Wednesday, February 16, 2011

me love you long time (part 1)

The managing director at my firm came out of retirement to do a tour of duty in Vietnam. He's a 6' 4" (1.93 meters) Scot. Everywhere we go together, we usually get second and even third glances. Initially, I didn't notice the attention we were drawing, until he brought it up. I don't get such glances if I am with someone with an Asian background (e.g., Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.), but in these parts where there are a number of stories about married or single expats finding local women and/or local women hoping to 'catch' a foreigner to bring them to another country, the combination of yellow skinned woman and white skinned man automatically calls for such assumption.

One can argue that the additional glances are due to the significant height differences with his tall build against my diminutive stature. Until...while we went on a walkabout for him to show me a bit of the city to acclimate me to the locales of the necessities (e.g., post office, convenience store, vendors with American DVD's, etc.), a female vendor asked him in English, 'you buy?' He responded with 'too small'. The object was a pair of boxer shorts. As he was walking away, she yelled to me in Vietnamese, 'miss, you should buy for him. I have 3x'. I'm not sure what made me laugh more - the fact that she assumed I was his lady love or that she assumed he wore size 3x.

For the record, this is not a case of 'yellow fever' although I have been accused of being the initial cause of an addiction to 'yellow fever' (and for some reason, which can be analyzed another day, I was offended by the accusation).

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