The Vietnam Rationale

Two Score and Four Years Ago.....

The guy on the right here left his native home of Vietnam to attend Columbia University in New York City. Having mastered the Latin language and equipped with a solid education from the prestigious Jean-Jacques Rousseau high school in Saigon, Monsieur Gabriel Pham (nee Pham Thanh Duong) entered, or was forced into rather, a premed and engineering curriculum.

Following his undergraduate studies, Gabriel entered medical school but immediately transfered to History after fainting at the first sight of blood. Reading up on European colonialism in Asia (The British and China; The Dutch and Indonesia; and, of course, The French and Vietnam), he was able to prolong his time on Columbia's campus, where he rubbed elbows with the likes of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and the other unhygienic Beats and, so he claims, invented Ultimate Frisbee.

Eventually, his academic philandering would place him in a position to meet the young lady sitting to his right, Ms. Zoe Janette Jones. Born to a Yankee mother and Southern father, Zoe was fresh out of Smith and had only been on the ground in New York for one hour before she met Gabriel outside of Chinese class smoking a Camel cigarette, unfiltered no doubt.

Fast forward a little, and we find the couple sitting around a Chinese banquet on their wedding day. Their elopement went unrecognized by the Jones family; and the Phams were too preoccupied with setting their lives straight after relocating to Paris following the fall of Saigon.

Turn the dial a little more, one medical degree later, a daughter in '79, and we eventually get to me in '81. As any reader will know, the '80s were a blur, and they will remain that way herein except for one essential mention of another daughter in '87. However, this long diatribe of familial concerns is at best a jocular attempt to thank the powers of procreation and is a digression from my main point of this post: a rationale for why I am here in Vietnam.

Asked recently, by a dear friend, how and why I decided to move where and when I have, I must do all I can to hold back my canned response of regurgitating statistics of the country's explosive economic growth and the boom in hotel developments of which are my main concern, as though the "gold rush" (and the American economic recession) are all that bring me to Vietnam's shores. While I can feel the palpable sense of excitement surrounding the country's economy and the sweet smell of concrete and sights of cranes are alluring, my cultural roots have been calling. Maybe it's wanderlust, but I truly had no desire to move anywhere else but here. As sappy and nostalgic as it may sound, Vietnam feels like home to me. I hope to make a positive impact here, not just within an industry but within the society as well. They call it the Peoples Republic, right?

I didn't feel this in New York. And to be quite frank, New York I love you but you totally brought me down. The cost of living in the city is out of control and has forced most of its creative denizens across the river to Brooklyn or, even worse, Jersey. (Kidding.) Don't get me wrong, NYC and its people are the best in the world. Hands down. I will always identify myself as New Yorker, and compare everything I do to its scale of scrutiny. But the marginal benefits of living there were quickly diminishing, so I bought a one-way ticket and won't leave until someone asks me to.

Please excuse me if you feel as though this crude and vaguely revelatory passage is unbecoming of a gentleman. I never claimed to be Greene's "Quiet American."