All the Pho Puns are Gone: The Height

No, I'm not leaving out the 's' on that gritty Fox show which spawned the irrepressible hit "How Do You Talk to an Angel" in my title. I'm only talking about the height of the Vietnamese I've seen in Northern Vietnam. To put it simply, they're pretty tall here. I didn't notice it the first few weeks, I realize, because I'm used to being shorter than everyone, and so none of that changed once I stepped foot in Vietnam. I'm not saying the Vietnamese are as tall as the Dutch, I'm just saying that I don't think I'm even the average height for men here, and the women aren't much shorter than me as well. I'd say the men average 5'8 here and the women 5'4, but it's not at all uncommon to see 6' men and 5'9" women, though I'm not looking down to see if it's the ladies' high heels are not.

Are you surprised? Are you surprised I'm surprised? What, you never heard at some point in your life that Vietnamese people were short? I have. I haveVietnamese blood, and I'm short. So I've heard it. But they're not that short here.

The Hmong are not so very tall, but I don't consider them Vietnamese, and neither do they.
My cousin Thinh and his wife are both taller than me. My uncle Phu is taller than me. My local friend Thang is taller than me. Thiet, my coworker, is taller than me. They're all northerners, nguoi Bac. I guess the Bac are taller than the southerners, nguoi Nam?

I forget, which was Swayze, a Confederate?

Even in the United States, just from hearing my aunts, uncles, and parents (the people who formed all I knew of Vietnam before coming here) talk, I know that there is a big divide between the Bac and Nam in Vietnam. It's a different dialect, different lexicon, there are different customs, the weather is different, one region calls soft drinks 'pop' and the other 'soda', and so on and so forth. But the separation between the north and south is inescapable. Living in a hotel, I meet different tourists everyday, and even they have a lot to add to the conversation when it comes to differences between Saigon and Hanoi.

"It's like a whole different world once you pass the mountains of Da Lat," Lyle told me, an Australian teaching English who has lived in Hanoi for three years. "They're far friendlier down there."

"Yeah, I guess I can remember a few more smiles down in Saigon," John told me, an Illini. "But I don't see that much of a difference, really."

"Saigon is ugly, and the Nam are loud," a waiter here told me.

"The Bac are snobs," I hear, from just about every Nam person I've met here.

And I think back to all I've heard, and reading the sampling of statements I've written here, none contradict each other, so I guess it's all true.

The South is still a mystery to me. The supposed binary nature of Vietnam makes the South seem as far away from me as Vietnam did when I was in the States. And Hanoi already feels like home.