Saving Face (and Hindsight)

The Vietnamese flag
(Photo taken in Hanoi, 2013)

I found one last blog draft on my desktop while doing a little virtual spring-cleaning. It's interesting to see how my perspective changed so dramatically in just a few weeks while I was in Hanoi: I wrote the below draft about halfway through my stay with CVTD in Vietnam, and my post here called "The modern Vietnamese woman" was drafted a week or so later.

I'm really proud that I did not publish the following account first; it really shows how much I still had to learn. In it, I hear a lot of arrogance in myself and a lot of that world-renowned "ugly American" attitude. I hope I have grown a lot since then. See what you think! And please read my other posts too, if this is your first time visiting my blog. :) I promise we Americans do try to be culturally sensitive!*

(Written March 20, 2013)

My first experience with the concept of saving face was fascinating. Three adults were in my first class, and we were playing “2 Truths 1 Lie.” One student was having difficulty, and he said the sentences, “I am from Hanoi. I don’t know English. I speak English.” The unfortunate truth was that the third was false, and the class realized this, but we would all lose face if we said that one student could not speak English. I winged it, and honestly I’m not sure what I would have said if the other students and my teaching assistant hadn’t come to the rescue. 

The student was visibly uncomfortable and I asked the class, “So… which one is false?” His neighbor timidly added a new sentence for him: “I am from [nearby town].” The teaching assistant jumped in, saying, “Ah, yes I think he will have four sentences.” At this point I caught on, and asked again, “Ok! Which one is false?” And everyone heartily agreed that the fourth sentence was false, since the students were all from Hanoi. No one wanted to make him feel bad or say that he could not speak English well, so they saved him. This graceful social footwork made me truly grasp the reason we save face, although I know that I will still struggle with it. I am hopeful that I can practice graciously saving my own face and that of others. 

According to my flatmate, this wasn’t really an example of “face.” But I do want to remember the way I understood this helpful moment between Vietnamese peers.

* I think it is hard for Americans to fully understand other cultures purely by traveling on vacation. As a nation, we are highly mixed ethnically, and most Americans (Canadians too, I suppose! And, well... all nations nowadays!) do have more than two ethnicities in their immediate ancestry. For this reason, I think the "pure-bred" American is, simply put, a natural born traveler! It takes us a long time to truly understand people because we have to live abroad to gain a full appreciation for our fellow human, rather than just pass through as tourists.