White Privilege
Trip Start
Feb 01, 2004
1
4
5
Trip End
May 23, 2004
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Last week my friend Erin asked me if I wanted to make $250 for 2-days work. "What?! $250 here in Vietnam?" I blared. "When do I have to skip class?". It turned out that business partners of Erin's parents from the states needed some English editing done for company XXX, asap. They were willing to pay $500 for two days of editing. If Erin (white, from America) and I did took the job, we'd split the dough. We recruited an expat friend Sarah (white, from America) to help too so we'd be sure to finish. A few hours later we found ourselves being picked up in a car (only very wealthy Vietnamese own cars) by 2 women dressed in nice business attire. They took us to Trung Nguyen, Vietnam's equivalent of Starbucks, to discuss what we'd be doing. The whole thing sounded a little too shady to be true, I mean, $500 is an insane amount of money here when considering "Rich" people work 3months to make this amount, and "Poor" people work up to 5 years to make this! It got even shadier when the women refused to sit in the middle of the coffee shop with other locals and asked to be seated in the very rear of the shop where no one was around. They then told us that this was confidential work and that we couldn't discuss any of this with anyone. All we needed to do was edit some documents written in English for a company. However, we needed to pretend we were "teachers for a study abroad program, which is located at 123 Street XXX." We didn't even have to do a good job, we just needed to "make sure we made lots of marks on the pages so it looks like we did a lot." They then went on to confirm that Erin and Sarah were working, but then asked where the third person that was going to help was. Erin told them it was me (Jimmy) that was going to help too. "Oh, I'm so sorry but we can only have white people" said the women. "No Asian people, only white man, no yellow skin. So sorry." We all just gave blank stares and dropped our jaws at the casualty in which these women just blatantly racially discriminated against me. Well, to make a long story short, we couldn't convince them that my English was up to par for the job. The women explained that their boss would never agree to having a non-white person edit the documents. This scenario is all too common here for English teaching jobs too. For the next 2 days Erin and Sarah went to edit the documents (which turned out to be for an oil company), and in turn got their $250. Out of this world. Discrimination happens everywhere I guess, whether it's overt or hidden, even 12 time zones away. My parents were also here last weekend, great seeing them. They just laughed when I told them this story.
