All’s Fair in Vietnam (Asean)

By Noah Klinger

“Dep, rat dep [beautiful, very beautiful]”.

That was an old Vietnamese lady, grasping my pale arm very firmly and refusing to let me go
until she was satisfied that there wasn’t a freckle or spot of pigmentation anywhere to be
found. For such a small, frail-looking woman she had a hell of a strong grip. I am not the first
person to notice that the Western preference for a glowing, golden tan is exactly reversed in
much of the East. In Vietnam, where I lived for a year, everyone – the women, anyway -
swooned over an ivory complexion and went to what seemed to me absurd lengths in pursuit
of one for themselves. By far the most important status symbol was a pearl-white, luminous
face - ‘a face like the moon’, as the saying goes. The source of this is mostly class-based.
What in the West signifies wealth and leisure time to hang out on the beach for hours in
Vietnam bespeaks a lifetime of toiling in rice paddies in the blazing sun.

When I first arrived in Vietnam I took a small room in the backpacker quarter with the aim of
becoming an English teacher. Once this was accomplished I realized that I needed some
more formal attire with which to maintain my respectability. So like a good tourist I trotted
over to Ben Thanh Market in search of some cheap clothes. I found a shop selling khakis
and asked the salesgirl how much they cost.

“Forget that” she said “Tell me; how much for your skin?”

I think I blushed. She wasn’t the only one to ask me that (and I could never quite be sure if
they were serious or not), but from then on I always told them “It’s not for sale”, which at the
time seemed like a tremendously witty thing to say. The truth is that I’ve always been rather
self-conscious about my mushroom-like pallor. I was always the one standing timidly in the
patch of shade while everyone else strode through the broad sunlight. I was the one who
endured the most horrific sunburns if I used sunblock that was weaker than SPF 50. The
final indignity was being chased around a beach in Cadiz by a group of kids yelling ‘Whitey!’.

In Vietnam, however, this curious genetic discrepancy became a source of admiration for the
locals. The effect was usually immediate; those who had a little English would simply
announce upon meeting me ‘Oh, you are very white!” Others did not bother to speak, simply
grabbing my arm and holding it up to their own for the sake of comparison. One woman
demanded to know what kind of special diet I was on to maintain such a complexion. In
elevators, people would gesture towards me and then indicate their own skin with a mournful
sigh of den (black) if their tan was a single shade darker than porcelain.

Sunscreen is expensive, so proper Vietnamese girls solve the problem of protecting

themselves from UV rays by wearing an assortment of coverings, including hats, gloves, and
face-masks that makes them look like motorbike-driving, cellphone-chatting ninjas. On the
sands of Vung Tau local tourists dressed more like they were going to the office than the
beach; among the thousands of people there I saw exactly one woman in a two-piece
bathing suit.

Instead of going tanning, Vietnamese girls go to spas for whitening, though exactly how this
was accomplished I never did find out. Instead of bronzing the various skin creams all
promised to make you look like you’d spent your life in a dungeon 100 feet underground.
Occasionally I would see women who had slathered themselves a bit too liberally with these
products and the result was always lamentable. They looked deathly ill more than anything
else.
It doesn’t take a genius to discover the moral in this, if there is one – namely that beauty is in
the eye of the beholder; that people always desire what is expensive and difficult to maintain,
and so on. I learned not to take it too seriously.

Of course, a little adoration never hurt anyone.

QUESTION 1

What is your opinion about the topic that has been discussed in this short story?

QUESTION 2

Do you think the writer enjoys having white complexion?

QUESTION 3

What do you understand from the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’?