Cám Ơn - Thank You

A typical phrasebook, useless as they often are*, will tell you that "cam on" (usually written without diacritic marks) means thank you in Vietnamese. It's okay when you're a foreigner and you come out with "Kam Awn," folks in Vietnam will understand what you're trying to say, even though it doesn't sound anything like the actual Vietnamese phrase. Any phrasebook worth the ink on its pages will at least give you a semblance of the pronunciation. The mouth forms a phrase that sounds more like "gham euhn," which is closer. But without the diacritics, or knowing how to pronounce the proper tone, it's still not going to sound right.

The first word has two different tonal pronunciations. The first is cảm, with a questioning tone. The second is cám, and the voice lifts with a rising tone. I can't get a good explanation for when to use either one, and my resident translators can't say. Wiktionary is no help either. But I found a text that lets me hazard a guess. Cảm ơn stands alone, while cám ơn is used with further words, such as kinship terms, according to the phrasebook Hoàng Yến Tiếng Việt. Take this explanation with a grain of salt.

Either way it's pronounced, the Vietnamese word for thank you seems to be a loan word from Chinese, according to Wiktionary. Both cảm ơn and cám ơn are based on the characters 感恩, which together mean something akin to a feeling of mercy or charity. Whether the Vietnamese word for thank you is a loan word or not, there is one thing I know for sure. I've heard from three sources that the Vietnamese rarely ever say thank you. Instead, gratitude is implied through the choice of words. It's the same as in English, in which a person can express thanks without saying it.

My sources also tell me that the words for thank you are used rarely because they express the deepest and most sincere appreciation. Just think in terms of a debt. When you're indebted to someone for a deed they've done for you, you're obliged to pay them back. The Vietnamese expression for being indebted is "mang ơn," which means to carry a debt to be repaid. When you say "cảm ơn" to someone, you're expressing that you're carrying an emotional debt, a debt that can never be repaid. This is the magnitude of the Vietnamese expression of thanks.

This magnitude is an aspect of thank you that phrase books always seem to leave out. Instead, the books encourage foreigners and tourists to throw the word thank you around like it was meaningless. Thank you for the fast food. Thank you for bus ride. Thank you for giving me the receipt for the groceries I paid for. The word seems trite and commonplace with overuse. The Vietnamese seem to understand this, and so reserve the word for the most special occasions. The locals seem to accept our tendency for overuse. They will even say it to us because they realize we expect to hear it.

It's not that the Vietnamese never say thank you. They place such an extensive emphasis on it that if you ever heard it said you would know the enormous emotion that was there. This emphasis made me wonder about my own use of the phrase. I wonder, how do you state true gratitude if the words are the same ones you would say to the bus driver when hopping off the bus? I throw the word thanks around a lot. I wonder if it's maybe too much. I wonder if thank you, like sorry, loses its meaning if spoken out of reflex and not from the heart. This amazing lesson is one of the ways my trip here has changed me for the better, by helping me understand how to be truly grateful.


* Before I came to Vietnam, I thought I would need a phrasebook to help me get by on my own. While browsing the local quirky used bookstore, I found one--a knock-off version of a popular brand of pocketsize phrasebooks. I flipped it open, and couldn't believe what I saw. It was a list of phrases one would need when buying or selling narcotics. Select phrases included "do you have any clean syringes for sale?" and "this is for personal use," and "I'm having an overdose." The funny thing is, none of the phrases were written in tones, which means you'd probably never be understood. Good luck getting poison control to take care of your OD when you're saying "These shoes don't fit like last year."

Cute Cannibal

Xuxifarm's mascot is quite the Happy Hannibal

We have some pretty disturbing advertisements when it comes to food. Recall the M&M commercials, in which snackers chat with anthropomorphic candies shortly before devouring them--if you think about it, eating an M&M after having a conversation with it is really disturbing. And here, I ran across a billboard that made me gag. This barnyard scene is a classic case of cannibalism. In the foreground is a giant pig indulging in a giant tube of processed swine meat. This pig squeals with delight as he sprints away from another pig, cows and chickens all gorging themselves on a porkmeat picnic. I saw this sign a couple of times in downtown Saigon, and finally got a picture of it. What struck me as most bizarre is not how marketers anthropomorphise food as a gimmick to get us to eat it, it's how we eat it anyway.

Return from Vĩnh Long

We had slept at Lữ's cousins' house on our last night in Vĩnh Long. In the morning, I noticed that the countryside sun seems to rise earlier than in the city. A hundred miles away in Saigon, the streets lay quiet in the still shade cast by tall buildings. Yet in Vĩnh Long the sun was already high in the sky and the world was vibrant and alive. The sun shone down on palm leaf-thatched houses and fruit orchards, and caused the chalky-brown river to sparkle. Neighbors gathered to gossip around the vegetable cart in the lane between the houses and the river bank. A flat barge covered in a blue tarp chugged downstream. Standing in the center of the barge, a little girl in a pink shirt and capris stretched her arms over her head and waved to the world.

The sun hid behind the clouds. Somewhere in the distance, three white, waggle-tailed ducks waddled their way into a lush paddy. Mudskippers, with googly, frog-like eyes, poked their heads from their bankside holes and skipped across the surface of the water in the irrigation ditches in the orchard. The wind carried signs of rain, and soon the world was awash in curtains of water that beat down on tin roofs like billions of angry feet. Almost as soon as it began, the rain let up, and the sun shone again on the glistening verdant countryside.

We said our goodbyes to Lữ's cousins, hopped on scooters, and sped off to Dì Tư's house. There, we had left some belongings that we needed to pick up before we left. And Dì Tư had some fruit for us to take back with us. Mike and Lữ groaned. We'd have to carry the fruit by hand from shuttle to bus to shuttle to taxi and then up the two flights of stairs home. How bad could that be? I thought to myself, it's just a little fruit. Just a little fruit turned out to be two-dozen coconuts, a jackfruit the size of a five-gallon bucket, and a burlap sack full of pomelo, longyans, limes, green-skinned oranges, and the 25 pounds of rambutan we had picked from the orchard. We stacked it all on the side of the road in front of Dì Tư's house, waited for the shuttle to the bus station, and wondered, how are we going to eat all this fruit before it spoils?

The shuttle pulled up, and through the window the passengers gawked at our pile. The seven passenger van was already carrying eleven people, so the matter was not only the fruit, it was the question of how we were all going to fit. We found a way, and within a few miles, squeezed an additional two people into the van. We were packed in like clowns. The driver passed Lữ our bus tickets, and the man next to me said he overheard her name and was related to her family somehow. He was a tiny man, with receding gums and ears that stuck out at ninety-degree angles. He, Mike, and Lữ held a brief conversation that petered out shortly after the man said he had fought with the Việt cộng during the war. I spent the rest of the trip with my camera behind my head, trying and failing to capture a picture of the 15 people squished into this 7-passenger van.

Our fruit bounty,
all we could carry

We got to the bus station. Mike and I unloaded our mammoth stock of groceries. The man who said he was related to Lữ joined us to grab his own bags. Mike smiled at him and cracked a joke about the imperialist Americans. The man laughed, dug into his satchel, and fished out two mangoes that he handed to us before he left. Not that we needed any more fruit. When we finally got home, we piled it all high on the table to marvel at what we were faced with consuming. Five days later, we still have a large bowl of rambutan, eleven coconuts, four pomelo, enough limes to make a pint of juice, and one of the mangoes. The fruit is a delicious reminder of our time in Vĩnh Long. It was nice to bring home a piece of the countryside--as much of a piece as we could carry.