Last month at my reading in Tallahassee, the conversation turned away from my memoir to my travels as a travel writer. I think it was a question about my favorite places that prompted me to talk about Vietnam, which I visited in 1994. I noted that it was the only place I’ve ever been where students would come up to me and politely ask if they could practice their English.
Driving home the following day, and listening to the BBC, I heard a report from Vietnam about how young people there target tourists in hopes of having English conversations with them. It is a common practice known locally as “hunting foreigners.” I was delighted to hear that it is still a thing, and wondered if perhaps I had been one of the first foreigners bagged. There were not a lot of tourists in Vietnam in 1994 and most of them were the linguistically undesirable French.
