June 2024

6/1/2024

Careful…

Here are a few behaviors the Vietnamese find to be socially unacceptable:

touching a child's head.
bouncing your leg up and down while sitting. This is interpreted as mocking someone who has tremors resulting from a stroke, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, etc.
discussing “business” at a meal - no working lunches here. Mealtime is the time to enjoy food, drink, and family.
loosing your temper in public.
engaging in any behavior that will bring shame to your family.
eating before the oldest person at the table has started to eat. This can become a bit tricky. For example, you may be the oldest person at a table, however, if your cousin, who is younger than you, is the child of your parent's older sibling, then you must wait until your cousin begins to eat.
eating food directly from the serving plate. As you've seen from my previous food photos, with very few exceptions (e.g., ordering a bowl of phỏ), Vietnamese meals are served in a “modified family style”. In the States, “family style” means all meal items are placed on a platter, or in a bowl, with serving utensils. These are most generally passed around to people who serve themselves a portion and pass it along. Sometimes you may politely ask someone to pass you a particular dish or you hand them your plate and ask them to give you a portion. In Vietnam, serving dishes are not passed, rather, each end of the table comes with its own duplicate set of food items. Every meal also comes with a small rice bowl (approximately 4" in diameter and 2.5 in height) and you take food items from the serving dish and place them in the bowl. So…it is unacceptable to grab a piece of food (e.g., a piece of meat) off the plate with your chopsticks and place it directly in your mouth. You must take it, place it into the bowl, grab it again and take it to your mouth. People do occasionally cheat by just touching the food item to the bottom of the bowl without releasing it.
giving a person older than you an item without using two hands, or, if you use one hand, not touching the “giving” arm's elbow with your non-giving hand as you give the item.
touching your glass to an older person's glass at an equal height when “clinking” glasses during a toast. A younger person should touch their glass to an older person's glass at a lower level (usually about halfway down the older person's glass or maybe at the three quarter mark).
leaning your chopsticks against or across your eating bowl when not eating. You should lean them against or across the edge of a nearby serving dish or sauce bowl; preferably the latter if it is not a communal bowl.
failing to use an age-appropriate pronoun.
sitting down before the oldest person has seated themselves.
leaving food in your eating bowl.
not raising your eating bowl to your face when you remove/eat the contents. It's okay, and common to touch your bowl with your nose while placing scraps of food into your mouth using a scooping motion.
not waiting to be shown where you will be sitting at the table.
not accepting tea when offered, even if you don't like tea, you should accept it and take at least one sip.
picking your teeth with a toothpick without covering your mouth.
eating more than a couple of mouthfuls of food without pausing, setting your chopsticks down and talking for a few minutes.
holding a spoon in your right hand to eat soup or loose rice (like fried rice dishes). When eating soup, the spoon is held in the left hand and the chopsticks place noodles, veggies, meat, etc. into the spoon, which is then raised to the mouth.
dipping your food into someone's dipping sauce bowl. If the dipping sauce bowl is obviously communal it's okay, but if each person is given their own dipping sauce bowl, which happens occasionally, it is not acceptable.
public displays of affection between couples, other than holding hands.
embarrassing other people; especially in front of others.

Here are some acceptable behaviors:

picking your nose.
urinating in public.
grabbing your next portion of food from the communal serving bowl/plate using the business end of the chopsticks. That said, when serving another person, you either use a new set of chopsticks, or, you use the non-business end of your chopsticks to grab the food and place it in their bowl.
sniffing and snorting when you have a cold or runny nose.
asking personal questions without permission. Mostly this is done to establish age/status etiquette.
cutting in line. People do not generally queue up to pay at cash registers, when boarding planes, etc. They simply group up and step in when there's an opening. You snooze, you lose.

Here are some interesting differences in behavior

personal space. In the States, our personal space is about one arm's length of distance that extends around our entire body, and we get uncomfortable if someone gets closer than that during social/interpersonal encounters. In Vietnam, if it exists at all, personal space is inches. Therefore,
- it is not uncommon for me to find myself standing toe-to-toe when speaking with Vietnamese colleagues. Also, on the rare occasion when someone shakes my hand out of respect to the western handshaking culture, I have had them hold my hand, and not let go, until the conversation is over.
- at street/neighborhood restaurants, if there are tables, the person you are with will sit across from you and people you do not know will sit beside you. I can't tell you how many times I have literally bumped elbows with my table-mates as I am eating my meal.
telling someone to “come here” with a hand gesture. As you know, in the States we extend our arm outward, palm up and flip fingers repeatedly toward our palm to signal that we want someone to approach us. Or we may extend our arm with our forearm sticking up and repeatedly bend our hand/arm back toward our shoulder. If we want people to move along, we “shoo” them by extending our arm, with our hand hanging down, and flip our hand outward to “shoo” them away. In Vietnam the way you invite someone to come to you is to “shoo” them away. It can be a little confusing at first until you get used to it.
Tipping. There is no tipping in Vietnam. When I've inquired, the response I get is “Why would you pay them twice to do their job? They are already getting paid.” It is also viewed as you arrogantly showing off your wealth.
Slurping soup is allowed and you can use your fingers to assist you as you eat pieces of meat containing bones.
Yes can mean No. It's called “delaying the no” and is most common in the north. “Would you like to ______?” “Yes, let me check my schedule.”; “Do you want to _______” “Yes, I will call you and we will arrange it.” On the other hand, Maybe can mean Yes. “I want to take you to dinner. Maybe we can go Thursday or Friday at 1700. I will let you know.” Then on Thursday you get a text message at at 1700: “I am here in a taxi. It's 1700. Where are you?”
Males often hold hands or put an arm around or over the shoulder of other males when walking as a sign of close friendship. Females do the same with females.
the person who invites you to go get a bite to eat will pay the bill. Offering to go Dutch implies the person who invited you is incapable of paying.
Given that Vietnamese do not de-bone or shell any animal they cook, there will be bones that need to be dealt with at most meals. At “fancy” restaurants, you will have extra small rice bowls (same as you eat from) sitting around that you place bones into and the waitperson will remove them when full and replace them with a new one. At the less fancy, most commonly found, restaurants I eat at (and at street food eateries), there is a small waste basket under the table or near you that you just put bones and used napkins into. Napkins by the way are bi-fold 4" x 4" affairs and placed in dispensers.

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