Hàng Ngày

Lillian is my name and teaching used to be my game. I am from St. Louis, MO, the middle of everywhere and the home of the famous St. Louis Arch and the almost as famous Forsyth Engineering Inc.

I currently hold the title of Vietnam Program Director for VIA (Volunteers in Asia) a non-profit, non-government, non-religious organization that seeks to build understanding between the people of America and the people of Asia through public service and educational programs. The most frequent question of my current life is “Vietnam. Hm. How did you get interested in that?” The answer is a story that starts back in Missouri with a restaurant called the Asian Grill and a mentor named Anthony Tran who sparked in me the curiosity to visit his home country of Vietnam someday. The next seven years have been spent variously living in Vietnam and the US,  contemplating my role in a foreign country that in many ways became my home, and trying to understand the question that haunts nearly every sphere of my current reality: “Why Vietnam?”

The first time I went to Vietnam was as a student on an SIT Study Abroad program in the spring of 2004. After spending a semester in Ho Chi Minh City, living with a family and spending most of my free waking hours at a shelter for adolescent boys who had been living on the streets, I knew that I wanted to go back to Vietnam to work after graduation. I was fascinated by Vietnam. My initial understanding was undoubtably quite shallow, but sparked my continued interest and study over the coming years.

I majored in Southeast Asian Studies at Barnard College in New York City, and during my last year in college spent much of my time writing my thesis about street children in Ho Chi Minh City and the social service system in a rapidly changing Vietnam in general. I applied for jobs in Viet Nam and no where else. Luckily, Volunteers in Asia, an international NGO based in California, was foolish enough to hire me for the part of volunteer English Teacher. After a brief TESOL training crash course in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I made my way to Long Xuyen, Viet Nam.

Long Xuyen, An Giang, Viet Nam is the capital of An Giang province, and therefore is home to the provincial people’s committee and the provincial university, An Giang University. The town has about 200,000 happy residents (all of whom will know my face after about 3 months, guaranteed) and is located about 5 hours southwest of Ho Chi Minh City in the Mekong Delta. The province borders Cambodia, and consequently a large part of the provincial population (I have been told as much as 30%) is Cambodian ethnicity.

An Giang University was founded in 1999, having previously been a teacher’s training college. Dr. Vo Tong Xuan, the rector of the university, and fondly called “Dr. Rice” by many Vietnamese, is world renowned for his agricultural planning methods that pulled Vietnam out of famine in the early 1980s and turned it into one of the world’s leading rice-exporting countries. Dr. Xuan was instrumental in changing the insitution from a college to a full-blown University, and the school is known for its progressive spirit and innovative projects; especially in agriculture.

I taught English to second and third year students in the Faculty of Education as well as pre-academic training to young professionals from throughout Vietnam and Thailand. Most of my university students came from more rural areas, and were part of a government program in which they receive scholarships to study at the university in exchange for devoting several years of their lives after college to teaching English in primary and secondary schools. The students were eager learners and very insightful about important global issues.

In March of 2008 I applied for the position of program director for the volunteer program of which I was formerly a participant. I have been back in the US since taking the job, living in San Francisco, CA and trying to hold on to the pieces of my lives in both Vietnam and the US through writing. I travel back to Vietnam and Thailand twice a year for work, which is both a chance to reconnect with students and friends as well as a painful reminder that to truly bridge these two worlds, America and Vietnam, is an awesome feat that I may never master.

The older writings on this blog are my stories from Vietnam, told with emotion, excitement, and a thirst for adventure that comes with any new life-learning situation.

My current writing is a personal effort to hold on to the tapestry of my life in Vietnam that is quickly fraying at the edges, as well as a disorganized musing of what the past seven years have meant and how it will shape my future.