Vietnam

Core values & worldview

If you want to understand a Vietnamese person, a good place to start is the word độc lập, independence. Vietnam’s history, as Vietnamese tell it, is the story of a people who kept their identity through a thousand years of Chinese rule, then fought off Mongols, Ming armies, French colonists and the world’s most powerful military. Historians such as Keith Taylor caution that the real history was messier, full of regional rivalries and civil wars, and that “resistance to the north” is partly a modern national story. But it is the story people grow up with, and it explains a deep pride and a refusal to be pushed around.^•

A few things follow from that history and culture.

Family first. The family, living and dead, is the centre of life. Confucian ideas absorbed over centuries stress filial piety, respect for elders and the duty of children to support parents. Many adult children live with or near their parents, send money home and care for them in old age. Decisions about study, marriage and work are often family decisions.^•

The ancestors are present. Most homes, shops and even offices have an altar where people burn incense and leave offerings for ancestors and spirits. Death anniversaries (giỗ) are kept more faithfully than birthdays once were. Whether people call this religion, tradition or simply what one does, it ties generations together.^•

Face and harmony. Many Vietnamese avoid open confrontation, especially with elders or superiors, and value indirectness and saving face. Language reinforces this: there is no neutral “you”; people address each other with kinship terms such as anh (older brother), chị (older sister) or em (younger sibling), so every conversation places people in a family-like order of age and respect.^•

Resilience and pragmatism. A people who lived through war, hunger and upheaval tend to be practical, hard-working and quick to adapt. After 1986 that energy went into business, from street stalls to tech start-ups.^•

Daily life & customs

Tết. The Lunar New Year, usually in late January or February, is the biggest event of the year. People clean their homes, settle debts, return to their home villages, decorate with peach blossom in the north or yellow apricot blossom in the south, and invite the ancestors home. Children receive lucky money in red envelopes (lì xì), and the first visitor of the year is thought to bring luck for the whole household.^•

Food. Meals are shared: rice, a soup, a few dishes and plenty of fresh herbs, with fish sauce (nước mắm) at the centre of the flavour. Phở, bánh mì and spring rolls have gone global, but each region has its own pride: the subtle cooking of Hanoi, the spicy imperial dishes of Huế, the sweeter, abundant food of the south.

Street life. Life spills onto the pavement: motorbikes (tens of millions of them), cafés with tiny plastic stools, street vendors and neighbours chatting. Cities are noisy, crowded and young.^•

Religion. Vietnam’s religious life is layered. Officially, in the 2019 census, 86% of people reported no religion, about 6% were Catholic and about 5% Buddhist, with smaller numbers of Protestants and followers of the home-grown faiths Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo. Those figures understate practice: many who say they have “no religion” visit pagodas, consult fortune-tellers and venerate ancestors and local spirits, especially the Mother Goddess cult in the north.^•

Writing. Vietnamese is written in chữ quốc ngữ, a Latin alphabet with many diacritics developed by Portuguese and French missionaries, especially Alexandre de Rhodes, in the seventeenth century. It replaced Chinese characters and the vernacular Nôm script in the early twentieth century and is one reason literacy spread so quickly.^•

Wounds & sensitivities

The wars. The wars of 1945–1979 killed millions of Vietnamese. Almost every family lost someone, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers are still missing; families search for remains with the help of psychics as well as DNA. War cemeteries stand in nearly every district of the north.^•

Agent Orange and unexploded bombs. American herbicide spraying left a legacy of illness and birth defects that many Vietnamese attribute to dioxin, and bombs and mines still kill and maim people in the countryside, especially in central Vietnam.^•

1975 and its aftermath. For South Vietnamese families, the end of the war meant re-education camps, confiscated property, discrimination and the dangerous escape by sea. These memories are largely absent from official history inside Vietnam, and they are central for the diaspora.^•

China. The thousand years of Chinese rule, the 1979 border war and continuing disputes in the South China Sea, which Vietnam calls the East Sea (Biển Đông), make China a sensitive subject. Anti-China protests have erupted at times, and calling the sea the “South China Sea” in front of some Vietnamese can cause a wince.^•

Being reduced to a war. Vietnam is a country, not a war. Many Vietnamese are tired of foreigners who know the country only through American films, and the phrase “the Vietnam War” itself centres the American experience.^•

Modern attitudes

Looking forward. Vietnam is a young country: the median age is in the early thirties, and most people were born long after 1975. Many young Vietnamese are focused on study, work, the internet and getting ahead, and the national mood is often more about opportunity than about the past.^•

Surprisingly warm towards America. Despite the war, many Vietnamese, especially the young, hold strikingly favourable views of the United States. Relations were normalised in 1995, and shared wariness of China has drawn the two closer.^•

Politics. Vietnam is a one-party state led by the Communist Party. Open political dissent is not tolerated, the press is controlled, and bloggers and activists have been jailed. In daily life many people focus on family and business and keep political opinions private; corruption is a common complaint.^•

Education and mobility. Families invest heavily in education, often in extra classes, English lessons and, for those who can afford it, study abroad. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese now work abroad, in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Europe, sending money home.^•

Not all Vietnamese are the same

North, Centre and South. Regional differences are strong and the subject of endless jokes. Northerners are stereotyped as formal and careful, southerners as open, easy-going and generous, central Vietnamese as frugal and tough, shaped by a harsh climate. The accents differ enough that the South’s is instantly recognisable. History adds weight: the North lived under communism from 1954, the South only from 1975.^•

Ethnic minorities. The Kinh (ethnic Vietnamese) make up about 85% of the population, and 53 other recognised groups, including the Tày, Thái, Mường, Khmer, Hmong and the Cham, live mainly in the mountains, the central highlands and the Mekong Delta. Many have their own languages and faiths, and some, such as the highland peoples who fought alongside the Americans, have tense relations with the state.^•

Faiths. Catholics, a legacy of the missionary era and the French period, form a close-knit community; about 800,000 or more northern Catholics fled south in 1954.^•

The diaspora. Roughly five million people of Vietnamese descent live abroad. The largest community, about 2.2–2.3 million, is in the United States, built largely by refugees and their children; the biggest concentration is “Little Saigon” in Orange County, California. Older refugee communities often fly the yellow flag with three red stripes of the former South Vietnam and remain strongly anti-communist. France has a long-established community from the colonial era, and Germany, the Czech Republic and other former Eastern Bloc countries have communities that came as guest workers from communist Vietnam. Australia and Canada took tens of thousands of boat people.^•

Meeting someone

Conversation starters

• Food. Ask about their favourite dish, their region’s specialities, or where to find good phở or bánh mì. Food is a source of joy and pride.
• Home town and Tết. Where their family is from, and how they celebrate the New Year.^•
  • Understanding Vietnam — Neil L. Jamieson, University of California Press (1993)
• Family. Asking about parents and siblings is normal and welcome; you may be asked your age, marital status and even your salary in return, which is a way of working out how to address you.
• Coffee. Vietnamese coffee culture is a safe and happy topic.

Topics to approach carefully

• The war and 1975. Don’t assume which side someone’s family was on. A person from Hanoi and a refugee’s child in California may tell the story in opposite ways. Let them lead.^•
  • Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Harvard University Press (2016)
• Hồ Chí Minh and the flag. In Vietnam he is revered and criticism can be risky; among older diaspora Vietnamese, the red flag with a yellow star can be deeply painful.^•
  • Ho Chi Minh: A Biography — Pierre Brocheux, Cambridge University Press (2007)
  • Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees — Yến Lê Espiritu, University of California Press (2014)
• China. Be careful with the South China Sea and with assuming Vietnamese culture is “basically Chinese”.^•
  • Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present — Ben Kiernan, Oxford University Press (2017)
• Politics. People in Vietnam may avoid political discussion with strangers, especially online. Don’t push.

Common misconceptions

• “Vietnam is a war.” It is a country of about 100 million people with four thousand years of claimed history; the American war was one chapter.^•
  • Completed Results of the 2019 Viet Nam Population and Housing Census — General Statistics Office of Vietnam, Statistical Publishing House (2020)
• “Vietnamese must hate Americans.” Most are welcoming, and many young people admire the US.^•
  • Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
• “Vietnam is just a smaller China.” It borrowed much from China, as Europe borrowed from Rome, but has its own language, customs and a long history of defining itself against China.^•
  • A History of the Vietnamese — K. W. Taylor, Cambridge University Press (2013)
  • Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century — Alexander Woodside, Harvard University Press (1971)
• “The war was a simple North versus South, or communists versus Americans.” It was also a civil war, a revolution and an anti-colonial struggle, and millions of Vietnamese fought on each side.^•
  • Vietnam: A New History — Christopher Goscha, Basic Books (2016)
  • Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam — Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press (2012)
• “It’s still a poor, closed country.” Since Đổi Mới, Vietnam has become a major manufacturing and export economy and a popular destination for travellers.^•
  • Vietnam 2035: Toward Prosperity, Creativity, Equity, and Democracy — World Bank and Ministry of Planning and Investment of Vietnam, World Bank (2016)