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By Duncan Rhyne (2010)
On my first visit to Vietnam, when en route from Thailand via Laos and Vietnam to China, I met a rather beautiful Vietnamese female student (way above the Vietnamese average) on the train from Hanoi to Bac Giang.
We first sat on benches separated by the aisle, but, as we were talking along, she moved over to the bench opposite me.
She talked in French, as this was her major in university, while I spoke English with her. I do still understand French, thouugh I have not used it for many years, and her school English was good enough to understand what I said. On parting I gave her my email address.
At that time, my mind was set on China, so I did not consider a Vietnamese girlfriend. Now I know that this was a mistake, as this was a rather rare chance.
We exchanged email for several months, with her urging me to meet again in Hanoi.
I still passed through Hanoi three times after we met, but each time I was so fed up with the Vietnamese attitude of trying to cheat foreigners even on small amounts like bus fares or phone booth charges that I just wanted to pass through as quickly as I could.
Before I passeed through the third time, I promised her that we would meet, and she even prepared an interinary for my stay in the city, with the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum the first landmark she wanted to show me.
I later wrote to her, saying sorry that for the third time, I just passed through Hanoi, without even calling her. She was very disappointed at that time. I am only disappointed in retrospect, as I now believe it could have been a rewarding episode.
Maybe it was the tone of her email in which she arranged what we should do during my visit in Hanoi. It felt a bit more formal than had the tone of some previous mails. And because I had been cheated on minor matters right after entering Vietnam from China, I quite possibly felt that I should have a suspicious attitude towards anything Vietnamese, including her. Now I know that this was unwarranted.
Out of my anti-Vietnamese mood which persisted after already having left the country, I blamed her to have another boyfriend anyway, and just to expext financial gains from being my host. How ugly my comments.
Anyway, she did write back to me, explaining that she never had a boyfriend or any sexual contact in her whole life. She also wrote (in French) something like: I now realize that it won't be me.
What I realized at that point was: she probably, rather seriously, considered me a candidate for husband. Not that I would have married her. But with girls who select me as a potential husband, I usually have some other options, too.
Now knowing more on Vietnam, I think it is quite likely that, indeed, she never has been anybody's boyfriend.
As I mentioned above, our meeting was during my first visit to Vietnam, and at that time, having come from Indonesia and Thailand, I had generalized in my mind that beautiful Asian female university students have been long sexually initiated.
But this is often not the case for two countries: China and Vietnam.
In Vietnam, there is a striking difference in the age of both sexual initiation and marriage for females (and males) in the cities and in rural areas. Basically, the less educated, the earlier the age of sexual initiation and marriage, which frequently occur at the same time.
In the cities, marriage age often is only between 25 and 30 for women, and above 30 for men.
At the lowest age, sexual initiation and marriage happens for the Vietnamese in the Mekong delta. For girls, it can be as low as 16, and for young men, it's still below 20 in most cases.
The Mekong delta is also the poorest part of Vietnam, and the one area of the country with the lowest school attendence rates. It's also where marriage brokers recruit brides to be married off to Chinese and Taiwanese farmers who cannot find wives in their own countries, often after having met their potential spouses on just a single occasion.
The Mekong delta is also the part of Vietnam where even more sinister types recruit virgins to be sold to Phnom Penh brothels (where defloration week just costs 500 dollars).
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Copyright Duncan Rhyne