The American Traveler and Vietnamese Orphan: Who is Really the Successful One? (class assignment)

Vietnam certainly taught me more about myself than I expected. As the fourth or fifth third world country that I’ve traveled to, it has brought me great understanding of what it means to be an American in this world.

We spent one morning at an orphanage in Nha Trang painting a classroom and playing with kids. At the orientation I noticed out of the corner of my eye a barefoot toddler wearing blue pajamas with a shaved head. Initially it looked like his arms were tucked inside his shirt. As I looked more closely, I realized that the child lacked both his left and right arms. I saw him rip as he ran to another child. With nothing to break his fall, his head hit the tile floor, and he began to cry.

Apprehensive about his ability to contribute, I wondered how he would react to our activity of painting the exterior of the classroom. When the time came, he sat down, grabbed a roller paintbrush with the balls of his two feet, rolling the brush through the tray of yellow paint beside him. He then maneuvered the brush so that the handle was in between his first two toes of his right foot. With his left foot tucked underneath, supporting his right, he picked up the brush. Bending and straightening his legs, he rolled the brush up and down the post of a railing- with a quicker cadence than that of his fellow quadra-limbed orphans that painted with their hands.

At that moment I was overwhelmed with feeling badly for assuming his limitations. This child was painting this railing with only using his feet, in a way that seemed as though he has had practice and was used to it. Why had I expected that he wouldn’t be able to participate?

I felt like the pretentious intellectual who treats his peers as unlearned inferiors- the guy that uses big words to make you feel inadequate. As Martin and Nakayama call it, I became self-reflexive about what it means to be an American outside of America. Pardon this generalization, but it seems that many Americans do travel with ethnocentricity tied to every perception. We seem like that popular kid in middle school that thinks he’s cool enough to tease the newbie that just moved to town simply because he knows the other kids.

It sounds extreme, but that’s how it seems that we act towards other countries. America, with all its pride in our Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, is not the only country with freedom and dignity that exists in the world. We often travel with this notion that the people in less developed countries have poorer standards of life. Yes, they might be less sanitary, harder working for small pay, in jobs that we consider to be lower class; but it doesn’t mean that they are any less content, or feel that they are any less competent. Plus, what does an economic standing or complex legislation systems have to do with happiness?

It isn’t everyday that you hear of a Vietnamese person that fled to America to escape poverty. In my honest opinion, if there’s a will, there’s a way- but I personally haven’t met anyone with the will to escape these places, or a burning desire to change their situations. They take on the roles they were born into, and embrace them. Instead, us (stereotypical) Americans put money into plastic surgery for “enhanced” physical attributes, and bigger houses to feel successful- when, to me, the truly successful one is the orphan with the paintbrush in between his toes.