{"id":4526,"date":"2017-11-21T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-09-12T15:07:32","modified_gmt":"2020-09-12T19:07:32","slug":"so-your-character-is-from-vietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victoriagracehowell.com\/staging\/6258\/so-your-character-is-from-vietnam\/","title":{"rendered":"So Your Character Is From Vietnam … Featuring Liliana @ Liliana N Bookish Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\nIt’s time for this week’s So Your Character is … Post! This is a weekly segment where I interview lovely volunteers from around the world to give you a firsthand account of being a citizen of their respective country or having a disability. I’m hoping to encourage international diversity, break stereotypes, and give writers a crash course on how to write a character from these different places on our planet. If you haven’t checked out last week’s  So Your Character is from Singapore … be sure to hop on over there and give it a read!<\/span>
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<\/span> Disclaimer: The content below may be culturally shocking to some. Each of these posts are as uncensored as possible to preserve the authenticity of the cultures of each of the interviewees.<\/span>
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So hi! I\u2019m Liliana, a 24-year-old Russian-Vietnamese-English translator currently residing in Ho Chi Minh city in the Southern part of Vietnam. I\u2019m actually Vietnamese born and raised in Russia, but I still hold Vietnamese citizenship. When I\u2019m not working, I\u2019m probably: a) reading; b) reading even more; c) reviewing a book I\u2019ve just read on my blog; d) craft bookish merchandises for myself. Apart from being a book blogger\/bookstagrammer, I\u2019m a huge k-pop fan, and there\u2019s almost no time when I don\u2019t listen to it!<\/span>
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What do you feel is unique to your country? Landmarks? Celebrations?<\/b><\/span>
\nI\u2019d say culture overall. As a person who lived in two completely different kinds of societies, I still find it hard to adapt to Vietnamese culture. Some stuff you can accept, some you can\u2019t even understand, not even talking about accepting. For example, in Vietnam, you can see locals driving on motorbikes on a pedestrian sidewalk in order to overtake the traffic. It\u2019s normal here for outsiders to poke their noses into any disputes going on the streets, and it\u2019s normal if there\u2019s a massive audience gathering on the bridge where a teenage girl just committed suicide as if it\u2019s some kind of TV show. <\/span>
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<\/span> There\u2019s almost no such thing as privacy here in Vietnam. Everything you do will be discussed behind your back, including that mole on your boyfriend\u2019s cheek that, according to Feng Shui, brings misfortune. It\u2019s really hard to be patient when your relatives keep asking questions they shouldn\u2019t be at all.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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Dalat City<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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Danang City<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Tell me about your country’s environment. What are some of your favorite places?<\/b>
\nI won\u2019t be hiding a fact that I dislike a lot of things here in Vietnam. Still, there are some cities that I cherish a lot, as they bring me that peace I sometimes crave so much, for instance, Dalat city, Vungtau city, Danang city. In Ho Chi Minh city, where I currently live, I particularly love bridges, especially the Thu Thiem bridge, since it brings you a perfect horizontal view of city center across the Saigon River.<\/span>
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Dalat City<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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Danang City<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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Ho Chi Minh City<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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Thu Thiem Bridge<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Tell me about your country’s food. What are some of your favorite dishes?<\/b><\/span>
\nWe have a wide diversity of national food, to the point that it\u2019s even separated by territorial regions. So when you go to any area of Vietnam, you will get the chance to try authentic dishes that came from that specific area, and nowhere else in the rest of the country will serve it as delicious as the \u201cnative\u201d does. There are too many different unique dishes in Vietnam, it would take me hours to talk about each of them, but I can definitely assure you that you will be able to find your new favorite if you\u2019re brave enough to try all we have, from rice\u2019s side dishes to most exotic things like frog\u2019s meat or different kinds of shellfish. My absolute favorite is Bun Bo Hue, Hue city\u2019s style beef noodle soup. When you might think rice noodle are pretty plain in terms of taste, Bun Bo Hue strikes you with both light spice and subtle sourness.<\/span>
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<\/b><\/span> Tell me about any different speech patterns in your country. Slang? Idioms? Words for things such as \u201cbiscuits\u201d instead of \u201ccookies\u201d?<\/b><\/span>
\nWe have one state language that is, obviously, Vietnamese, but by the way someone speaks it, you can figure out from which part of the country the speaker comes: North, Central, or South Vietnam. I\u2019m not really familiar with local slang because I don\u2019t really hang out with youngsters to figure that out. Also, we have slight differences in some words we use for the same item, depending on the region.<\/span>
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