Life in a Homogenous Country: White = Native Speaker

A boss to his employee, an English teacher from the UK: "Well, you look a little young to be teaching [English to] adults. But, you're Caucasian, so that's good."

Having spent eight months in HCMC, I thought I'd share a few of the more unique and potentially awkward experiences that come with being a non-white foreigner living in a homogeneous country such as Vietnam. Many of these experiences revolve around the racial dynamics, divides, and biases among locals, white foreigners, and non-white foreigners.

These types of issues aren't easy to discuss. However, I strongly feel that they are worth bringing up, as each discussion helps us inch closer towards a better and more mutual understanding of one another beyond the biases and stereotypes we've accumulated since childhood.

In this particular instance, I'm exploring the automatic relationship drawn between being a white foreigner and being a native English speaker.

Skin Color (Falsely) Indicates English Proficiency

A couple of weeks ago I had dinner with a friend, Mike (not his real name, at his request). Mike is in his early to mid 20's -- although he looks a few years younger -- and has been living in Vietnam for the past couple of years.

Like many other foreigners in Vietnam, Mike teaches English for a prominent English language school in the city center. He teaches in the afternoons and evenings. His students are still in primary school. Parents who can afford the tuition often send their kids to these kinds of English language schools after their day of regular primary school ends with the hope of giving their kids a better shot at life through increased English proficiency.

Mike recently asked his supervisor if he could start teaching adults. The supervisor hemmed and hawed, dragging their feet for a few weeks before giving an answer. Their most recent conversation resulted in the exchange that you read at the open of this post.

"Well, you look a little young to be teaching [English to] adults. But, you're Caucasian, so that's good."

As anyone who has ever tried to apply to an English teaching job in Asia knows, your skin color can sometimes give a false indication on whether or not you are a native speaker.

In other words...

If you're white, then you're a native speaker, when in fact English could be your second language and you might speak it with an accent that is hard to understand.

If you're not white, then you're not a native speaker, when in fact you grew up speaking English as your only language.

It's absolutely plausible that the supervisors and those in a decision-making capacity for Mike's language school -- or any language school for that matter -- may very well know that a UK-born, second-generation Chinese woman may be a native English speaker, but the school's students, and more importantly, the students' parents (i.e. the end customers paying large sums of money to make sure that their kids have the best English education their money can afford) may not be as open-minded or informed.

Or, perhaps they are open-minded and informed, but they still don't want to take the risk of having their child study under someone who isn't a native speaker. If parents have a limited budget with which to use on improving their child's English, then chances are that the parent will do what they can to ensure that their child is getting what the parent, and the society as a whole, considers as the purest, most correct, and most native English. This kind of English is primarily associated with a white foreigner, regardless of where the white foreigner is actually from.

Hard to believe, but these folks may
all speak English fluently.
Picture credit: TI.com

Mike then shared a story about how another one of the school's teachers made his students guess the nationality of people by holding up their photo. Naturally, those who looked Asian were assumed to be from Asia, whites from the States, Europe, or Australia, and so on.

The kicker of this exercise, of course, was that each person in the photo could've been born in the UK and raised speaking perfect British English.

This teacher's aim was to help the students understand that native English goes beyond skin color, a noble and worthwhile exercise in breaking stereotypes and helping the next generation better understand the world around them. However, no one person can undo or erase this association between having white skin and being a native English speaker, an association that's been around for decades and is prevalent across many parts of East and SE Asia. It'll take time and lots more people like this teacher to help the next generation disassociate skin color from someone's English language proficiency.

Media Perpetuates the Relationship

There are multiple causes for why the relationship between being white and being a native English speaker might exist. However, I want to focus on one cause more familiar (and interesting) to me: Media.

The connections are pretty easy to make.

On a macro level: Western entertainment such as movies, television shows, and music that play in Vietnam typically star white people who all speak fluent English. As Western media and entertainment proliferates, more Vietnamese are exposed to white celebrities, and, as a direct consequence, the white celebrities' native English. After a short while, the connection between having white skin and being a native English speaker is made.

What an ESL video might look like

On a micro level: More English schools are incorporating multimedia materials to help their students improve their speaking and listening comprehension. Videos depicting an everyday conversation in English usually stars white people as the main if not only actors. The outcome is the same as above.

In fact, as I started writing this post at Urban Station Cafe on Nguyen Thi Minh Khai in District 1, the Vietnamese student to my immediate left was watching an English language learning video in which all of the actors were white.

At home and in the classroom, kids grow up associating "white" with "English." From this exposure white people become more "normal" and "familiar" than non-whites. Normal and familiar translates to safe and comfortable. This may explain why white people walking in a park -- or around Ho Hoan Kiem in Ha Noi, as my friend Andrew and I were doing -- are more likely to be randomly approached by a Vietnamese college student wanting to practice their English than a couple of people from India, Malaysia, or Kenya.

When these students exit school and enter the workforce, the associations made between a foreigner's skin color and their English proficiency doesn't go away. The influence that media has had on them since childhood will invariably influence how they interact with foreigners, including who they choose to befriend, hire, and even love.

This Sound Familiar...

Seeing this kind of mistaken association between skin color and English forces me to think about how we, as Americans, also treat both foreigners and people of color in our country. In some ways, we're different, but in many ways we hold these exact same habits of misattribution, perhaps not with someone's English language ability, but rather with their nationality and ancestry.

I'm a bit more well-versed in the stereotypes against Asian-Americans, so I can say with confidence that the act of misattributing skin color to nationality is especially true with how we view Asian-Americans, a topic explored in these two videos. I'll let the videos do the explaining.




In short, much like how a Vietnamese person might consider a white foreigner to be a native English speaker when they're really not, a non-Asian-American might consider an Asian-American to be foreign despite having been in the States for decades.

Accept Reality, But Speak Up

Mike's stories remind me that no matter how much I am in love with this place, I'm still "not in Kansas." I'm a foreigner, and more specifically a non-white foreigner; I'm a minority in a homogeneous place that flaunts completely different views on the concept of equality, equality among race and skin color, gender, sexual preferences, and everything in-between.

There's no changing these views. I can only accept these views as the general norm and then do my best to mitigate the exposure to these ingrained inequalities by surrounding myself with people who can see past the skin color.

In this city of 8-10 million people, we're bound to find those who are more informed and open-minded about how the rest of the world works. In these past eight months, I've had the fortune of making plenty of friends who have definitely seen past my skin color and have taken me for the native English speaking Filipino-American that I am.

I'm also not afraid to speak up and crush the stereotype, and I would encourage anyone else to do the same. Granted your message about diversity might be lost on some, you will definitely find others who will understand or take interest in hearing about what it's like growing up among Hispanic-Americans, Indian-British, etc., When the opportunity arises, talk about diversity as you know it to be in your country.

There will always be people who will immediately and outright reject someone based on their skin color. This is a harsh culture shock for non-white foreigners to encounter when choosing to live in a homogeneous country. Be patient and know that for every 10 people who will reject you because of your skin color, there will be one who will appreciate you for who you are.

Those are the friends you want to make.