International Relations

For most of their wedding, Do Thi Thanh Thuy and Andrea Da Gasso followed Vietnamese tradition, lighting incense, wearing ao dai, and marching gifts over from the groom’s house.

But as for the ritual of clinking glasses at every table, Andrea didn’t want to drink that much alcohol. So his aunt brought from their native Milan what he called 'a kind of keo' — confetti, or chocolate-covered almonds that brides and grooms deliver, table by table, at Italian weddings.

Such cultural compromises began long before the nuptials and, as with so many mixed-nationality couples in Vietnam, they continue long after.

“She’s open to learn about my culture,” Andrea, 42, says of his wife, “and that’s important to me.”

Couples like Andrea and Thuy represent roughly 2 percent of marriages in Vietnam each year, according to the Ministry of Justice. Of 668,026 marriage certificates issued in 2010, for instance, 13,882 went to foreign-Vietnamese couples.

When people travel to Vietnam and fall in love with locals, the couples embark on not just long-term relationships but long-term questions about how to marry their own habits and traditions with those of their partners.

Dating the family

More than anything, Confucian obsession with filial piety can complicate romances, from day one. Gia dinh la tren het, as the Vietnamese say. Family first.

Thuy, 30, met Andrea in 2008 when he visited the art gallery she was managing, to see about displaying his photography. He teased her about pronouncing 'next week' like 'Nesquick' and asked her out. After some qualms about dating a client, she finally agreed.

But like the majority of single Vietnamese, Thuy was living with her parents, so early on, dates ended with the pair sitting outside her house. From a balcony, her mother could watch over them or shout down to them about how late it was and shouldn’t he be going?

Doru Tudose, from Bucharest, met similar suspicion when he started dating Nguyen Han in 2006.

“In the first days, when I was picking her up, her mother was looking mean, no eye contact,” Doru, 34, says.

The two have since married and opened Bootleg Cafe together. But Han, 32, explained that at the time her parents were wary of foreigners, whose time in Vietnam could be fleeting, and they didn’t think it was proper for her to go out with Doru.

But the couple didn’t have as hard a time as Sonia Watson, 29, and Nguyen Hung, 28. Raised in Paris but identifying as British like her mother, Sonia is a rare white woman to marry a Vietnamese man. Hung says the gender reversal was a problem right away, in part because his parents expected him to marry a Vietnamese who would move in with them. On the other hand, a Vietnamese woman wed to a foreigner could make a smoother transition, because custom already requires that she move out of her parents’ house. Tuoi Tre newspaper quoted government statistics in July estimating that four in five Vietnamese who marry foreigners are women.

“It’s easier for a foreign husband and Vietnamese wife, because in Asian countries the man is usually more important. So if a daughter marries a foreigner, parents think she’ll have a better life,” says Hung, who works in customer care at Lakeview Villas.

Sonia, a behavioural therapist, becomes emotional when she recalls how Hung’s parents initially ignored her. His father walked out when she brought mooncakes the first time they met; his mother continued cooking rather than respond when she announced she was pregnant.

“We had big, big fights,” Sonia says. “They wanted me out of his life and did everything they could to get me out.”

That was years ago. But a newer couple, Doan Thi Ngoc Hien and Arnaud Darras, are now facing similar resistance from the Vietnamese side.

The couple have a lot to prove to Hien’s family. Arnaud, a manager of a heating ventilation and air conditioning company, is from Bordeaux but met Hien online in January, and they got married here in August. While talking with AsiaLIFE at a restaurant downtown, Hien feeds Arnaud ice cream and describes how her family urges her to marry rich, especially because they are well-off already.

Arnaud, 40, says Hien’s brother wanted to set her up with one of his wealthy friends.

“Later, when he sees we’re happy, we have a child, we’re still married, they will think, ‘He’s a good guy, we can accept him,’” Arnaud says, lacing his fingers around Hien’s. “But for now, I know it’s not the case.”

Hien, 28 and a sales manager at a shipping company, is adamant her family will have to come around.

But in the beginning, some choose not to deal with their families. That is, they lie. It’s common enough for women to date by telling parents they’re going out with friends. Thuy took it a step further, spending a weekend with Andrea on Phu Quoc island. What did her parents think she was doing? Surveying a client hotel for her art gallery.

“They don’t agree with me to go overnight with a man, but I follow my heart,” she says, sitting cross-legged on the floor at home with that man, whom she affectionately calls Heo, Pig.

On the island, they booked separate rooms, hers with a balcony from which she could listen to his guitar serenade. They grilled seafood on the beach and had their first kiss.
Hung made up a different story to stay with Sonia for a week. He came down with chickenpox after they met and told his parents he would go to a friend’s so the family wouldn’t catch it.

Tilting at stereotypes

Thuy says she trusts Andrea, with whom she shares a photography business out of their house in Binh Thanh District. But during the courtship, she kept an ear to friends who warned that when it comes to Vietnamese, westerners love them and leave them. And sometimes, leave them pregnant. When Thuy and Andrea finally visited Milan together, she went in part to check he didn’t have another wife and children in Italy.

The stereotypes cut both ways, says Doan Thi Ngoc, an instructor at Hoa Sen University’s Gender and Society Research Centre. Vietnamese women who walk down the street with western men can be seen as prostituting themselves or marrying for money and a passport, she says.

But Ngoc has found that people opened their minds as Vietnam opened its doors economically and socially. More tourism, wealth, business links, exposure to pop culture, and intermarriage, have meant that “attitudes can be more open,” she says.

Integration

In the case of intermarriage, Vietnamese families tend to open up to foreigners not just because they stick around, but because they adapt.

The process begins with le phep, deference to parents, from learning to address them respectfully, to having them over or visiting at least once a week. Andrea remembers one meal when he began eating before Thuy’s parents — a faux pas in Vietnamese culture, which dictates that younger generations invite older ones to eat first.

But few changes have a larger impact on the dynamics of relationships than a foreigner’s decision to take up Vietnamese.

“I want to learn everything,” says Arnaud, adding that Hien will teach him Vietnamese.

“You cannot understand the way of life of a country without learning the language.”

That’s still a work-in-progress for Adam Schofield, from Manchester, and Le Thi Ngo Nhien. Since his studying has dropped off, Adam is more likely to use his language CD during a DJ gig than a Vietnamese lesson. Red tape has stalled their marital plans, but the two have a 1-year-old son, and Adam says he’ll probably try learning Vietnamese again when his son does.

Sonia studied Vietnamese for a few years and says she’s grateful to participate during festivities, such as wishing her in-laws good health and longevity. But she and Hung generally lapse into English, which Ngoc, the university instructor, says reflects a 40-60 balance between Vietnamese and westerners.

“Just in my own opinion, still one side is dominant,” Ngoc says. “Vietnamese usually have to follow other cultures, but they enjoy that culture, too.”

The language barrier intrudes most obviously when husbands and wives can't communicate with their in-laws, or even pronounce each other's names correctly.

English is but one symptom of how far western influence has spread, but that makes it a more widely useful language than Vietnamese.

Partly for that reason and to keep a vacation-like barrier between him and the country, Doru, the Romanian, chooses never to adopt Vietnamese. Though Han wants him to learn, Doru is blunt in his refusal. Just as he never acquired a taste for local cuisine, Doru thinks no one has to change his ways for others. Yet he admits, “When we chose that she would learn English, subliminally, we were choosing to live on my terms.”

Gender divide

Han makes the compromise, reasoning that living on western terms is to her benefit.

Wearing a white lace dress and heavy bangs, she says during an interview at her bar-cafe that the arrangement puts her on a more equal footing with Doru.

“Vietnamese men want us to be traditional, clean the house, cook, take care of the kids,” she says in Vietnamese. On the other hand, if she washes clothes, Doru dries them. If she cooks, he washes dishes. Not that she likes to cook.

She writes off Vietnamese men as selfish and jealous, but Vietnamese women own up to their spars with the green-eyed monster, too. Chalk it up to a society that leaves little room for friendships with the other sex, particularly after marriage.

Adam, 33, and Nhien, 27, have trouble finding middle ground here. They’re butterflies in a social scene ripe for jealousy because they like to DJ at clubs. Across from the altar in their parlour at home is a corner turntable. She sees less nightlife now their son Lucajay is in the picture, while Adam continues to work, which he says requires him to be, in a word, friendly. Still, Adam tries to curb the flirting, and Nhien tries to overlook his habit of calling people ‘darling’ and ‘love’.

“Women always want to be number one,” she says. “If he just hugs anybody, I feel like I’m the same as them, I’m nothing special.”

Sonia doesn’t worry so much about jealousy or infidelity. Friends had warned her of those problems among Vietnamese men, who they said drank, expected to be waited on, and hit their wives. Those formed an image that Sonia says turned her white girlfriends off from Asians. It doesn’t help that Asian males defy a somewhat western construct that they must be bigger and taller than females (Sonia notes that she’s taller than Hung). If dating sites are any indication, Asian men are some of the least successful pursuers, according to a 2009 study published in Social Science Research.

Asian women ranked among the most sought-after.

But Sonia has been attracted to Asian men most her life, while she considers herself nothing like traditional Asian women.

“I complain a lot,” she says, before turning to her husband in the living room of their District 7 apartment. “Your life would be easier with a Vietnamese wife.”

He considers. “You make me think about it.”

“Admit it, you know it’s true,” she says. “You’d live with your parents, you’d come home and everything would be done.”

Hung turns back to the interview, joking, “She wants me to get a Vietnamese wife.”

Bringing up baby

As couples go about welding their two worlds, no issue complicates the process more than the question of children. Hien and Arnaud want to conceive this month, while Andrea and Doru each need some convincing from their wives.

Those with children must then decide on a bevy of compromises. Will they keep the newborn inside the house until the first-month celebration? What will they feed the baby? For education, will they enroll in a Vietnamese school, pay five figures for an international program, or move to the foreign spouse’s home country?

Despite the challenges, parents say having children has smoothed the welding process. At first, Nhien earned her mother and father’s disapproval by drinking and going out late with Adam.

“But they’re happier now that I settled down and have a stable family,” she says.
For Hung and Sonia, 2-year-old Tam has made all the difference. When she became pregnant, they got not a single 'congratulations' from Hung’s parents, who harbored something verging on contempt for her.

Over the months, some of the animosity subsided and his mother even began to smile.

“The bigger I got, the more they realised, this is really happening,” Sonia says, before her son interrupts to ask for an explanation. He is holding a book, pointing to a picture of milk.

The day he was born, Tam’s paternal grandparents transformed completely. They spent the day at the hospital, tending to Sonia and cradling their hours-old grandson. It was as if they had always gotten along, and they never looked back.

While selecting a name, Sonia and Hung considered Tam, which means 'heart' when topped with a hat-shaped accent marker. But her mother observed that in Scotland, where she grew up, the name also means 'Tom'. So they opted to forgo the marker, leaving their son with a Vietnamese heart, and a western one, too.