Rage Against the White Machine

Above: Singapore’s nightscape with their famous merlion (half mermaid/half lion)

What makes our eastern delicacies palatable for your western appetite?

Is it the language that you can dominate?

The women who you can conquer?

The foods that are toned down to help your stomachs cope with the rich flavors of our cuisine?

Find a country that can give you that and you maintain your power, no matter where you are in the world.

There we’ll find you in Singapore

Where inter-racial couples, burger joints, and “multiculturalism” reign supreme.

I reject the idea that countries are at the white man’s whim

I reject my country’s need to conform to your appetite to dominate and destroy.

Poem written September 27, 2015, during my travels to Singapore

I’m tired of the same world order.  How easy it is for a white man to live and expect that standard of whiteness honored, fetishized, and embraced. After my visit to Singapore, although a lovely country, I desperately craved for the wondrous chaos and struggle of Saigon again. The poem above is in no way absolving Vietnam of these same issues, as I see it happening among some of our expats and foreigners here, but never so acutely had I been aware of it as when I was in Singapore.

There’s not so much as the issue of race in a country like Vietnam but it has more to do about binaries of identity and power –  those who are privileged and those who aren’t; those  who are powerful and those who are powerless. These constructs will always exist whether there is ‘race’ or other constructs to fill it or not. My position here in Vietnam is one of immense privilege – comparable to the country I left – and I do not take that lightly.

I’ve been given various employment opportunities, valued for my ability to speak a language, English, that by chance I happened to learn. I’ve been entrusted with a great deal of responsibility , thrown in to make important work decisions without my skills ever needing to be qualified or scrutinized. Is it just the culture of working in Vietnam or is there a deeper underlying privilege that arrived with me. I think there is an undue sense of exceptionalism because I’ve come from a developed English- speaking country, an achievement I did not earn but was out of a necessary consequence and now a benefit, as a result of my emigration to the U.S.

My cousins  here who’ve studied at universities and work hard for decades with Fashion and Economics as their degrees still don’t make the income I make (which isn’t relatively high) . Why am I considered successful? Why is my success overnight? I don’t believe I’ve yet earned the merits of success, at least not defined by my standards, and nor should locals  or foreigners quickly accept this status quo that’s been assigned to  foreigners.  I see how so many people can get caught up with complex  that as foreigners, we have been bestowed some inherent worthiness when really we just need to check our privelege and egos. Vietnam should demand that we earn it — for the sake of the people of this country who we are primarily serving.