True stories about Americans displacing themselves into foreign cultures always awaken my curiosity, and this one in which Dana Sachs remembers her recent stays in Vietnam was much less self-indulgent than I feared it would be. Dana's desire to immerse herself in Vietnamese culture comes from a genuine love of the country and its customs. She is barely old enough to remember the war in Vietnam, but the consciousness of it is almost constantly with her and leads to some of her more awkward interactions. The only thing more cringe-worthy is her description of the brief love affair she enters into with a Vietnamese man, a friend of the family she takes a room with in Hanoi. I would berate her for being so foolish if I hadn't done similarly foolish things while abroad. It's easy to forget how different the social life and the customs are from what you're used to when your heart is involved. It's all the horrors of being a teen all over again, where you feel everybody else knows the rules but you're still blundering around trying to figure them out.
Heidi J. De Vries
True stories about Americans displacing themselves into foreign cultures always awaken my curiosity, and this one in which Dana Sachs remembers her recent stays in Vietnam was much less self-indulgent than I feared it would be. Dana's desire to immerse herself in Vietnamese culture comes from a genuine love of the country and its customs. She is barely old enough to remember the war in Vietnam, but the consciousness of it is almost constantly with her and leads to some of her more awkward interactions. The only thing more cringe-worthy is her description of the brief love affair she enters into with a Vietnamese man, a friend of the family she takes a room with in Hanoi. I would berate her for being so foolish if I hadn't done similarly foolish things while abroad. It's easy to forget how different the social life and the customs are from what you're used to when your heart is involved. It's all the horrors of being a teen all over again, where you feel everybody else knows the rules but you're still blundering around trying to figure them out.
