I have set my schedule for my work and volunteering I have been able to organize my study of Vietnamese around my other obligations.

I refrained from enrolling in any Vietnamese course or paying a private tutor. I purchased a couple of text books for some structure (I also bought a Japanese textbook for Vietnamese students which has been useful in interesting ways). I posted an ad on a Hanoi website looking for language exchange. I offered to teach anyone interested English or Japanese in exchange for Vietnamese. I had a lot of responses and at this point I meet with 3 different Vietnamese people. I meet with one girl who wants to learn Japanese and she is the best teacher since she is fluent in English. The other two want practice with English conversation so it doesn’t require any effort from me aside from just talking. This language exchanges have been very fruitful and I am glad that I decided to do them.

Vietnamese is an interesting language. There seems to be three main dialects which are based on geography: northern, central, and southern. Northern Vietnamese is considered to be the official language and that is the dialect that is usually found in Vietnamese textbooks. The dialects are not wildly different like the myriad languages of the Philippines or India. There are differences in vocabulary and pronunciation but they are essentially the same language. Luckily, the Vietnamese long ago abandoned the burdensome Chinese characters and adopted the Romanized script created by a French missionary. It is thus very easy for me to read (unlike Japanese).

There are six different tones (although they only recognize five in the south). This means that seemingly identical words can have a completely different meaning. They signify different tones by using diacritical marks over top and below the words. For example, giay, giáy, giày, giảy, giạy, giãy are all completely different words. I know one of them is shoe but I forget which one it is. I don’t know about the other ones. There is a rising (giáy) , falling (giày) , and flat tone (giay) which are easy enough to figure out but the other three were tough for me to get my head around. One of them is like a sudden stop so it makes you swallow the word (giạy). One of them makes you make a glottal stop in your throat and rises sharply (giãy) and the last one starts low, goes lower and rises again (giảy). I’m sure not all of those “giay”s (the gi is pronounced like a z)  are real words. I just wanted to show you guys the tones. There are also plenty of other marks that are used to mark vowels to signify they have a completely different sound. A normal Vietnamese sentence looks like this: Tôi là người Mỹ và tôi muốn biết tiếng Việt nhưng tiếng Việt khó lằm. That means “I am American and I want to know Vietnamese but it is too difficult. The writing system is kind of intimidating at first but it’s honestly not that hard to learn.

The grammar is easy enough for me to understand. The grammar structure is subject+verb+object which is how I’m used to talking. Japanese language is structured quite differently and so it forces me to say things in a way that is contrary to my English thought process. I really have to get into a Japanese mindset to adequately speak Japanese. I don’t have that problem with Vietnamese. The verbs also do not conjugate. They signify the past, progressive, and future tense by small “helping” words put before the verb. However, if the context is obvious then they are usually dropped.

Every Asian language I have encountered has had some built in grammatical system to demonstrate status and show politeness. Tagalog (Philippines) was the easiest. You just have to insert the word po after whatever you say and it becomes polite. I’m sure there are other nuances but I didn’t dive into Tagalog in enough depth to be aware of them. Japanese has a very complex and tedious system to show politeness in varying circumstances. I know the two basic levels of politeness and I have an idea how to construct some of the honorific speech but I gave up trying to learn any more of it. The verbs completely change along with a lot of the vocabulary depending on if you are honoring the person you are talking to or humbling yourself and honestly it seems like a different language. It is only used for those working in strict Japanese companies or other sensitive circumstances. The system is so hard to use correctly that I heard a lot of young Japanese actually take a class to learn how to do it before they start working.  In Vietnam, the system revolves around pronouns. How you refer to yourself, the person you are talking to, or somebody you are referring to depends entirely on your and his/her age. It also based on how old your siblings and mother and father are. If the person you are talking/referring to is about your older sister/brothers age there is a special pronoun to use for them. If there is a person who is about your uncle/aunt’s age there is a pronoun. The keeps going past mother/father to grandmother/grandfather. So there’s about a dozen different pronouns.  They also don’t have fixed meanings so they could mean you or I depending on the situation. For example if I am talking to a man who is older than me but not older than my older sister then I would refer to him as anh and myself as em. This process is reversed if I am older. Em seems to be general pronoun used if you are the younger.  There are other irregularities such as how my friend has to refer to her younger cousin as if she was older because her cousin’s father is older than her father. It was very confusing system at first for me to learn. There are some nuances as well such as it is usually polite to refer to women as one level younger than you think they are. I guess it makes them feel young but more often than not I have just been corrected so my attempt at being nice falls flat. This is part of the reason why one the of first questions Vietnamese people ask is how old you are.

At this point I can carry basic conversations and navigate my way through markets. My vocabulary is expanding like a haphazard tapestry but eventual I’ll tie off the important loose ends. I am certainly not going to become fluent while I am here but I hope I can be pretty decent by the time I leave. The only problem I encounter is that the pronunciation can be so difficult that people will just stare at you blankly as you speak and will think you are speaking English. This is really frustrating but it gives me impetus to work harder at it.

Getting Started

I apologize for not writing any blogs recently but so far I have spent the majority of my time in idleness. Tet New Year is really a boring affair for non-Vietnamese. There is literally nothing to do but luckily I found a Will Smith collection DVD which has entertained me. The box indicates that Will Smith is “One of unique ability and odd brand black movie stars!” and that he is “The Whole People Superman”. I would have to agree.

I have just began teaching and it’s going pretty much as I expected. Dealing with kids is very tiring but I think I have the patience for it. I can’t really relate to the other teachers that are so sensitive to the kids being bored since I grew up with a majority of my teachers being mediocre and uninteresting (of course there were exceptions). All that mumbo jumbo about effective and engaging teaching is really an idealization. There are of course better methods than others but at the end of the day but judging the quality of teaching is subjective. Test scores say a little but that’s it; just a little yet that little can drastically affect someone’s life. That is the essential mediocrity of the system.  I believe that teachers should not completely cater to the students (except in the case of small children or children that are disabled). Once they hit teenage years than they deserve minimal leeway. The world only bends to those with a silver spoon or extraordinary talent. The majority of people have to work within the system and the system is not forgiving. Aside from all of that, I do like the students. They can be adorable at times.

I have finally found an NGO dealing with microfinance that has given me the opportunity to volunteer for them. This is a major accomplishment since I was giving up hope altogether. Vietnam’s microfinance market is not easy to get involved with but I’m glad I have a foothold. That was the whole reason why I came here.

I am warming up to Hanoi. I understand the bus system for the most part which has made my life a lot easier. I am not going to invest in a motorbike since I think it’s kind of a waste of money. I keep thinking about what that French girl told me on the train. That Hanoi is a poetic city. It’s hard for me to say if I can fully agree with it. Hanoi was at first quite abrasive for me. The weather has been terrible. I have seen the sun a few times this month and it rains almost every day. I will put more thought into this and respond later.

 My Vietnamese is slowly improving which has made my life much easier. I’ve been meeting with some Vietnamese people to do language exchanges and this has proved fruitful. Vietnamese is a complex language but I don’t know a language that isn’t hard to learn.

I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about the rest of my time here. I’m glad I finally have work to do. I hate not having any work to do. It really drains my sense of being.

Journey to Ba Vi

During the doldrums which is Tet (Chinese New Year) in Vietnam some friends and I decided to go on trip to a nearby mountain. On a side note, I’m interested at just how little Vietnamese do for Tet publicly. There was a firework display but aside from that everything just shuts down. So for someone who doesn’t have Vietnamese people to celebrate with you get stuck with nothing to do.

There were six of us and 3 motor bikes. I didn’t drive since I haven’t practiced at all. We were drinking on Monday night and decided impetuously to go. We planned to go to the Ba Vi national park which is home to a 4,000 foot mountain and is only about 50 km from Hanoi. It was drizzly and cold on our drive up. Luckily we spotted a lady selling gloves. Otherwise I wouldn’t be surprised if we got frost bite. The road is easy enough. It’s a pretty much a straight shot from Hanoi through vast agriculture. I was struck by just how flat this part of Vietnam is.

Up until we arrived at the small town of Son Tay which was about 20 km from the foot of the mountain I didn’t see any signs of elevation. We looked for a hotel in the ghost town that is Son Tay during Tet. As we drove around aimlessly we stumbled across a two star hotel that could put us up for 5 dollars a night per person. I thought this was reasonable since we were only staying one night. With only a finger pointing us in the direction of the mountain we set off hoping that it should be quite obvious where this goliath is. It was still raining a bit and the visibility was bad. There always seems to be a fog that hangs over much of Vietnam, especially at this time of the year, but that day was especially bad. I couldn't even see the mountain as we continued down this country road. We also assumed that a national park as big as Ba Vi national park would have an obvious sign. We were completely mistaken about that and we ended driving until we got to a dirt road littered with pot holes. It was definitely doable in a Land Rover or 4X4 but those little Honda Waves were more like scooters than actual motorcycles. There was a ferry crossing just where we stopped so I tried to ask some people directions. It was no easy task since my Vietnamese is still quite bad but I got the idea that we had gone too far and had missed a turn off somewhere. We turned back and stumbled upon a road that seemed like it could lead to a national park. It was definitely headed toward the mountain. We drove down this idyllic road through the rice paddies into a small town. Just beyond the small town were a large gate and a toll man. It looked like we had finally found the right place. We paid the man and took off in great excitement thinking that we could finally drive up mountain. After about a hundred meters we were directed to a parking lot and we had to get off the bikes. We were confused since we were told you could drive up to summit but just went along with it. As we started walking through this strange place I began to think we had made a mistake. There were plastic dinosaurs scattered around with play grounds and a child’s swimming pool. The place was surreal and not at all what I expected. There was a nice waterfall and a trail that seemed to go up to the mountain so we decided to hike a little bit.

 We got stuck at one stream crossing since the Vietnamese built a pretty ridiculous bridge that was so narrow one of my feet was too wide. A couple of my friends made it across using the bridge but I crossed using the myriad treacherous stones. We hiked a bit farther but it was definitely a dead end but it was a nice scamper about.

We headed into town a bit disappointed that we couldn’t find the actual mountain but determined to find it the next day. It took ages to find a place to eat because of the paralyzing effect of Tet but we eventually found some nice pho. Son Tay was a nice town and the people were all very friendly.

In the morning we got up and headed out hell bent on finding this mountain. We decided that the turn off has to be on the same road since there really was only one major road. All of a sudden we spotted one of many small signs directing people to Ba Vi. I finally learned the word for national park which is quite different than the word for park which I already knew. On a whim we tried it out and finally found the mountain. We biked straight up the mountain and the road is actually pretty well maintained. There was only one incident of one bike falling into a ditch but they survived. The weather was better but the visibility was still bad and for the last quarter of the trip up the mountain we were in a cloud. It was also freezing cold and damp. Once we made it to the top we just had to hike for another 30 minutes or so the actual top where the Vietnamese built a spectacular temple and a shrine for Ho Chi Minh. 

Unfortunately, you couldn’t see anything from the top of the mountain because of the heavy fog. Mountains covered in mist are beautiful but difficult to photograph. I stood at the top of the mountain and I could just imagine how spectacular the view could have been. At times you could see notions of the horizon before us. Fog is like lingerie. It can give you a glimpse but hides the essentials. It is enticing nonetheless.

From the top of the mountain we made our way down and stopped a few times to photograph the scenery. If you look really carefully you should see the temple at the very top of the mountain.

After that we beasted it back to Hanoi making real good time. It was definitely a good trip. I really enjoy mountain air. 

A little bit about Hanoi

I can say at this point that I am pretty used to Hanoi. I have secured employment which is good. It’s nice to know that I will have some sort of income coming my way as long as I show up to the English lessons I’m supposed to teach. I’ll probably be teaching little kids which I don’t know if I’m prepared for but you never learn unless you’re in over your head right? It’s a nice feeling to get accustomed to something that you thought you couldn’t do. Manila was also quite intimidating but learning how to get around the city was an accomplishment that made me warm inside (it was plenty warm outside though).

Hanoi is more user friendly than Manila is some ways but not in others. There is a regular bus system here which I will probably be using every day. I probably won’t rent a motorbike because of my budget but I wouldn’t be against the idea. It looks fun. Manila had its idiosyncratic bus and jeepney system which took a couple months to get used to. Hanoi’s bus system is not easy to understand but it is regular and regulated. The problem here is that buses only stop every half a kilometer so you end up having to walk twenty minutes to a bus stop anyway. I like the Filipino system where you could flag down buses wherever you were and you could get off wherever you wanted to.

Unlike when I was in the Philippines I have a kitchen here which is nice. I go to the local market where you can buy everything such as eggs, meat, vegetables, and even dog if you want. They just skewer the dogs whole and roast them and it looks like you buy either the bottom or top half. It is kind of sad because all the dog faces look like they’re screaming; like they were roasted while they were still alive. I ate dog in Seoul and it was real rough on my stomach. There are ample amounts of pork, beef, and chicken around so I don’t think I’ll have to resort to eating dog.

My major problem with Hanoi is that old men urinate all over the place. I have gotten into the habit of walking around the city a lot and I have seen a lot of this. I don’t have any problem with guys peeing outside in principle but it gets on my nerves when they piss on the sidewalk right in front of me as I’m jogging. Everyone here must be really dehydrated too because it smells terrible; very concentrated. It’s annoying because people will usually piss on the sidewalks so if you’re walking it smells like piss. People also drive their motorbikes on sidewalks when there is traffic so even though you’re walking you get stuck in traffic. I get annoyed by this but if people in America did half of what people here do to me I would flip out. I don’t want to get in a fight with local and get bum rushed by everyone around me.

The other thing that annoys me about Hanoi is getting ripped off. Hanoi is notorious for not posting prices and it is kind of expected that foreigners will pay more for things. I have been trying to fight this by asking how much things cost in Vietnamese and emphasizing that I’m not a tourist but I still get ripped off from time to time. I swear that I wasn’t scammed that much in Manila. Filipinos seem to have better business ethics but it could just be my perception.

Aside from those minor complaints I really like Hanoi. It’s a nice city with plenty to see and do. I think it is more interesting than Saigon but I’m biased since I was only in Saigon for a couple weeks. One thing that strikes me about Hanoi is how businesses are organized. Stores seem to be segregated depending on what they sell. For example, we were trying to find some ping pong balls and I couldn’t find one store that had them until we stumbled across a block which had only sport stores. I walk past blocks where there will be 4 stores in a row selling luxury whiskey. I can’t help but think this is a really stupid way to place businesses. Why would they purposefully concentrate all the same kind of store in one area? You would think they could get a larger market share if they spread out to different parts. I thought it was some kind of government regulation but apparently it’s part of Vietnamese culture. I was talking to a Vietnamese friend of Kristine who happens to also live in Hanoi and she enlightened me. In the old quarter of Hanoi which has existed for over a thousand years all of the streets are named after what kind of artisan worked there. So there is “Shoe Street”, “Noodle Street”, etc. Nowadays the street names are just names and don’t dictate what kind of store but there is still lingering presence of this ancient organization. When someone opens a sunglasses store somewhere and it is successful people think that that spot is lucky for sunglass stores so they invest in opening other stores there. This kind of common sense seems counterintuitive to me but hey whatever works, works even if it is inconvenient for me. 

My Real Goal

Day by day Hanoi is demystifying itself to me. As I wander around aimlessly the streets start to become familiar and I begin to get a sense for the city. My time in Vietnam will be very different than I had imagined. I’m not going to be roughing it like I did in Manila. I’ll only be involved with NGOs on a part time basis. These things kind of bug me. It’s as if I’m on an extended work vacation but I didn’t really need a vacation; my life wasn’t stressful in America. If anything it’s more stressful over here. I do enjoy learning more about the cultural differences and idiosyncrasies of Vietnamese people but I try not to focus on the differences, more on the commonalities.

I used to study the philologists of 18^th and 19^th century who were the first Western “pioneers” to analyze and dissect Eastern culture so it could be codified and become academic curiosity in university discussions. Their methodology was terrible and their work is largely useless. But it is important to learn from other people’s mistakes. There were many philosophers and assorted intellectuals that were engaged in the practice of thoroughly analyzing ancient Asian texts. From the works of Confucius to the Ramayana or Mahabharata they drew wild conclusions about Indian and East Asian culture.  They used these texts as a jumping board to develop the cultural stereotypes and generalizations that still linger today. They used their fanciful imagination and intellectual indulgence to misrepresent the world. Of course, there were adventure-seeking Westerners who actually came to these countries and really sought to experience the difference in culture.

I was watching the Discovery channel and there was a show about an American guy who was with a tribe of traditional Zulu people. He partook in their rites of passage and was invited to the wedding. According to this show, there should be a stick fight between the groom and some other man from the bride’s family. It’s supposedly largely ceremonial but could be used as a way for the bride’s family to express their disapproval of the groom. This particular family held the wedding ceremony but left out the stick fighting bit and danced instead. It seemed to me that it was a pretty innocuous part to leave out but the American guy was more than put off by this. He lamented to the camera that the Zulu people were becoming more Westernized and losing their cultural heritage.

“And the only reason why: apathy.” He had the audacity to say.

This guy is on the other end of the spectrum compared to the philologists of the past, in terms of methodology, but I find him equally wrong. Firstly, who is he to say anything about other people’s cultural practice? It’s like chastising a Jewish person for not eating gefilte fish on Passover. Some people just think that stuff is gross. When I was studying Japanese culture and language, a lot of my peers would wildly idealize what Japan was actually like. Some people thought that it was a nation of stern Samurai ethics or an ultra-modern technologically advanced paradise. I would like to say that the truth is somewhere in the middle, as I say often, but I think these kind of generalizations are fundamentally wrong. There is value in generalizing when one is in the preliminary level of understanding. I would go as far to say that it is necessary to generalize. For example, when somebody studies economics it’s important they start by studying the basic structure of micro and macroeconomics. It would be a major waste of time to try and understand the technical aspects of price elasticity without understanding how a simple supply and demand curve work. You can’t understand Calculus if you don’t know Algebra.

In the study of culture the process is a little bit different however. Not only must you use your generalizations as a stepping stone but they must be discarded as you progress. As time goes on, culture changes. The American guy from that show was frustrated with the present Zulu people’s apparent “apathy” toward their cultural heritage but that’s because he was using his own idealizations and generalizations to imagine how Zulu people were living. He was projecting his own reality which didn’t square with the actual reality. He wasn’t trying to understand the culture of present Zulu people. He was trying to experience what he wanted to experience, like someone at an amusement park. To his credit, globalization does appear to be progressively making the world less interesting but this is the natural course of things. We really are passive players in the sweeping transformations of society.

There are of course good cultural anthropologists or sociologists which I would consider are doing a good job. As studying culture is not a science in the technical sense, the whole field is quite subjective. It really depends on what you’re looking for.

As I walk the streets of Hanoi I see plenty of stores and restaurants which I am quite familiar with. To some people this is comforting but I really don’t care for it. I don’t really care what a McDonald’s burger tastes like in Vietnam (there actually are no McDonald’s in Vietnam). The average Vietnamese eats a wide range of seemingly exotic food but everything seems exotic before you’re accustomed to it. For me food is food and since I’ve burnt away most of my taste buds I don’t really care about what I eat, as long as it has base level of nutrition and I don’t get sick. In my opinion food is not all that important in terms of culture but I know a lot of people would disagree with me. The question of “What is culture?” is always knocking at my door and I still don’t have a satisfactory answer to that. As culture is fluid the answer will be fluid. It does make me think however about how some people complained about the lack of culture in the Philippines. It’s a very superficial analysis but it’s one worth debating. Vietnam on the other hand has a very distinctive aspects that makes you constantly aware that you are in Vietnam and not anywhere else (The Philippines also has plenty of unique aspects to it but most tourists gloss over them because they are not “Asian-esque”, like temples and pagodas). The French influence of Vietnam is interesting and captivating at times. Actually the entire history of Vietnam is compelling and worth looking into. I don’t have bad thing to say about Vietnam or Vietnamese culture. The point of me writing this whole post is to explain that I really don’t care about the fanciful notions of culture anymore. I feel like an old man but without the wisdom. I am not interested in ancient legends and how they have shaped the mindset of the people. There are forces common to all humanity which transforms society. Notions of love, relationships, friendships, sadness, etc. are common throughout the world even if they can be expressed in different ways.

My real goal is to engage Vietnamese people of today from different spectrums of society and learn from them. It’s unfortunate that I’m going to teach here since I am really just a student.