Things Expats Often Misjudge when picking a country to live in — Part 5
Relationships, Family... and Money
This Substack is about life in Việt Nam from the viewpoint of a 10-year expat who spent his first 60 years in a low-context culture.
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Today’s topic is on a few of the ways Vietnamese culture dictates that money changes hands in relationships between expats and locals.
What follows is my experience and/or that of everyone I’ve talked with about this, both male and female. The Westerners almost always nod their head and say, in one form or another,
It could be worse.
The Vietnamese all say,
Of course!
There’s a chance that some readers will take this post as a complaint. It is NOT.
It may, however, be judgmental. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Boyfriends, husbands, sons-in-law, and grown children... have your ATM card handy.
The Unexpected Tax
There may be times when a man is asked “can you help me a little?” while getting dressed after first-time sex. His initial reaction is probably,
Wait a minute… I thought she was here because she likes me. What’s this about money?
Breathe.
It’s a pretty good bet she’s not a pro, because pros ask for the money up-front. The smart ones wait to ask until there’s no way he’s gonna say no. But it’s still before.
She likes him, at least a little, or she wouldn’t be here. And she wanted to have sex. Now that it’s concluded, she’d like a little help getting through the week.
A smart guy will reply, “How much were you thinking?” and won’t try to negotiate.
The ask is going to be less than he thought.
He probably spent more than that getting to this point.
She needs it a lot more than he does, and
She’ll lose face if he counteroffers.
If he thinks he needs it more, it’s time to go back to the home country and refill the bank account.
If he sees her again, she will likely again ask for help, though not every time. The fact that she asked after the first time means that she’s playing a “short game” and doesn’t see him as a long-term prospect.
Think of it as a Casual Pleasure Tax.
The Relationship Tax
Men in an exclusive relationship with a Vietnamese woman are expected to gift her money every month, preferably on the 1st. If the relationship is serious, her parents also get a gift given through the daughter, never directly. The man may or may not be credited as the source of this gift.
Such gifts are very rarely avoided.
Men only get monetary gifts once the kids are grown. More on those later.
The woman will probably bring this up during the second or third month in the form of “can you please help me a little?” The first time, there will often be an additional “for my parents” or “for my grandmother’s anniversary” or …
Here again, “how much were you thinking?” can be a helpful question. Offering an amount without asking is akin to guessing a western woman’s weight or age — he’s gonna pay for asking, even if he gets it right.
Like the Casual Pleasure Tax, the amount is non-negotiable. She’s spent some time thinking about it and discussing it with her friends, so she’ll know he can afford the ask.
If he says no, there’s a very good chance that she will ghost him after another attempt or two. She cannot and will not go back to her friends and family with a “he won’t do it” story and still be with him, no matter how much she liked him, because she will lose face. If he’s been paying attention, he knows it’s going to be the same (or more) with whomever he meets next.
Think of it as a bird-in-the-hand.
Once he “helps”, the help will continue until the end of the relationship. While the amount may at times increase, it can only decrease if they move in together AND he’s a good negotiator.
This video is not exactly on-point, but close enough (and funny enough) to share here:
The Family Gathering Tax
This is an extension of the relationship tax. It kicks in whenever he visits her family or goes out with them.
He pays.
For everything.
If he is visiting her family and someone heads out to buy more beer, rice wine, snacks, or whatever, he will be invited to “come along”. He’d better take his wallet because they expect him to pay.
For everything.
If they go out to dinner or to a bar or club, they will, of course, invite him to join them. His wallet and possibly a detour to the ATM along the way are necessary, because he is paying.
For everything.
In Vietnam, cash is king. There are a few places — mostly high-end hotels and fancy restaurants — that take international credit cards, though it’s a very small percentage. More and more restaurants, even mom-and-pops, are now taking electronic debit payments (think Apple Pay, but not Apple Pay), though it’s rare these will accept an overseas account. Always have more cash with you than you think you’ll need.
Whether the family is coming to him or he’s going to them, he should take a LOT of cash and handle it discretely.
Know that this could be worse. They could be living with him.
The Parental Tax
Vietnamese culture dictates that when children are grown, they will give their parents monthly monetary gifts as “repayment” for the parents raising them. It matters not if the child has a menial job and the parents are relatively well-off. In fact, many parents will stop working once the children start sending money home. This is part of why you see a lot of middle-aged men sitting in a cafe for many hours during the normal work day — their monthly stipend from the kids is sufficient to pay the bills, so
Why should I work?
Most Vietnamese work 10-12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, 50 weeks a year, with two weeks off for the Lunar New Year.
They earn very little and live hand-to-mouth their whole lives, not making enough to put away any savings. For the overwhelming majority of people, there is no Social Security or old-age pension.
Nothing.
The parents need the children to help ensure they have money to live through their old age. This, I understand. But teaching the children to suffer for most of their working life so parents can stop working at 40 or 50? My western mind is very uncomfortable.
I know more than a couple unmarried women, one of whom is my relative-by-marriage, who admit to intentionally getting pregnant knowing the man would neither marry nor support them or the child. Why? So that they will have someone who will take care of and provide for them when they are old. The child(red) will also be there to pray for them after they die, details of which I’ll cover in a later post.
Conversely, I know childless women who worry how they will get through their sunset years with no one to support them.
Is this what it was like in the US before FDR gave us Social Security? I think so.
As strange as this sounds to those of us not raised in the culture, it can be even worse. In my almost 10 years here, I’ve talked to a LOT of people about their stories. The “how I got to where I am now” stories are of special interest to me, and I’ve heard dozens.
The most heart-breaking stories are the ones in which the parents in a small town or village indoctrinate their daughters from a very young age that when the girl turns 17 or 18, she will go to the nearest city and work at whatever she can find that pays well enough to send money home so Mom and Dad no longer have to work.
What could a young woman with maybe a high school education possibly do in the big city that would earn as much as two people in a small town or village?
Yup, you guessed it.
Once she’s working, if the parents don’t get what they think is enough, or need to buy a new motorbike, they will tell their daughter to “work harder”, so she can send more money home. There are hundreds and hundreds of these women in every city who make pretty good money, yet live in a very small room with no stove or refrigerator, sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor because they have to send 90+% of their earnings home to mommy and daddy. These are not just made-up stories; I’ve heard too many of them and even seen photos of some of their sleeping rooms over coffee to not believe that it happens all too often.
I’ve mentioned this to a number of Vietnamese friends/acquaintances. To a person, they said something along the lines of,
Of course. They have to pay their parents back for raising them.
My western mind replies,
“WHAT???”
I missed the part where children demanded that they be conceived and born.
My western mind says that if you choose to have children, YOU OWE THEM the best life you can possibly give them.
They owe you NOTHING, certainly not forced “repayment” while you’re still able to work, ffs. If you’re thinking the child could “just say no”, that is simply impossible in this culture. Parents are treated reverently, never questioned, and MUST be obeyed, even if it hurts the child.
There is something I should add here: the concept of an outsider babysitting your kids doesn’t really exist in VN, so a good percentage of grandmothers work as babysitters for their grandchildren. Grandma watches them while the parents are at work, and make sure they’re fed, while grandfather takes them to and picks them up from school. These grandparents should be helped as much as possible.
Regular readers know I have a stepdaughter who is culturally mostly Vietnamese, with some Western bits thrown in here and there as I could. I recently found out that her mom already had at least the first of the “as soon as you get a job, you will give me money” talks with her. Fortunately, it did not include any of the seamy stuff. At least there’s that.
This means I have a short window to get my daughter thinking
This is bullshit!
Whatever she does end up giving her mom monthly, my daughter should keep enough to enjoy her own life — until her mom is 60 or so. I’ve already promised her that I will never ask for or accept any money from her… not one single đồng!
As someone who’s been pokin’ the bear my whole life, only death is gonna stop me from daily doing everything I can to ensure she has the best life possible.
It’d be easier, and better for her, if I weren’t the only one.
That guy has some funny singing videos. You did a good job of summing up the Vietnamese - Western relationship dynamic.