The Man From Vietnam

I was in the middle of studying my Spanish lessons, and it triggered a memory. I once worked with a young man from Vietnam. He had escaped from his country and landed in a refugee camp in the Philippines. From there he found a way to get into the US, and being in the US he got a job with the tiny company where I worked. 

What triggered the memory was this: I sometimes wonder if I'll ever speak Spanish well enough for Spanish-speaking people to understand me. I wonder about that because I never understood a word of this man's English. His Vietnamese accent was so strong that he sounded like he was speaking Vietnamese. I do not exaggerate when I say that I never understood one single word of anything he said. He could understand me, but our communication was strictly one-way, from me to him.

I admit to having trouble with accents. Some people seem to handle accents quite well, but the only accents I can understand are other American accents. I can handle a Boston accent, or a Texas accent, or a Louisiana accent, and so on. And to an English speaking person, those are definitely different accents—different from, say, a Nebraska accent or a British accent. (Britain is a small country but it has a multitude of accents. Or perhaps I should say that the United Kingdom has a multitude of accents.)

But this young Vietnamese man had a disgusting habit, and I'm sure he never realized that it bothered the rest of us in our small company. When he had to urinate, he went to the bathroom, relieved himself, and left the bathroom. The next person to enter the bathroom would find a soaking wet toilet seat because the Vietnamese man had urinated all over it. It was as if his objective was to avoid peeing in the toilet bowl. So whoever followed him to the bathroom would have to clean the toilet seat before using it.

No one wanted to say anything to the man from Vietnam, but I could tolerate only so much before I thought, "This stops now." And so one day I told the man to follow me to the bathroom. We entered the bathroom and there was the toilet with it's seat dripping with pee.

I pointed to the seat and I looked him in the face and I told him to either pee into the bowl or clean the seat after he used the toilet. I made sure he understood what I wanted. And he did; he understood me. His face displayed an expression of total humiliation. I was not trying to humiliate him, but I was willing to humiliate him, if that was required to change his toilet behavior. And it did. 

When we travel to another land, who knows what taboos we may cross unknowingly. If I had known he would be so embarrassed by my little lecture, perhaps I might have put up a sign instead of talking to him. The sign would have had drawings, one showing the wrong way to use the toilet and one showing the correct way to use the toilet. Nah, who am I kidding. I would've still done the point-and-lecture. I can't finesse this kind of thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm a blunt instrument in a world of marshmallows. 

There is one more thing I should tell you about the Vietnamese man whose English was so bad that I never understood him. When he was in the refugee camp, he had a job. Guess what he did on his job.

He taught English to other refugees.