Americans are retiring to Vietnam
latimes.com
latimes.com
When I researched housing prices in the nice areas of Saigon in 2018, 50 square meter 1 bedroom apartments were sold at $300,000+. And "sold" here means you rent it perpetually from the development company to circumvent that 50-year land ownership limit. But that can put you at risk in case said company folds.
Oh and I've also heard a lot of stories about Vietnamese women becoming rather disenchanted of hip cool American backpackers, the latter of which presumably read articles like this and decided to try their luck. The backpacker area of Saigon is considered more like a slum that you try to avoid at night.
One other thing that the article dangerously omits is the fact that food hygiene and/or safety testing is still pretty much non-existent even in the richest parts of Vietnam. If you're old, a bad food poisoning could well kill you. And in Vietnam, you'll probably have one per year. That said, food is super tasty and impossibly cheap.
Hanoi's French Quarter is the same way, and I'm glad the local women are hip to the game. They'll ask you "where are you staying?" If you are anywhere near Hoan Kiem Lake they will assume you are a broke backpacker and ghost you. When I was staying at a serviced apartment at West Lake (a more upscale neighborhood where foreign white-collar expats live) Tinder matches switched to "OK I come to your place tonight."
>>>One other thing that the article dangerously omits is the fact that food hygiene and/or safety testing is still pretty much non-existent even in the richest parts of Vietnam.
I've also spent about 6 months in Vietnam, cumulatively over 6 six trips. I've gotten brutally sick on 5 of those 6 visits. The lack of sanitation is the #1 reason I don't think I could EVER live there, no matter how much money I had. You can't escape the E.Coli in every ice cube and tap water supply, the open-sewer streets, and the choking air pollution.
Ice cubes come from vendors and I'd be surprised if they're contaminated (that's like the entire point of buying ice instead of making it from the water supply).
The air pollution is something that is being worked on, but honestly it's not really noticable (I buy a new n95 mask every other day, problem solved).
Regarding open sewer streets, I mean, some gaps between the sidewalk and the roads are dirty but what place has sewage just flowing by? Seriously name the street and I'll visit it today.
Also have you considered staying outside the foreigner bubble? (I bet you're probably in Quảng An). Go see the real Hanoi, outside of menus that are in English and don't even have Vietnamese on them.
You consider this "not really noticeable"? [1]
>>>but what place has sewage just flowing by? Seriously name the street and I'll visit it today
Bach Mai, the commercial street east of Bach Khoa (Hanoi University of Science and Technology). Have you not noticed the filth that gets dumped in the streets from all those little restaurants?
>>>Also have you considered staying outside the foreigner bubble? (I bet you're probably in Quảng An). Go see the real Hanoi, outside of menus that are in English and don't even have Vietnamese on them.
What "foreigner bubble"? I've only known 4 foreigners in Hanoi: 2 European women from Tinder, and 2 other black guys who were exchange students at HUST. Everyone else I know in Hanoi is Vietnamese, and mostly Hanoi natives. Over those six trips I only spent 2 weeks at the serviced apartment in Quang An (I ate the excellent room service there almost exclusively and that was the one trip I didn't get sick). Most of the time I've been in Hang Bai or Bach Khoa because most of my engineers lived there, or out west at Cau Giay where my client's office was located.
I had a local date take me to eat snails and bird eggs (similar to balut in the Philippines, but much smaller). Another date took me to her favorite restaurant for Ga Tan, some sort of blackened bird soup. I went on a weekend camping trip to Ham Lon (Pig Jaw Lake/Mountain) with about a dozen Vietnamese, as the only foreigner. We barbecued meat that had been waterlogged the whole day because the styrofoam "icebox" failed early in the trip. I still ate it. When we returned to Hanoi we had some sort of big duck stew together.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/UnmvQTBj7cYNMHrq7
"Foreigner bubble"....scoffs
[1]https://vietnaminsider.vn/why-hanoi-and-hcm-city-ranked-amon...
>>>I've also spent about 6 months in Vietnam, cumulatively over 6 six trips. I've gotten brutally sick on 5 of those 6 visits. The lack of sanitation is the #1 reason I don't think I could EVER live there, no matter how much money I had. You can't escape the E.Coli in every ice cube and tap water supply, the open-sewer streets, and the choking air pollution.
You will get used to it, eventually. Would be faster if you have a local to tell you what's safe and what isn't. I rarely get food poisoning, not even during that time I had to eat shit, literally (google 'thắng cố', 'nậm pịa' if you are curious). Surely half of Vietnamese street food won't meet western hygiene standards, but then your digestive system will adapt to it.
The locals taking me to their favorite holes-in-the-wall to eat was what usually made me sick. When I pressed them to go to more upscale restaurants with the caveat that I was paying, I think that helped.
The one weekend I spent in HCMC I didn't get sick, but I spent the whole time dining at some really upscale places with a chubby foodie (I swiped right on her for exactly that reason..."She looks like she eats well").
"Food poisoning killed 22 people and hospitalized 3,147 others in Vietnam during the first 11 months of this year, official government data shows."
https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/food-poisoning-deaths-doub...
That's the government data where they count only registered Vietnamese residents.
No. I did a 5-week exchange program with the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, which led to me networking with a state-owned defense company to develop products for them. This then led to me hiring some grad students and other engineers to prototype a software-defined radio device for said defense company, but the remote-management of that team eventually failed.
Another trip was to attend a defense-related research conference which was hosted at HUST. I had a pre-existing relationship with the conference as it was started in Thailand and I networked with the founders (Thai military officers, some of which had studied in the US).
There may be something more going on here?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09567...
I'm sure it's a very nice place, but that sum is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder how much it costs now, and what is monthly expense is.
Good thing is, American government has sensible reciprocal arrangement with many countries that offer national pension system that you don't necessarily have to wait until you hit full retirement age to live abroad and collect social security checks from there.
I did not know this. How does this work?
https://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html
In a nutshell, all national pension systems work pretty much the same way in that, the longer you put into it, the more you get out. There is also minimum that you have to put in. For the U.S., it's 40 points (or 10 years).
Let's say you work 9 years in the U.S. but then decide to pack your stuff up and move to one of the above listed countries. You will get credit for 9 years worth of work and not have to start over in your new country (and the other way around too)
I'm actually conflating two different topics... one is reciprocal arrangement in terms of pension point system.
Another is, just being able to collect pension from abroad, which is actually not a big deal at all.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/110614/how-can-i-re...
Our tax dollars at work, I guess.
I can't tell if the LA Times are thinking this sounds cheap or not?
In many crash-afflicted areas, prices are double what they were in 2011.
> The children were born via caesarean section; the procedure, including a four-day hospital stay, cost about $1,200, far less than it would have in the United States.
> Monthly expenses here rarely exceed $2,000, even to live in a large unit like Rockhold’s, including the help of a cook and a cleaner.
Getting staff for that price in the US is next to impossible.
That said, some Asian women also just look young even at a surprisingly high age. I recently had Germans mistake my Asian mother in law to be my younger sister.
But sure, it is a big plus that in Saigon the $2k in retirement money pay not only for one person, but for an entire family. So if you're old and lonely, that might be a very attractive reason to go.
On the one side, that leads to men who feel like they deserve an attractive girlfriend and take evil methods for acquiring one.
On the other side, there's a booming industry in the US and Europe that teaches rich single white dudes how to be a decent enough human being for long enough to go on a normal date with a normal girl.
But for the guy, after they have committed most of their youth to financial success in the hopes that it will lead to a mate, switching course later on will be very painful. And lots of frustrated overly horny dudes might destabilize the country.
The idea that relationships are based on love is not universal to say the least, many parts of the world still have arranged marriages that are explicitly transactional with an agreed dowry or bride price.
If it makes you feel a bit better, we are currently living through an unprecedented high in relationships based upon love rather than money.
In fact, it appears the man in the article may fit that profile. I think there's a big difference between "American couples are retiring to Thailand" and "single American men are retiring to Thailand and marrying Thai women."
Of course you see a lot of sexpats, but Vietnamese culture is definitely less sexualized than in other SE Asia countries. It certainly exists literally everywhere, but it is just harder to find outside of the STD infected backpacker areas. The women are pretty adamant about having a bf.
For a long time, it was also more difficult and expensive to get a visa... so the guys looking to just get laid went to the easier countries. That is changing though as Vietnam now has an e-visa.
you can "afford" a gardener as a retired middle manager only because a lot of poeple in that society are being enslaved
What a great idea! Let's retire there and have slaves!
The cuisine and the culture in much of the developing world are superb, the cities are dynamic and young, transport and services are cheap, in contrast, going back to my parent's village feels like going to a whale graveyard. Now I'm far from retirement age and maybe I'll mellow out a bit but many western small towns I've seen are outright depressing to live in (and at this point lack basic services and public transport).
that's why you feel this way. After you lived a life and developed social ties and relationships in place it would be impossible to rebuild those in a radically different country.
Statements like "Retire to Vietnam!" are mostly absurd nonsense - really to go to a place you can't even read the signs?. The most valuable asset one has are the social ties - far easier to live in a boring German village where you know most people than in the most dynamic place on Earth where you never lived before.
the problem is though that this is an idealized version of traditional small towns. My parents are still doing fine, but my grandparents were very isolated at the end of their lives because most peers have died off, are too old or sick to go anywhere, and most young people have left too so it's a very, very insular and lonely environment.
From the stories I read about the state of health, drug abuse and so on in American small towns it appears to be even worse.
Boring life is not necessarily a good thing for older folks. The practical problems of being far away from healthcare and so on aside, I believe being in a young and dynamic environment is a good thing for you if you're old, it keeps people stimulated.
People love painting the image of 'loneliness in the city' vs 'community in the village' but in reality, at least in my experience it's the other way around.
Integrating into a foreign culture is orders of magnitude more difficult - for many perhaps impossible at old age.
In kind of a less extreme situation, I've known several couples who retired in the UK and moved lock stock and barrel to Spain. Even there, I've heard horror stories of getting soul crush homesickness, not being able to sell the house, and eventually returning to the UK and living a very much reduced lifestyle thanks to all the assets being tied up in Spain. It's a massive risk.
Max out-of-pocket for insurance plans now is very reasonable. If you can afford a $250k house, you can afford the max out-of-pocket cost for many many years.
I did some random shopping for a typical family of 5 and found a max rate of ~$1600/mo for insurance premiums. You would only pay this if you were self-employed, part-time employed at a pretty shitty job, or unemployed and run out of the various mechanisms to keep your insurance. After that you have to spend your net worth until you qualify for the insurance benefits for the poor in your state.
In reality, with various employers I have paid between $0 and $200/month for insuring just myself. (I have paid $0, I don't remember the most expensive, but it was <$200 in any case)
Who gets screwed and bankrupt are the lower-middle class who can't manage to get a full time job, especially single parents who get sick. The system is biased towards benefitting married partners with children, only one person needs that full time job to cover everyone. If you are in the middle class or above and do only a small amount of planning, you're fine. If you are below the middle, you generally have to lose everything or go bankrupt before the system will help you – people in that position are often the least equipped to figure out and head through the optimal path for themselves and end up making very bad decisions.
We don't need public healthcare, we need better support which reaches higher up the income scale and better education.
Why is one large bureaucracy better than the other?
Never had to switch doctors and the paperwork amounted to the receptionist asking if my insurance was current and handing them my card.
And I'm asking you not just to show that a bunch of bad stuff has happened, but that in its totality at least one country most people would consider a democracy (a good but imperfect shortcut for this is if Freedom House rates them as such) has essentially no accountability.
I don't dispute the US is non ideal, I do dispute that as a whole the government is unaccountable. For example, what do you think would happen if Gavin Newsome (governor of California) had someone killed for disrespecting him? That's the kind of thing really unaccountable governments get away with.
So I'm asking you to not only show that bad things have happened and not been adequately punished, but that the government is fundamentally as unaccountable as a reference unaccountable government, like the U.S.S.R under Stalin or Britain under Oliver Cromwell.
Yes, that's an extreme requirement. But you made an extreme claim when you said not just that democracies are insufficiently accountable to be completely just but that they are unaccountable.
Of course many governmental officials would likely be held accountable for extreme misconduct if they weren’t able to cover up the evidence. And of course certain governments are more accountable than others.
The government is bound by a constitution. Violations of your constitutional rights are remediated on an individual basis through the judicial branch. You may individually hold the entire government responsible for violating your constitutional rights. This happens regularly.
The government is also accountable to you in aggregate through the voting process. Yes you don't get to vote on each individual issue, as you're not an expert on literally everything and have other things to do, so you delegate. Less delegation happens in America than in basically every other established democracy. You don't like what your representative did, vote for someone else, or run for office.
The least fortunate are the disproportionate beneficiaries of constitutional rights. Yes it's not perfect, and direct democracy tends to lead to squelching the rights of minority groups, but that's why America has a constitution plus 3 branches of government with various checks and balances.
Your employer has literally none of the above, which is why it has no business in your healthcare. If you get fired from your job and lose access to healthcare you don't get to run for CEO, you get to fend for yourself. If you're wrongly denied cover under a socialized medical system you can sue anyone and everyone involved and also vote them out, while still having access to the private markets to fend for yourself just as you would have if you left the company you worked at.
No, health care should be between me and my physician and whatever other experts I decide to consult. The government has no business meddling in it.
Health insurance or health care cost sharing might be things we could arrange cooperatively through government, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to do that without having the government try to meddle in what care people get.
I for one wouldn't like this level of risk with something so vital to my wellbeing. I would rather prefer that the government took this risk on my behalf of me and just charged me a flat rate throughout my life. (Btw this is the case already in almost all developed countries)
In general there are some things where government intervention is needed. Police, Education, Healthcare and Pension as these things cannot have a totally variable cost decided by a free market.
No, it can't, because in a totally free market nobody would have monopoly rights to produce particular drugs or provide particular treatments, so if one provider tried to charge a price nobody who needed the treatment could afford, they would go out of business. If it proved to be impossible for anyone to make the drug or provide the treatment at a price anyone could afford, then that would be a failure of the free market, yes; but it's an extremely unlikely failure mode as compared with the much more common failure modes of government granted monopolies and government determined prices.
That said, in a democratic country if the majority shares your risk preference, then that majority can vote for politicians who will enact it:
> I would rather prefer that the government took this risk on my behalf of me and just charged me a flat rate throughout my life.
And that would be a form of cost sharing, which I mentioned--all taxpayers share the costs of expensive treatments, on the assumption that only a small percentage of them will actually end up having an illness that incurs those costs.
However, that still only protects you on the assumption that in fact only a small percentage of people end up having the costly illnesses. But the illnesses people are generally worried about with respect to high costs--cancer, heart disease, arterial sclerosis leading to a high risk of stroke, liver disease, kidney disease, diabetes--are not that rare. So either we keep paying more and more taxes as a higher and higher percentage of people have the illness, to the point where we are just as badly off as if we each paid our own costs individually, or many people end up not getting the treatments at all because there isn't enough money to go around, so the risk you thought you were offloading to the government is back on you again.
This scheme also ignores the possibility of making the treatments cheaper. But the way to do that is to allow free market competition; we don't have that in the US since prices are not set by supply and demand but by a combination of government agencies and private health insurance companies.
> In general there are some things where government intervention is needed. Police, Education, Healthcare and Pension as these things cannot have a totally variable cost decided by a free market.
This is not the obvious truth you appear to think it is. It is an extremely strong claim which is not at all clearly established by actual historical evidence.
Lets be realistic here. What happens is that most drugs are either actually manufactured overseas or at least can be shipped from overseas for pennies. However due to regulations and lobbying drug companies charge really high prices for the same drugs and they make sure it is illegal to import those drugs. In case the government itself was paying for these drugs it would be much harder for the companies to game the system like this and an individual would be protected from such predatory practices.
> So either we keep paying more and more taxes as a higher and higher percentage of people have the illness, to the point where we are just as badly off as if we each paid our own costs individually,
This is not true if you observe the tax rates in any countries with government funded healthcare. The taxes more or less remain the same but of course there are differences in the healthcare budget.
> This scheme also ignores the possibility of making the treatments cheaper.
Once again the healthcare costs in the US have actually risen quite significantly under the private system.
> This is not the obvious truth you appear to think it is. It is an extremely strong claim which is not at all clearly established by actual historical evidence.
Police and education it already is true even in the US. Even pension has significant regulation. The only reason healthcare is not is aggressive lobbying by private companies.
I'm not old enough to be keeping an eye on the numbers, but it looks like ~$450 / month for hospital (free) + doctor (subsidized) + prescription (pay).
This sounds like an entire family with a higher-level plan, correct? Higher-level plans have correspondingly reduced out-of-pocket maximums, to the point where the out-of-pocket maximum can be as low as $2000/year — so your premium is nearly your entire spending.
$320,000 / $8000+ a month (not including rising costs) means he has 3.25 years of care coverage paying out of pocket which I don't consider many years.
I'm not sure on the particulars, and certainly don't take the above as any kind of financial advice -- I just started looking into this for an aging parent myself. Though, it might be worth talking to an accountant and see what is applicable for your location.
You’d be doing this in the UK on the NHS too. The patient needs to pay until their assets are drawn down until a certain amount, and then the government will take over until death.
Get checked. Think about it. If you're worried about money you will spend less if you catch and manage something early than if you're late and whatever you have doesn't kill you but makes you very sick.
If you're not insured, get insured. Financial planning via expecting death is just foolish.
Or did you get a "bill" that listed before-insurance numbers which nobody pays and might as well be spit out by a random number generator?
https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/real-estate/T010-S003-home-pr...
In Birmingham Alabama, you can't get just as hot as you can in Vietnam, and your rent will be pretty similar.
Yes, healthcare and food are more expensive, but not that much. And you'll spend less on those two things over the year than if you come home once a year to keep your citizenship.
But yeah that also wouldn’t require coming back to the US necessarily
A lot of people that get rich because of America would just drop American citizenship once they do get rich to avoid paying back into the system that allowed them to become successful.
There is no other country that offers as much upward mobility as the US to its citizens. Hence the tax.
The Bi-coastal Americans in this article will take communism on a bankroll over the Bible Belt, take a hint
Shitty extremes of temperature
Shitty hostile weather patterns
Shitty viability of opportunities as a result of ongoing talent drain towards the coasts with everyone wondering why its so cheap
Shitty isolationist mentality and nationalism to rationalize why their dystopian nightmare is okay
Shitty extremes of religion that were literally kicked out of Europe
Shitty public policy and services as a byproduct of the prior two realities
When people want to enjoy their money its an easy and hard pass on the bible belt. Social welfare states and full blown communist states by the water give you everything for free all while you can buy luxury in liberalized state planned economies.
That's... pretty damn bizarre that you'd find it intriguing.
>In Memphis, TN you can rent a decent apartment in a shitty part of town for $300 a month.
Who _wants_ to live in the shitty part of town? You've deconstructed your own argument in a sentence.
Also, with American money you can live in Vietnam like royalty, and in an area that looks like paradise. There's a reason the places you are talking about are in the "flyover states".
Let's say you just quit your job to live your dream of creating an indie video game. You'll probably want as much runway as possible while you build.
Startups tend to need rapid iteration and experimentation unless they're highly technical, which is why this plan is probably better for things you can do solo and completely cut off.
On the other hand, maybe someone just wants to spend a few years playing video games and reading books? Why not do it cheaply?
Bugs. There is something to be said for a deep winter when opening a window doesn't mean invading in an Attenborough documentary worth of wildlife into your bedroom.
> For the second year in a row, the world's happiest country is... Finland!
> Finland topped the list of 156 countries, which were ranked in the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network's 2019 World Happiness Report. The report ranks countries on several well-being variables including income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy and more.
> Two other Nordic countries came in second and third place, Denmark and Norway, respectively.
From https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/03/20/finlan...
Meanwhile, in the tropics:
> On the other hand, South Sudan ranked the least happy on the list.
How many wealthy native born canadians visit sweden? Hardly any. How many wealthy native born swedes visit canada? Hardly any. I bet more swedes visit thailand in one day than they visit canada in a whole year.
Just won’t have pho around and lots of snow.
As is household debt.
You can live a pampered lifestyle that would not be even remotely within reach in the US on the same budget.
Vietnam still is a communist country in that respect.
The government still owns all the land and is legally leasing it to its citizens and foreigners. In reality, now that Vietnam is increasingly open to the world economy the government has to treat property rights better or else it'll scare foreign investment away.
The lack of private property rights and the Vietnam's Communist Party stranglehold on the economy with their state owned enterprises is a huge drag on productivity and innovation.
Fortunately, it seems like things are improving.
Hell even Singapore limits property ownership of foreigners.
You lease it for 50 years, but in the end you can sell the actual property to a citizen or sell it to a non-citizen who will get a 50 year lease.
Large landowner (ex aristocrat) or government, what difference does it make? The land is forever not yours.
Why would a higher cost of living within the US push expats out of Malaysia into Vietnam?
There's also a desire to try to make daily costs of living stretch more and many retired people will find themselves retiring to rural environments. However, those places may also be very far away from the kind of emergency medical care that's likely to be needed.
The intersection of decent cost of living, close to medical facilities, high quality medical establishment, and affordable medical care leaves not too many places in the world.
At the moment, my wife and I are considering retiring to South Korea (not Seoul) or Japan (not Tokyo) since those seem to be places with that rare intersection. I'm sure some places in Western Europe may also qualify.
That's not at all what I said and is exactly the opposite.
You guys are criticizing me for calling Asia a monolith but I can assure you the difference between Tokyo and Myanmar is smaller than NYU and the Midwest
One could make an argument that living in rural areas is worse than urban ones when it comes to access to top medical care, but that has nothing to do with the NYC/LA vs. the rest of the country.
There’s some confused thinking in this thread I think.
How about the ambulances in Detroit which take 45 mins, or the south Chicago hospitals who refuse to treat gunshot wounds?
The services are there but the density is low and the sprawl is wide in the midwest, and your only option is the car or to be entirely dependent on a relative to shuttle you to your appointments as public transit is anemic to non existent outside of chicago.
Costs are fractions of U.S. costs. For an extraordinary number of medical situations, one could fly to Korea, get treated, stay in hotels or nice recovery centers (medical hotels), and fly back and still spend less money than in the U.S. with very competitive medical outcomes.
For developing countries, you can have very capable doctors, but limited access to technologies.
I don't think what you say is remotely true, though. Sure if you plan to live in high-cost areas in Europe, healthcare would be expensive, but taking Turkey as an example, the healthcare is very reasonably priced even in top private institutions, compared to what they would be in the US.
I do not have first hand experience for critical surgeries, but i have a recent experiences and learned what the price would be in Turkey.
Labor: US: $40K, Turkey: ~$2K. Dental implant: US: $6K, Turkey: $660
They are both pre-insurance, though.
The same should follow for critical surgeries like healthcare, cancer, etc.
I think you exactly confirmed what I said.
Real estate agent who told me retirees were coming down out of west-side Santa Cruz cabins as "the medical problems start."
There are places in Spain that are essentially senile British colonies.
If anyone want to move to Vietnam, pick Saigon/Danang/Hue/Nhatrang and stay away from the north until they fix their air pollution problem. It's pretty bad up there. (source: I'm a Hanoian)
Do you know about the quality of VinMec? For VinSchool I've heard from friends who attended that they have incredible teachers and from advertisements that they have professors from ivies helping them out, so I was wondering if VinMec is also top tier. They claim to have equipment "equivalent to leading hospitals in the US, UK, Germany, Japan and Singapore" so I wonder if they also have the skills to use it effectively.
Let us see...
My partner got what looked liked food poisoning when we arrived to Hue. Local hospital refused to take us, sent to a special hospital "for foreigners". She was put on a bed and kept waiting in pain for hours. The doctor didn't bother to do anything for her for hours, despite not too many other patients. We felt hungry, yet they refused to let us go. After several hours waiting and feeling more stomach pain from hunger, I said, we absolutely have to go and eat something. Yet the doctor told us to keep waiting, refusing to let us go. I started looking around for food and found a cafeteria on premises that was luckily still open (it was already late). After a verbal fight with the doctor, he finally allowed us to go to eat in that cafeteria. It was already late and dark and I had told the doctor, we would be leaving now unless he does something. After more verbal fights and repeated insistence, the doctor wrote a quick prescription without even checking and sent us to pay about USD 100! However, by the time he gave it to us, the hospital pharmacy was already closed. And no other pharmacy on the street would have that medicine. So we came back around midnight, with no medicine, wasted many hours, spent USD 100 on nothing.
Would I call it "not too bad"? Well, if it was any more serious, we would have to fear for our lives is all I can say.
> Local hospital refused to take us, sent to a special hospital "for foreigners".
This was the red light, Hue central hospital is actually very good (I have been there myself). It would be better if you had a local to guide you, maybe I should develop a website to help expats in Vietnam... Still what was the name of that hospital 'for foreigner' you mentioned?
I'm a native VNmese in HCMCity. My wife is a doctor, we also have lots of friends/relatives working as doctors, pharmacists,... so I hope my sharing is not quite irrelevant.
In VN, you can get medical service with the same quality as US, if you know the right place to go. Sometimes you can find doctors with excellent proficiency, since VN is a good evironment for doctors to practice their skill and knowledge (rare cases, severe cases due to bad sanitary & healthcare mindset).
But again, the biggest challenge is that "right place". Not all great doctors work in the biggest hospitals, and not all well-known doctors are great.
Americans, AIR?
The kids also do not trust their govt. or the education they get in school. They now have access to the Internet and can learn things on their own.
For the older generations, the other part is that America has, in a way, redeemed itself. First was the attempt at the end of the war to rescue millions of people. We've also brought great wealth to the country and for better or worse, taught them capitalism (Clinton in the 90's). People may be dirt poor, but nobody in Vietnam goes hungry anymore.
So yea... it just isn't how is looked upon anymore.
I believe those old white dudes who can afford it are just trying to avoid dating the stereotypical modern western girls.
Here in Germany, rich guys go for a Czech, Turkish or Italian wife if they hope to have plenty of kids. And it's no secret that British guys will travel all over Europe to try their luck at dating, because apparently most aren't too happy with the supply at home.
If they were actually rich they wouldn’t need to retire overseas to stretch out their retirement.
Or they are totally put off by the personalities of young attractive western women and consider foreign women an objective quality-of-life upgrade.
Both are uncomfortable stereotypes, but we find the latter more acceptable because Western masculine ideals traditionally interpret the male in that situation as expressing his virility and alpha-dog status (while denigrating the woman as a gold-digger and whore.) Although many people are creeped out by the age differential if it's wide enough, it's expected both that older, powerful men will attract younger women, and that younger women will be attracted to the money and power. It's a sentiment expressed and reinforced throughout Western media and culture.
Meanwhile the Asian version of the stereotype has connotations of the failure of masculinity on the part of the male, as only a step above hiring a prostitute, as well as implications of pedophilia and sex-trafficking.
Masculinity doesn’t have to be linked with local wealth (pressing/buying someone with money, connections and law doesn’t make one alpha-dog nor a unique problem solver), and I would add wealth actually tends to hide smaller balls, if you excuse a non-native speaker for this idiom. It is strange that traditions link those two, as a person may be just not interested genuinely in spending effort to accumulate so much bigger than usual money to simply get a normal healthy date and life. Masculinity is a thing that allows you to skip these steps altogether, unless women are heavily reprogrammed on money instead and everyone is okay with that.
Basically, it is a failure of a man to find a decent woman, but it is still unclear who is a failure in general.
I meant to state that the perception is that about Asian women not that I consider it the reality.
> If the male cannot find a match, it is a failure by definition, but I do not see how this fails his masculinity.
A man is often seen as having earned a Western trophy girlfriend, but as having likely bought the Asian counterpart. Why this is, and why the former is more accepted, is probably rooted in negative stereotypes about Asian women formed during America's wars in Asia (specifically Korea and Vietnam) and about the perceived "submissive" nature of Asian women in general.
>Masculinity doesn’t have to be linked with local wealth (pressing/buying someone with money, connections and law doesn’t make one alpha-dog nor a unique problem solver),
It doesn't have to be, but historically, it has been. Trump bragged about being able to "grab'em by the pussy" and it endeared him to (some of) the public, as did Clinton's escapades, as did JFK's. It's been the case since kings had harems.
>and I would add wealth actually tends to hide smaller balls, if you excuse a non-native speaker for this idiom.
Yes, people often say ostentatious displays of wealth are a way to compensate for a man's shortcomings.
>Masculinity is a thing that allows you to skip these steps altogether, unless women are heavily reprogrammed on money instead and everyone is okay with that.
There's masculinity, and there's "masculinity" as expressed by commercial culture (call it corporate masculinity.) The latter is telling men that they need wealth and status items (in other words, to participate in conspicuous consumerism) for a woman to find them attractive.
Go ahead marry into an Asian family I double dog dare you.
That's why there's the saying in my country that roughly translates to something like "Woman is key of the household (because she keeps all the money)". One of the traditional duties (there are five of them) of a wife is to control and distribute money in the way that is fair (among family, her parents and in-laws).
All the men were killed in the war. The women ran the houses and the businesses. Now, 2-3 generations later, kids have grown up watching mom and sister be the strong ones.
Trust me, the last thing you want to do is piss off a Vietnamese woman.
Bali is expensive and honestly not that nice. Kuta is a train wreck and places like Ubud are now some weird yoga retreat city with too much car traffic.
At least the conquistadors had to live there in the interim years.