Dating Vietnamese Women: My Saigon, #7

By Elly Thuy Nguyen

Vietnamese girls are a minefield.
A very hot minefield.

 

We've got the hoochie-koochie, but we're also a load of trouble, and an enigma wrapped in a mystery. And a bowl of pho.

We come on strong, then suddenly back away. We wear extremely revealing clothes, but faint at the mention of sex. And our college girls look like ladies of the night, while our ladies of the night look like college girls.

 

Hey, it's Vietnam! It's Vietnamese dating culture. And this book is the complete guide to succeeding in it.

 

Is it English practice or is it a date?

Mack on college students without being creepy.

Don't get catfished.

Is there really no premarital sex?

How to invite her to an evening of horizontal folk dancing.

Different region of Vietnam, totally different culture.

Catholic Vietnamese girls are a great dating choice, and it's not because of uniforms.

English teachers aren't hot stuff.

A businesswoman could be a very expensive girlfriend.

Birth control, condoms, and everything else that makes your girlfriend blush.

 

Dating Vietnamese Women details all the weirdnesses, expectations, turn-ons, and turn-offs of Vietnamese girls.

We're weird, but we're worth it. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elly Thuy Nguyen
• Release date: Oct 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781386939221

Elly Thuy Nguyen

Elly Thuy Nguyen is a devoted Saigon nerd. Saigon is her major hobby. Reading and writing are her other hobbies, and also her vocation: in her day job, Elly is an English-language marketing writer. In addition to her love of Saigon and the written word, Elly enjoys cafes, cats, hip-hop, and international travel.

Book preview

What’s Vietnam? Why Vietnamese Women?

VIETNAM IS A DENSELY populated S-shaped... blah blah. You’ve heard that already. I’ll tell you the interesting stuff instead.

Vietnam is a quickly developing faux-Communist country with a dynamic young population, a huge divide between urban and rural life, and more or less one foot in the rural past and one foot in the urban future.

Culturally, Vietnam really has nothing to do with Thailand or Cambodia or other Southeast Asian countries. You’ll get nowhere comparing us to Thailand. We’re totally different. Vietnam is, for better or for worse, a Sinitic (Chinese-ized) country. You can understand our culture by referring to Chinese culture, especially Taiwan or Hong Kong, rather than by thinking of countries like Thailand or Laos.

Also you don’t get anywhere by thinking of us as a Communist country, at least if you think of Communism as meaning no money, everybody working together for a common goal, no interest in fashion, and so on. We’re the opposite of all that. We are very much a Communist country if you understand the Communist Party as a business organization. But please don’t get the idea—as many foreigners do—that Vietnamese people don’t care about money, because they’re a Communist country. We care about money all the time, and how!

Also. Somehow people, especially Vietnamese people more so than foreigners, get the idea that Vietnam is a tiny, postage-stamp-sized country. Actually, Vietnam is the 14th most populous country in the world. And our total (not per-capita) GDP is the 48th biggest in the world, which isn’t too shabby. (I think the we’re a weak, tiny, poor country thing, which is always taught many times over in Vietnamese schools, has to do with keeping the populace scared enough to obey the government.)

Enough about GDP. How about the hot chicks? Superficially speaking, Vietnamese women are the world’s slimmest. Literally. We are the world’s slimmest and smallest women. Vietnamese women are always said to have a certain charm, a certain vivaciousness—I’m a Vietnamese woman myself, and I don’t date women, so I’m not sure if I can objectively compare, but I kind of see what that’s getting at. And more tangibly, Vietnam’s per-capita GDP and opportunities for women are both pretty low, and Vietnamese people historically liked to move abroad—so Vietnamese women have a pretty strong appetite for foreign men. Yes, that’s you!

And perhaps owing to our culture, we’re a bit more, um, goal oriented and cerebral than neighboring countries. We are nothing like, for example, Thai women. That can be good or bad. But, for example, East Asians find it a lot easier culturally to get along with Vietnamese women than with Thai women. And many foreign guys comment on Vietnamese women being a lot smarter than women from other Asian countries. Hey I’ll take that compliment if I can get it!

Last thing? Demographics! Famously, most of our population is young, like young and single and looking-to-get-married age. Most people couldn’t afford to have kids until around the 1990s. And now, well, here are all the kids, and they all want to get married themselves. We’re a young populace, our culture forces us to get married ASAP, and we’re generally very open to foreigners. Sounds great, right?

Sure. But you need to know how to navigate. There’s a lot of cultural and dating stuff foreigners normally have no idea about. Not because you’re stupid, but because this isn’t taught on any Wikipedia page or in any guidebook.

But here’s Elly’s guide. Teaching you everything. Now go forth and... I don’t know, find the love of your life, or have a great time meeting different women, or whatever you’re into.

Just follow Elly’s motto: be nice to everyone you meet.

Don’t Bother Learning Vietnamese

DO PEOPLE IN VIETNAM speak English? Not really. Most people really have no idea about English.

But guess what. You’re not trying to date every person in Vietnam. You’re not Magic Johnson. (What a great name for a guy who had sex with five hundred women a year!) You’re just trying to find one woman for a relationship. Or a few women for dating.

You’ll have no problem finding one woman, or a few women, or even a hundred women who speak English well and want to date you. There are enough English-speaking women in Vietnam, at various levels of English, to make it feasible.

Saigonese people and people under 30 are likely to have some basic understanding of English. The most common situation is that they studied English for many years, from elementary school through college, but they never used it, and they only remember a few words. But they can still comprehend a lot, usually more so in writing than in speech. And thanks to American pop culture and YouTube, Vietnamese people always think English is cool.

You’ll often find Vietnamese young people saying to each other, in English, phrases like no! or go away! or even some four letter words—expressions they’ve learned from a movie or from an English class that they think are cool. Also popular are catchphrases from songs, like I want it that way. Those young people don’t really know English other than that, but they think it’s cool.

You will find that all people under 25 in Vietnam desperately want to learn English. English is seen as the key to money and success, to a highly unrealistic degree. That is, many, or maybe even most, Vietnamese people believe that if you can speak English, you will instantly become rich and successful. I think it’s because they see American celebrities on TV and think that the only thing standing between them and living like the characters on Friends is English ability. (Umm, even in the US, most people don’t live like the characters on Friends, but don’t tell the average Vietnamese person that.)

At the upper