The entire Vietnamese experience was a massive culture shock

Karen Hewell

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Lived and worked as an expat in Vietnam for 5 years 6y

I’m American, and I spent 5 years living and working in Vietnam beginning when I was 22 years old. The entire experience was a massive culture shock, but I think the thing that was the hardest to adjust to wasn’t the toilets, or the food, or even the traffic… it was the general understanding of health.

I got sick more than a handful of times in my years there, and once was really flat-out with a case of amoebic dysentery. I spent that entire time being told I “wasn’t eating enough”, was “taking showers that were too hot” and “had a fan on and my door closed while I slept”. Huh?

What I would come to understand later is that illness, especially food-borne illness, is extremely common in Vietnam. The level of healthcare available to most is lacking, and the cultural method of dealing with this kind of disconnect is to not name it. When you name an illness or disease, you have a treatment — but since many treatments are simply not available or are too expensive for most to afford, the only way to rationalize it is to call it something else or blame it on things within your control. Feeling as if your health is in the hands of something corrupt or out of your control has to be really disheartening.

This was further cemented as a root cause when a friend-of-a-friend (Vietnamese) died of avoidable complications from lupus. Before I knew what it was that she died from (she was only 27 at the time), I was simply told she was simply “very weak” and “did not eat well”. This was the only way her family and friends could make peace with her death, especially since she could have lived a long and healthy life had she had access to reliable care. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case, so the people around her did what they could not to drown in frustration and anger.

This was a hard lesson to learn and an even harder one to come to terms with. I think I returned to the US feeling very grateful for having access to decent healthcare, and even more emboldened to make sure others did, too, regardless of income or social status.