Family

"We spend Thanksgiving with family. We spend Christmas with the people we love." -- Unknown

I’m a Westerner who grew up in a family that was NOT emotionally close to each other. With a few noticeable exceptions, e.g. the Olsens across the street, we seemed to be similar to most families I saw. I felt so isolated growing up that, until a very recent reconciliation, I referred to my immediate family mostly as

People with whom I share DNA

Then, at age 61, I moved to Vietnam.

What a difference an ocean makes!

What follows is based on my personal experiences and conversations with locals, including the woman I married and her family. I’ve been paying close attention and it’s my reality.

Family in Vietnam is sacred. It trumps everything. EVERYTHING!

Vietnam society appears to this outsider to be “tribal”. By this I mean that family comes first, neighbors come next, and no one else matters, not even a little. As a foreigner, I will never really be in a tribe, even though I’m married to a Vietnamese woman who’s spent her entire life in this small city and all but a few years living on the plot of land where she grew up. Because I provide for a couple members of the tribe, I’m accepted, but I will never be a member.

The only exception is my daughter, whom I first met when she was four-years-old. She loves me as if I were her biological father and, if she ever thought about it, I’m sure she considers me a member of her tribe. But her mother, my wife, doesn’t.

For example, I came into some money and we decided to use it to build a house here in Dalat, the most desired city, the garden spot of Vietnam. Without exception, when I am anywhere else in Vietnam and a Vietnamese person asks where I live and I say, “Đá Lạt”, their reaction is the same:

I LOVE Đá Lạt! It’s so beautiful; the weather is so nice; I want to live there!!!

Consequently, thousands of people who live somewhere else own land or a house here that they’re hoping to move to “some day”, most likely when they retire. Their demand drives up prices to where land costs as much here as it does in Saigon, Vietnam’s largest city.

Now imagine all those unoccupied houses, most of whose owners can’t afford two properties, on the rental market. This over-saturates the rental market, driving prices down. You can rent nice a 3-bedroom, 2-bath row house in Dalat for less than $600 per month, including utilities and high-speed 5G Internet. So…

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Why Buy or Build?

I want to ensure that our daughter will never have to worry about having a place to live, so I decided to buy some land and build a house. Without her in my life, I would NEVER build or buy a house here, because I could rent for 50 years for the same money — and I’ll be lucky to have another 20 years. A second reason is that even though I pay 100% of the cost to build the house, my name cannot be in the red book (the deed) because I’m a foreigner. In Vietnam, foreigners are allowed to own an apartment or condo, but not dirt. Because I’m married and the red book is in my wife’s name, my interest is protected because Vietnam has “community property” laws; what we acquire during the marriage is split 50/50 if we were to divorce.

Did I mention that the standard building construction here is SHIT? In a later post I will share what we had to go through to build a house that won’t, like 98% of the houses in Vietnam, have black mold in/on the walls in five years or less. It wasn’t pretty.

All the reasons NOT to build or buy a house don’t come close to providing housing security for my daughter and, eventually, her children and grandchildren.

Before I got the money, my wife and I spent months discussing the house we wanted to build — a three- or four-story in a quiet neighborhood, with two ensuite bedrooms, a shop for her, and an office for me. Most of the lots here are between four and six meters (~10 to 13 feet) wide, sandwiched between other houses (think “row house”) so they build up, not out.

The view from my office balcony shows the most common style of house

There’s a hard lesson coming

When I got the money, I was visiting the US for a bit of work and a few meetings, so I called my wife to tell her the good news. I also asked her to start looking for land on which we would build our house. At this point, I had only lived in Vietnam for six years and did not yet fully realize or appreciate the nuances of family relationships and how they would completely fuck me over. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have told her anything until I got home.

Although she knew a couple realtors and is well connected to people who speculate in land, she asked her father to help her look. He told her she didn’t need to look for land because he would sign over his house to her if we would build our new house on that land so the five of us could all live there. He didn’t mention that the house was infested with black mold he had tiled over so maybe no one would notice. Or care.

During our house-planning discussions, she and I had briefly discussed doing exactly this and both agreed that this was NOT something we wanted to do. We wanted our own house on our own land.

So of course she said yes to her father. Although we talked daily, she neglected to mention it to me.

By the time I got home five days later, her parents had:

1. Moved out of their house

2. Rented a neighbor’s spare room to store their belongings

3. Moved in with one of their other daughters

4. Gutted the house so the only thing to do was tear it down

The in-law’s house a week or so after I returned to Dalat.

As my mantra states,

And in Việt Nam, elders are revered and anyone even 2 minutes older is obeyed and agreed with without question (unless you’re married to them).

Bố is King

In addition, VN is a “high-context” culture. This means that 95+% of communication is indirect and appears to someone from a low-context culture, to be almost passive-aggressive. So when her father said, “if we would build”, it meant “you will build.” Since elders, especially parents, are obeyed without question, she HAD to do it. It didn’t matter what she and I had previously discussed, decided, and agreed to, a Vietnamese father is “he who will be obeyed”.

She knew that because I am a strong-willed foreigner, she couldn’t tell me any of this until I got home. She also had to make it irreversible by the time I got home because I am not someone who would say, “too bad your parents tore down their house, ‘cause I’m not building here and living with them.” Unfortunately, we did not have sufficient funds to rebuild their house and buy/build one of our own. So we built a big, beautiful, bespoke house on that land.

I’d love to say that it all worked out and everyone is very happy, but that would be a lie. No one is happy with the arrangement, but we’re living with it as best we can. I want to sell it, split the money with her parents, and go back to our original plan/agreement, but she doesn’t.

Here we are.

All because I didn’t fully understand the dynamics of the culture and wait to say we had the money until I got home and could object before the ‘dozer came.

The very strong family/tribe dynamic is also the reason they drive and ride motorbikes the way they do. “Me First” may as well be immortalized in the driving regulations because no one around you is of your tribe, so they literally don’t matter. It’s also why, if there is one motorbike parked in front of a shop, I’ll give you 100-to-1 odds that it’s either directly blocking the entrance or within 50cm of blocking because that’s where you park.

Why should I have to walk an extra meter or two to enter the building/store? And screw everyone after me who has to walk around it to get in — that’s their problem, not mine.

Following this cultural trait, people will defend their family/tribe members against others, even when it’s clear the defended one is wrong. Right/wrong takes second place to family, every time.

When the two clashing parties are members of the same family, the ranking order is:

1. Grandparents

2. Parents

3. Children

4. Siblings

5. Spouse (my guess is this is because they’re not an original member)

6. Extended family

Everyone else can go screw.

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