Getting personal in Vietnam

If you're travelling in Vietnam and not taking regular questions about your marriage, offspring and age, you know you're not interacting with the locals enough. If you haven't copped a hospitable grilling by the time you check into your hotel, you’re probably sending out defensive or unfriendly signals. Or you just haven't met a local with sufficient English skill yet.

Vietnamese love firing off personal questions. For Vietnamese, these questions aren't especially personal at all. They’re part of the fabric of life. Vietnamese find it more than a little perplexing that foreigners might be cool about engaging with strangers on matters marriage, age and family.

While friendly curiosity explains these low level interrogations in part, most Vietnamese are also very keen to place visitors in context. To work out where you fit into the universal order of things.

Age? Well without that, a Vietnamese person won’t know how to address you. The Vietnamese language is hierarchical and based on age. Knowing your age is essential to making progress in getting a conversation going - especially if the age difference is not immediately apparent.

Vietnamese rarely address people simply by name. They will almost always use a signifier beforehand - (older brother Mark = Anh Mark, very old man Mark = Ong Mark etc etc etc). In fact Vietnamese tend to use the signifier more than the name. That means that people will tend to address one another as older brother, younger sister, uncle etc etc. This stuff gets very very complicated for foreigners but is second nature to Vietnamese.





Marital status and kids? While the current generation of young Vietnamese are challenging long established cultural norms of early marriage and almost instant procreation, the proposition of someone being in their mid to late thirties or older, and unmarried, is one that most Vietnamese, especially outside the cities, struggle with. For many Vietnamese, it’s assumed that pretty much everyone gets married and has kids in their early twenties.

The family might be the core unit of every society, but in Vietnam, the family significance runs even deeper. Another reason why Vietnamese are so keen to establish your family status. It’s part cultural but also part spiritual.

Ancestral worship is probably the most pervasive spiritual form in Vietnam. It seems to sit quite comfortably alongside Buddhism and Christianity. Even hardened old communist atheists have been known to happily abide the ancestral altar and its rituals as vital to every home.

And if you believe in this amazing symbiosis; where ancestors help your world along, and you theirs, the family is embedded not only in your fortunes in this life, but in the next one too.

So don’t be surprised that pretty much every Vietnamese you connect with, will be keen to know some of your personal details. They’re not being nosy, they’re just placing you in the great order of the universe.  And more than likely, these questions will lead you into some of the more enjoyable and memorable conversations of your travels - whether you're talking to your tour guide, your taxi driver, your waitress or anyone else.


Tips for handling Vietnam’s personal questions

The personal questions can on occasions cause some uncomfortable moments both for travellers and their Vietnamese hosts.

If your personal status doesn’t issue any challenges to the order of the universe - ie, you’re married with two or three kids by the time you’re in your mid thirties - the gentle probe will be quick and painless.

But, if you’re of marriageable age and unmarried, or married and childless, or gay, things can get tricky.

Take my personal circumstance. I became a father at age 18, have never been married and I’m now in my 40s. This situation throws a total spanner in the Vietnamese idea of an ordered world. Instead of an embarrassed retreat however, your average taxi driver will demand a full explanation of this bizarre set of circumstances. It can go on for quite a long time and be an obstacle to other more interesting conversation. It can also become slightly annoying when it happens a few times a day.

Similarly, friends of mine, a middle aged, childless couple, who are regular travellers to Vietnam, have faced endless questions about why they don’t have children.

But they’ve come up with an ingenious solution - they’ve concocted a more palatable family circumstance.

In their case, that’s meant  inventing a son and daughter in their twenties. It's worked perfectly for them. And over time, their children have evolved quite interesting lives.



For me, it’s a little simpler. I’ve simply added a fictional marriage, where necessary, to my early fatherhood story. I didn’t seek the consent of my daughter’s mother in the arrangement but think she’ll be sympathetic. 

In both cases, the 10 minutes of confused questioning disappears and the conversation can move to more interesting terrain. 

If your personal situation doesn't fit into the perfectly ordered universe, you might also prefer to have an alternate story on standby. It's a much better approach than getting your back up over the well intended but at times unsettling interrogation.