Vietnam's hard-charging economy has boosted demand for English speakers. Many can't afford classes, so they flock to September 23 Park in Ho Chi Minh City to strike up conversations with passing tourists.
Eranio Huong has never visited a Western country but speaks English with near-native fluency, down to using “like” as a hesitation word and starting sentences with a drawn-out “so.” The 27-year-old from a poor village in central Vietnam couldn’t learn much of the language in high school or at her university. She never hired a tutor.
“I’m quite stubborn, and they know it, so they told me to be careful and that was it,” Huong said, recalling her parents’ initial shock. Now they see the first cafe, the larger one, and get it.‘70s, and it’s now getting an economic foothold because of rapid inflows of foreign investment into export manufacturing. “We’re all trying to do business with foreign countries, because that’s where the money is, so companies require their employees to [be able to speak] English,” Huong said.
On several afternoons, the 70-year-old Vietnam War artillery team veteran sat on a two-person wooden bench waiting for someone to come up and say, “Excuse me, do you have a moment?” He spent more than an hour talking to a college senior one Monday afternoon in November. Duc, 20, donned a school backpack and the shirt that was part of his old blue-and-white high school uniform as a signal to Western tourists that he’s after an education rather than something commercial. Van, also 20, wants to become a captain with an international shipping line. Maritime communication and written laws are almost always in English. Van knows Vietnam needs more people in the navigation field.
But the dialogue wasn’t over. Smet, 61, an environmental engineer, now helps Huong teach English in her cafes on his annual returns to Ho Chi Minh City — among his 20 trips total so far to Vietnam. Two years ago, on one of his more memorable park encounters, Thien asked a stranger for 10 minutes of his time and offered to share information about Vietnam.
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