Esterhammer - So happiness to meet you: foolishly, blissfully stranded in Vietnam

ADVANCE PRAISE

Karin Esterhammer has artfully delineated what its like to live outside your comfort zone. Her sharpshooters eye for detail captures the Vietnamese people, their culture, and the pretzels an American family has to twist themselves into in order to adapt.

Phil Doran,

author of The Reluctant Tuscan

When life hands you financial ruinas the Great Recession did to former LA Times journalist Karin Esterhammerthe answer might seem simple: Why not move to Vietnam? Along with her husband and child, Esterhammer did just that, facing her new life in Ho Chi Minh City with courage, wit, and an open heart, all the while examining one of lifes biggest questions: What is it that truly makes us wealthy? Its an unforgettableand importantadventure of the body, soul, and pocketbook.

Alison Singh Gee,

author of Where the Peacocks Sing: A Prince, a Palace, and the Search for Home

A loopy adventure and charming cautionary tale for anyone whos ever dreamed of packing it in and starting over somewhere newthe perfect read for the armchair expat.

Mark Haskell Smith,

author of Naked at Lunch and Baked

Copyright 2017 by Karin Esterhammer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A few lines in the book were previously published in the Los Angeles Times.

Published by Prospect Park Books

2359 Lincoln Avenue

Altadena, CA 91001

www.prospectparkbooks.com

Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

www.cbsd.com

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Esterhammer, Karin, author.

Title: So happiness to meet you: foolishly, blissfully stranded in Vietnam / by Karin Esterhammer.

Description: Altadena: Prospect Park Books, [2017].

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047486 (print) | LCCN 2016048366 (ebook) | ISBN 9781938849985 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)--Description and travel. | Vietnam--Social life and customs. | Americans--Foreign countries.

Classification: LCC DS556.39 .E87 2017 (print) | LCC DS556.39 (ebook) | DDC

959.7/7--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047486

Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan

Book layout and design by Amy Inouye, Future Studio

Author photo by Marisa Cooper

For my mom

I miss you

Table of Contents

Contents

DISCLAIMER

This book contains trace amounts of humor. Do not read while driving. Also, I changed the names of all but the main players to protect my neighbors privacy. Otherwise, the story is all true. Really, you can trust me.

Cake comes; cake goes.

(VIETNAMESE PROVERB)

IF YOU EVER GET THE CHANCE to become stranded in a foreign country with no money to get home, I recommend Vietnam. I say this because while you are boo-hooing and berating your rash decision to sell all your earthly belongings and move to this steamy hot Southeast Asian nation, like I did, you might pause long enough to ponder Vietnams own history of hardships: back-to-back wars, colonization, famines, and those seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries who couldnt make heads or tails of the writing system, so with a haughty, ethnocentric sniff, replaced the ideograms with the Roman alphabet, thus rendering the classics unreadable to future generations. The Vietnamese are philosophical about struggle: Dont look back; tomorrow will be better.

As I sat at the kitchen table in my sweltering, nine-foot-wide house in Ho Chi Minh City, my young Vietnamese teacher explained hardship this way: Life ee like being on a boat and you have to drive you boat, but a beeeg ship go by you and make beeeg wave and you get trouble with you boat and you almost fall off boat. Then wave go back down and everything ee calm. But then there ee nothing to do.

I tried to decipher Tin Nguyens point. Did he really believe that life is dull without adversity? I knew he was trying to cheer me up. Id been depressed lately about all that Id lost in the Great Recession, though I hadnt told him so specifically. Why say anything? Id already obliterated all chances for sympathy just by flying to Vietnam. My neighbors needed only to apply a little inductive reasoning: The Americans purchased airfare to Vietnam. It takes a lot of money to fly to Vietnam. Therefore, they have a lot of money.

I knew that Tin, who was a born-again-and-again-and-again Buddhist, would be mystified by my Western worldview that the Joneses were viable opponents, that satisfaction with the hand life dealt was a character flaw, and that frequent spending was a lovely way to stave off the unhappiness that always threatened to engulf me if I thought or felt too deeply. In fact, the insidious cycle of always wanting more and more (which seems to be part and parcel of the American Dream), and then precariously tying those material possessions to my identity, had worn me down physically and emotionally. I hadnt realized how exhausted I was until Id lost it all. By the time I got to Vietnam, I nearly stumbledwearied, worn, and whimperinginto the arms of my new neighbors, who smiled sweetly and intoned, I didnt know what it meant, but I thanked them for their kindness. (Loosely translated: Oh, for the love of God, stop complaining!)

My attention shifted to a noisy fly that alternately attacked a basket of sweet, oozing mangoes on the table and the drops of moisture on my brow. Annoyed at the zzzz-ing around my face, I inadvertently swatted myself. My sweat glands shifted into overdrive and I felt a rivulet of water drip down my back, soaking the waistband of my skirt. It was only 10 a.m. and odor already wafted up from my armpits. Holy crap, Vietnam is hot.

Tin (pronounced Din), twenty-five years old and runway-model gorgeous, also focused on the fly. He stood up suddenly and whapped it senseless in mid-flight. The obnoxious creature fell to the tile floor, its black, thread-thin legs curled up. Dead. Wahoo! Tins quick reflexes astonished me. He normally moved like an astronaut out for a Sunday spacewalk. My gentle tutor, sliver-thin in his neatly pressed slacks and short-sleeved dress shirt, languidly sat back down and wagged one of his long, slender fingers at me. Ee time to pay attention. I looked back at him. He flashed his straight, white teeth, framing them with a gentle smile. You wasting ow-ah lesson time.

I was indeed. And for good reason. These Vietnamese lessons werent going very well and I felt embarrassed. Unbeknownst to me up till now, I had the language facility of a Cheez Doodle. My husband, our eight-year-old son, and I had been living in Vietnam for more than a month already and I hadnt even mastered the alphabet. It wasnt so much the twenty-nine Roman letters, but the six tonal inflections that changed the sounds of those letters. If you raised your voice, lowered it, wiggled your voice box, or warbled like you were choking on a frog, the meaning of the word changed. Swallow too-hot coffee and you might well be in danger of telling your neighbor that his mother looks like a pork chop.