Progress By Pho Pas

LONDON—Enter any cheap café in Vietnam and you are likely to be welcomed by a steaming bowl of the national dish “pho bò,” or beef noodle soup. Look around the café and you might notice something odd: almost every patron is male and almost every server is female. Go outside and the story is similar. While men wile away the days idling over iced coffee, women toil in the paddies, planting rice, gathering it, and then manning stalls to sell it at market. Holding all top political and business jobs, men run the show—women are merely the servile hard workers.

Not so for the lone female traveler.

As a woman making my own decisions and paying my own way, I was awarded a quasi-male status. So, on a boat between island and shore in HaLong Bay, I was invited to share a meal with the dozen other passengers, all males. Glasses brimming with beer and vodka were passed around and repeatedly refilled. Tureens of steaming fish arrived and disappeared into empty stomachs. They kept raising random toasts to nothing—over twenty in all.

Only halfway through the meal did I glance around and notice the only woman on board. I realized she had cooked our food, served it, and was now holding the boat steady on course until the men finished their meal and deigned to choose a direction. She caught my eye and smiled softly. The distance between us was vast: Traveling alone and choosing my own direction, I was effectively male. She would never be anything but a wife serving fish to menfolk.

Unfortunately, defying social convention has its price. I was not always invited to sit at the men’s table and share their vodka. Instead, most of the invitations I received were of the teeth-sucking variety—tooth-sucking being the Vietnamese equivalent of a wolf whistle. One particularly juicy chat-up line—“Can I have some watermelon?” referring of course to my unfinished plate of fruit—had me sniggering in the suitor’s face. Men, boys, and even occasionally old women disturbed me in parks, in restaurants, on buses—everywhere, as if the appearance of a lone woman triggered an irresistible urge to make unwanted advances (or, in the case of the old women, to poke and prod).

One incident went beyond irritating. In my brief overnight stay in the tiny mountain town of Tam Duong, I was harassed by two rather vile specimens. One drunkenly clutched at my hand before handing out his business card (lucky me), and then attempted to charge into my hotel room after me. Fortunately, I snappily closed the door. Another, after failing to gain entrance by continually knocking on the door, settled down to wait outside. Neither my command for him to “go away” nor a threat to “smash his [expletive] face in” persuaded him that I did not want to “be his friend.” It ended only when I emerged, armed (rationally) with a pen, a key, and a coat hanger in order to flee past him to reception.

Perhaps such unpleasant reminders of my vulnerability should be enough to make me stay at home. Any woman bold enough to stray alone from the family fold is surely fair game. She would be better off finding some nice secretarial work close to home or meekly holding the boat steady while her menfolk make merry. Or, as Mansfield would have it, perhaps I was responsible for endangering myself by being so immodest as to travel alone (at night no less!).



Auspiciously, both Western and the more traditional Vietnamese gender roles are being broken down. Here, more and more women defy social conventions, stepping beyond family and farm to create their own economic opportunities. Try telling Trang, a woman I met who works six days a week in a bar and studies English and computer science all seven, that she would be better off at home with her rice-farmer parents; or Minh, a business student working twelve-hour shifts as a waitress six days a week.

It’s not easy for them to confront social norms that would limit them to the role of a subordinate worker in a society run by men. Yet they persist, promoting change person by person. Society could do with more of such defiance of the status quo, in both east and west.



Juliet S. Samuel ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. She missed Pimm’s the most during her stay in Vietnam, but she now misses pho bò even more.