What are the things that will likely surprise you when you come to the US?

What are the things that will likely surprise you when you come to the US?

I decided to add 1 more thing that surprised me after thinking about this. I hope I do not offend many women.

0. American women (I’m not talking about white women, I’m talking about American women including white, black, Asians you name it) do indead cheat on their men (husband, boyfriend what have you) in America. It is called infidelity. I didn’t know about this phenomenon until one day my husband came home and told me XYZ (husband) and ABC (wife) were getting a divorce. I blurted out saying something to the effect of “yeah, I bet you some money that the husband has a little mistress on the side” to which he said “no, it’s the wife and the husband showed me her disgusting love letters to her lover who happens to be a white guy”. Now, the reason why I immediately accused the husband of having a love affair was because in my Vietnamese culture it’s always the men who had a mistress not the other way around. All the men in my family had a little something on the side. It’s considered “normal” in Vietnam although it’s not really “normal” in my opinion. I grew up learning this at a very young age. My next door neighbor in Vietnam was a mistress of a truck driver (yeah, you heard that right, a truck driver having several mistresses up and down from North to South Vietnam) and his “oldest wife” and her adult children would come and beat up my neighbor almost every week causing a scene for us kids to watch as entertainment. We even made bets who would win a fight that week (sorry we were having fun over someone’s misery). My neighbor, despite being a mistress, gave birth to 6 kids (yup, 6 kids not just 1 or 2), all were this guy’s kids. Thus, to hear and see American women sleeping with other guys other than their husband was a bit of big surprise to me. Apparently, it’s kinda “normal” in American culture. I mean “normal” as in it’s expected. It’s not like American men wouldn’t be so hurt when they find out their girlfriend or wife sleeps with another guy while they’re still in the relationship. It is “normal” in a sense that yeah, it happens more often than it would in Vietnam so it is no longer an exception but a norm.

I was asked to answer this question so here goes. Remember, the below is from the observation of a poor female immigrant who came to America in the late 1980’s. from a third world country called Vietnam

1. Boys and girls can freely hold hands, embrace and kiss each other on the street in broad day light.

1. Houses are built as tract houses thus they all look alike or very similar to one another. Vietnam houses are not like that.

1. Beautiful student school supplies. I’m not even talking about pens, colored pencils or erasers. I’m talking about just one thing that all students across the world use in school: composition books. My kids nowadays use beautiful composition books to doodles while I used it to keep cooking recipes and yes that’s my handwriting you’re seeing which brings me to my next surprise.

1. American students have very bad handwriting even before internet age.
2. American food portion is huge. I’m not going to talk about American food because Americans are typically bigger in size so they need to eat bigger portion to get to the size they are now. I’m talking about Vietnamese cuisine and some how Vietnamese Americans in America decided that they, too, should supersize their Vietnamese food at their restaurants in America. I could never finish my bowl of beef noodle soup at all. See how big this bowl of Pho is compared to this woman’s size. The picture below is is a typical size you’ll see in Vietnam.

1. Too many TV channels. In Vietnam, there was only 1 channel which was broadcasted nightly including weekends from 7PM-10PM. From 7:00–7:30PM children program would be on air mostly singing followed by some news which at the time was mostly how the Chinese attacked us at the borders and some horrible pictures of women’s breasts being cut off lying dead on the street. Bad impression on us kids because I still remember, until this day, those bad pictures. From 8PM to 10PM, main featured movie was broadcasted. Again, most movies were from Russia, Czech Republic, some other Communist European countries and India. No Chinese, No Korean, No American movies or comedy shows. The government controlled the media and it would only broadcast news it wanted its citizens to listen and see just like CNN, Fox. and NBC control the media in the US nowadays after the 2020 general election. hahaha. When World Cup season came, the government would allow us to catch the final games during the day on TV but after the game was over, the TV went black until 7PM that day. By 10PM everyone was in bed because everything was closed. This occurred uniformly across the country. No one really complained. Us kids thought that how life should be. We were so brainwashed that during one of the final World Cup games I watched with my mom I pointed to the ad billboards alongside the field and asked her “mom, why do they have all these things there? What are they for?”. She didn’t have an answer for me or maybe she did and I didn’t even understand what “ad” was and why would any company put their names on the billboard to advertise their company. That is to tell you as a teenager I didn’t even have any idea what capitalist “advertisement” was. Why you would need ads when everything you need is provided by the government? It made no sense to me at all so I thought those companies were kinda stupid to put their names on these billboards hoping some Vietnamese citizens who watch the soccer game across the world would notice and go buy their products, which were not made available by our government anyway so why even bother.
2. You’ll need to have a car to go anywhere in this great America. If you come and live in San Francisco or New York you don’t need a car to survive. But outside of those two cities, based on my experience, you’ll need to have a car. But let me tell ya, don’t come to live in SF or NY. I hated it when my mom moved to SF. The streets are small, 1 way street, hilly, hard to drive, hard to walk. And don’t ever live in an area called the Tenderloin because that’s where all the drugs and prostitution are in broad daylight. I didn’t even know why my mom would choose to live in Tenderloin. Maybe she didn’t know it’s the baddest area of the city?
3. Students go to school until approximately 3PM every day Monday through Friday. In Vietnam school bell starts at 7:30AM and ends at noon. So I hated the long hours at school in America.
4. Free lunch at school if you’re poor. But don’t expect Michelin 3 star meals. Expect bad food. Back then, I looked forward to Friday lunch because that was the only day when school served fried chicken and a cup of canned fruits while the rest of the week they served whatever which I couldn’t eat. So I mostly went home hungry and would chow down instant noodles or Korean Kimchi noodles after I got home from school while watching Tom & Jerry, the cartoon. Yeah, I was 17 years old and Tom & Jerry was my show to watch every day after school. That goes to show you how deprived I was as far as TV programming went before I came to America, hahaha, which brought me to my next surprise
5. High School students watch lots of sex movies and also are having lots of sex. One day in my home room class the teacher decided to let us kids watch “Dirty Dancing”, the movie. I didn’t really know English at the time so I just watched the action not understanding the entire movie. I kinda knew the story was about this girl who danced with this guy and that’s the end of the movie. Hahahaha. But during the movie there was a bedroom scene and I was shocked to see that on TV in a high school. I was very embarrassed so I looked down and I also looked around to see the reaction of other students around me. To my surprise, they didn’t react much when that bedroom scene was on. I thought to myself “wow, this would be a scandal in Vietnam for a teacher to show their students this kind of movie in a classroom”. But nope, she continued to teach and there was no reprimand of her bad behavior for showing a “sex” movie in the classroom hahaha That was how I figured out American high school students had lots of sex anyway and that’s the reason why they didn’t feel shocked at all when they watch sex scenes in a movie.
6. It’s very easy to get an A and be on a honor’s roll in America in high school. When I attended high school I literally did not know any English yet I still got straight A’s in every class I took. I didn’t know I could get A’s even if I didn’t know English. Maybe I could attribute that to me studying using a dictionary all the time and diligently finished all my homework and extra credit work and whatever was given to me by my teacher.
7. Different race tend to hang out with each other rather than commingle. I’m talking about black, white, Latino’s, Asians etc…hanging out with their own black, white, Latino’s, Asians group respectively. I’ll elaborate more on this because I think this is the reason why race tension is the thing in America still until this day. Being a newcomer to this country I didn’t know there was something called “racism” in America. I thought it was like in Vietnam hahaha where kids just hang out regardless of their skin color. Yup, in Vietnam there are some black kids and white kids, too, and their fathers were American soldiers who left VN after the war. But we kids just hung out, had a great time and no one talked about race back home. Then I notice how the only people that talked to me in high school was the Cambodians and the Vietnamese not any blacks nor white nor Latino students. As a matter of fact, on my school bus the only students who would scoot over to give me a seat on the bus were Asian students. The black students never did unless the bus drivers shouted at them saying something to them before they would reluctantly scoot over to let me sit down. There were no white students on the school bus because most of them were driven to school by their parents. Being in a poor immigrant family we didn’t have a car so I had to rely on a school bus to get to school so I’m just reporting to you my experience the way it happened. At any rate, one day about one week after I came to this school, I carried my lunch tray to an outside grassy area looking for a shady place to sit down and chow down my fried chickens and canned fruits, as I walked I heard someone yelled out “hey, hey” so I turned around and I saw a group of Asians sitting on the grass making their hand motion to call me over. So I walked toward them wondering what they wanted from me. Then they started to ask me in English if I were a Cambodian. Tell you the truth I guess that’s what they were asking me because I didn’t understand what they were saying. It turned out they were a bunch of Cambodians so after they knew I was a Vietnamese they introduced me to a group of Vietnamese students who sat not too far from them that they knew of and I never saw them much since the Vietnamese student group was the one that really talked to me and hung out with me and no other groups did. I swear to God prior to those Cambodian students calling “hey, hey”, no students had attempted to shout out to me “hey, hey” and called me over to make friends with me. And of course with very limited English vocabs I didn’t dare to approach anyone to start talking in English hahaha I pretty much kept to myself hoping no one would notice me.
8. Americans go grocery shopping once a week. In Vietnam I’d go grocery shopping daily to ensure my food is fresh.
9. Parents in America don’t have as much power as the parents in Vietnam to their kids. When I say power, I’m not talking about spanking. I’m talking about the power to guide your children a certain way to your liking. It seems to me the kids born in America have more power over their parents than the kids in Vietnam.
10. American men don’t have much power inside a family setting, American women do. While it is true there are more white men occupying large American companies’ boards, it is the women that have more power when it comes to making decisions that impact a family. For example, in a divorce, American men most likely will lose custody of his children and he will be forced to give 1/2 of his whatever assets to the ex-wife. When it comes to keeping a pregnancy, it is the women’s call to keep it or not.
11. There are no national middle school and high school entrance exams. In Vietnam you are expected to pass these exams in order for you to move on to 6th grade and 9th grade. Three subjects are tested: Math, Vietnamese and science/or social studies which would rotate annually. In my 8th grade year, history was the subject every 8th graders must pass. The year prior, it was biology. The year prior it was physics etc..The maximum score for math was 10, for Vietnamese was 8 and for history was 8. Yeah, I know it’s weird and I can’t tell you why they don’t give out 10 in Vietnamese and history. Maybe they think no one deserves a 10. I can’t remember what the total minimum score was to be considered “qualified” to go to 9th grade. But this exam was no joke. You have to study like hell before you can pass. American students, I don’t think, in general are subject to this kind of discipline like Vietnamese students are. So in my opinion, American students get it pretty easy and that probably explains why I got straight A’s and be on honor’s roll despite the fact I spoke zero English during my high school years in America. If American educational system were similar to that of Vietnam I would have failed miserably because in Vietnam there were no true/false, multiple choice tests. Every test you take, whether history, biology, physics, mathematics, you’d have to write a lot in Vietnamese. So if you know zero Vietnamese, too bad, you will fail academically.

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