i stumbled upon your blog yesterday and i have been browsing your posts and photos. wonderful! thanks a bunch.

now on to discrimination: i think i understand how you feel. it is sad because discrimination/racism exists in all the asian countries that i have been to. i dont think the argument that they are trying to make a buck cuts it, because when they dont want your money the discrimination is still there.

if you have ever lived in japan, you will know it. dont get me wrong the japanese as a people are very polite and kind, and there are much from their culture that i love, but boy, are they just ever xenophobic! i dont know about in vietnam, but in japan there is a hierachy in terms of discrimination: discriminated by revered are white westerners, feared are blacks, looked down upon are “koreans” (incl. japanese of korean descent), and loathed are the chinese.

there were many things that i could cope with relatively well when i lived in japan (mind you, i speak japanese and was a translator so there was no language problem), but racism was something i could not and eventually i moved on after 3 years.

i hope you fare well there and if you find a secret to overcome this issue then please do share.

in the meantime, keep blogging, both positive and negative – that makes things a lot more authentic.

I kinda think that if you hadn’t given in and paid that first time, and made it clear that you know what the rules are, and maybe gotten some support in talking with the ticket people from a local, maybe even from a policeman or the ticket guard’s superior, and got really friendly and smiled a lot with the ticket people like they were going to become your best friends MAYBE you could have gotten in. But now it’s too late if they know they’ll get money from you a few times a week.

Do you get a paper ticket each time, that they rip in half and keep a stub?

It took me years, and learning a fair amount of the language, before I pretty much shook that ‘everyone wants to rip me off’ feeling. They do, but charvey’s also right: they want to rip everyone else off too.

Re. Lynn’s comment: on one hand if Americans always charged Asians more it wouldn’t fly BUT if purple-skinned people came to America who could easily earn 50 or 100 times the average income of an American, based solely on their native language and the color of their skin, you can bet that Americans would try to over-charge them in any way they could!

Re: The price discrimination, yeah it’s there. But if it’s any comfort to you, it’s not racial discrimination. Vietnamese discriminate pricing in every way they can get away with against anyone they can, foreign or not. As you point out, it’s woven in the fabric of the culture here.

Blatant price discrimination like you describe at the zoo does annoy me though. Another way to have handled that would have been to tell the guard “The other people didn’t pay. I’m not paying either. It’s not right.” Although they do practice discrimination they also have a sense of fair play that this isn’t right. When you expose and challenge it sometimes it goes away.

It would be especially effective if you could challenge the guard in Vietnamese. My Vietnamese language ability has gotten to the point where I’ve noticed that people treat me differently in these situations when I speak Viet to them. I think the Viet ability signals that I know the score and won’t accept unequal treatment. Keep up with your Viet lessons!! It’s very learnable and not at all as hard as people would have you believe.

charvey

I’m just catching up on some of your posts. This is an interesting one because what you describe is a fact of life for expats all over Asia. I never thought about it as discrimination though. Maybe its because the discrepancy in income between us and most of the Asians around us made the difference in prices seem fair in a way. Maybe its because I always felt like I was a guest in their culture and it was just the Chinese (and I guess Vietnamese) way to turn as much a profit as possible given the chance.

The discrimination that really bothered me was the sexist kind. I got SO tired of being denied access to our accounts because I was not the “primary account holder”! I actually took to impersonating Lee on the phone at times, just so I could conduct business with our bank!

Ah well…just do the conversion to US dollars and you won’t feel so bad….:)

Hugs, Lynn