Yesterday I arrived in Siquijor island, Philippines. I had a long night, woke up, and felt my heart heavy for no specific reason.
The ocean view is more than beautiful. Dogs are taking care of me, and I’m having a cup of Earl grey tea. I thought this anxiety came from my harassment experience recently. But it is not. I just felt so sad, painful, and anxious… and I cried.
And there you go, it leads me to a sentence I heard yesterday when I was trying to find a parking lot at a restaurant in Talibaran (a coastal city in Bohol island, Philippines). When the man knew that I’m from Vietnam, the first and only sentence he said was:
“Ah, Vietnam. Vietnamese women are very hard-working.”
I’m crying because of this sentence. It brought me back to many memories and stories I heard from other women in Vietnam, my mom, auntie, grandma, and even myself.
My aunt is now on her trip to Canada. But it’s not only a normal trip to visit her dear son. It’s a trip of letting go. She thought about it many times and arranged a lot of things just to be absent for two weeks from her house and her company. She never took a two-week vacation leave from her company in 25 years. “I’m afraid…” was the sentence she told me many times. Afraid that her second son can’t be taken well, afraid that she would lose her job because two weeks is too long, afraid that people would not be happy… Because she is taking a trip on her own? For more than 40 years you were living for other people. It’s your time now, auntie. I told her.
My mom wants me to get married since a long time ago already. And every time she calls, it will come to that point. Almost every man I meet, she will point out to me, he is good at this, he is not like that but just accept it, and sometimes when I meet a man who made me feel like I will have to carry all of the work in the house just like many other Vietnamese women: work hard at the company, and work harder at home. No time to rest, no time to enjoy themselves… What would I do? And yet, they will stay in the marriage even though love and respect died many years ago.
In Vietnam culture, we have a sentence that goes “công, dung, ngôn, hạnh” which taught a woman how to live their life. This came from the Confucian perception that existed for thousands of years. I quoted a simple explanation about this from a Quora user:
- Công (nữ công gia chánh): work, or more correctly, housework. Vietnamese women are expected to be in charge of the house, from cleaning and cooking to gardening.
- Dung (dung nhan): appearance. Yes, we value looks. A pretty girl is more appreciated than an ugly girl.
- Ngôn (phát ngôn): speech manner. The way she speaks reflects who she is. Vietnamese women are expected to be soft-spoken and "womanly." Which means no slang, no big words, no shouting, and no "manly" manner.
- Hạnh (đức hạnh): good behavior. Treat the parents right. Make the husband happy. Take care of the kids. Stay home. No gossiping.
It is not enough. There is also a “Tam tòng: Tại gia tòng phụ. Xuất giá tòng phu. Phu tử tòng tử.” When still young in the family, they had to submit to their fathers; when married, they had to submit to their husbands; and when their husbands die they had to submit to their children). In the family, the husbands are patriarchs and family masters, having the right to decide all family affairs. So even though many things have changed, Vietnamese women have much more freedom and the right to decide their life and the way they want to live, this kind of old (and odd) thinking still exists commonly in the society of Vietnam.
I’m crying because this was not the first time I heard the sentence “Vietnamese women are hard-working” from a foreign man. In the past two months, I heard this from other Asian and Westerners also. Obviously, in many cases, people want to get married to a Vietnamese woman because she is hardworking and hardworking as the Confucian thinking I mentioned above. This “thing about Vietnamese women” just came to me recently on my travel, I never expected to hear this many times from foreign men.
Being hardworking is by all means a great trait. But Vietnamese women have more than that. Like any other woman on this planet, we want the life we want and we will work hard on it, but not the life other people think we should have.
So maybe, thank you for appraising Vietnamese women about being hard-working, and I will be hard-working. However, not to please other people but to live the life I want.
After reading this post, one of my new Filipino guy friends sent me a message and it brought me another perspective.
“I do not know where that man is coming to tell you that, but I am going to tell you that it is because I know that life in Vietnam before is very hard and all of its people have to work hard regardless of gender. Same here in the Philippines, women struggled and fought for their lives and rights as well. That is why if you say to a Filipina that "you are hard-working" it means you exercise your right, you are strong, and you don't need a man to live with. Because before, women were merely servants, they didn't even have the right to vote. But you are correct, people should not say anything they think is correct to any person especially foreign persons without knowing their culture.”
So actually, I did not have a problem with the man who said: “Vietnamese women are very hard-working.” He said it out of purity, and as a compliment with a big smile to me. It was just a situation, a tipping point of my reflections about women of Vietnam and other Asian cultures somehow.
This is an excellent example of traveling and learning, especially when I have the chance to connect and talk deeply with local people. Thank you, Philippines!
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