Đẹp Trai, or: My (Physical) Ego as a Vietnamese Male in Vietnam

The surface:

This is a topic I have been thinking about for a long time, but I felt weird writing (publicly) about it because it seems pretty… shallow. Being attractive. Being called handsome. Being known as handsome. “Jesus, Simon… poor you for being called handsome.”

Before I had even set foot in Vietnam, my resume and picture had been circulated throughout my school. Apparently, this is somewhat protocol for when new, foreign teachers arrive, but the fact that some teachers and students already knew what I looked like before I got there was…peculiar.

Whenever I am introduced to new people, students or teachers describe me as a foreign American teacher who is Vietnamese American. The introduction is sometimes followed by a comment like, “đẹp trai (handsome).”

One class in particular – comprised of mostly girls and a few LGBTQIA+ male students – would actually whisper “handsome” to me in English WHILE I was teaching, and then switch to Vietnamese when they realized I had heard them, not realizing I also knew the word for handsome in Vietnamese.

Sometimes my male-identifying students would call me handsome to my face or make a comment about my appearance, but I would only hear these comments from female-identifying students indirectly or through other people telling me that those students thought I was handsome.

As the only foreign teacher at my school, I do feel a bit of scrutiny with how I appear around campus. Most of the time I wear a button-up shirt (thank you to Banana Republic for that slim-fit fit) and slacks. After morning classes, I’m usually dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. I’ve gone through campus a few times in a tank top and shorts ONLY because I’ve come back from the gym, and because it’s usually 93 degrees. It’s also really funny to watch students’ faces, shocked to see a teacher with biceps.

Being called handsome in Vietnam can feel like a high, particularly when multiple people throughout the day tell you this. I not only look Vietnamese in Vietnam but I am also seen as good-looking too.

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The small aftershocks:

After getting to know a few students a bit better, I started to hear a few comments about how they saw me. Some of my students didn’t think, at first, that I was fully Vietnamese. “Your nose is pointed up and not flat,” inferring that my nose isn’t the mark of a typical Vietnamese one. Some students were surprised that I was fully Vietnamese (I think not being fluent in Vietnamese suggests that only one of my parents is Vietnamese; I could only be fully Vietnamese if I already spoke Vietnamese fluently).

When I first came to Cao Lãnh, I felt tall. I thought I was one of the tallest people at the school and in the city. But then, when I started to teach, I realized that some of my students, particularly the male-identifying ones, were quite tall. Some over 6’. After my initial tall-boy bubble burst, I actually started to second-guess myself: “I think I’m shrinking. This can’t be right.” How could kids in Vietnam be taller than me?

Before Vietnam, I spent a solid 4 years in Chicago, the hub of the Midwest. White men in particular are usually quite tall and burly; I felt sometimes invisible in comparison to their “All-American” frame and the paradigm of what men were supposed to look like in America.  

It’s so easy and toxic for men to compare themselves to other men physically in very unhealthy ways. “I am taller than him. I am therefore better, stronger, and more attractive.” I often check myself when I see people around town and unfairly analyze people using Western standards – Oh: he’s short. He’s tall. He’s skinny. He’s big, but maybe not in a good way. Americans love to do this. What you see is what their value is. Men gladly condition themselves to literally and metaphorically look down on others. I started to do the same in Cao Lãnh. Well, at least I’m a bit taller than some of the teachers…

Living in Vietnam has challenged me to not directly center myself on white masculinity for the first time in my life. I know that there are many different ethnicities represented and integral to Vietnam’s population makeup. So, let’s just say, everyone in Cao Lãnh typically looks Southeast Asian (again, hard to really define). But I am comparing myself to people who generally look more similar to me than different.

When I go around town, I usually feel tall or above average, leading me to feel perhaps above average about myself. But then I go and teach class, in a more intimate setting. Students stand up next to me, and then I feel smaller. My ego diminishes. Definitely for the best, but it doesn’t always feel good. Whether it’s Chicago or Cao Lãnh, there will be people who will always be taller than me. And I just have to be OK with that.

In the U.S., I definitely became familiar with walking into spaces – work, parties, restaurants (especially the Northside of Chicago) and not only being the only person of color in the room but viscerally feeling that maybe those spaces didn’t always naturally attract Southeast Asian faces and bodies. My body constantly felt less than compared to the stocky, typically taller white men who came from all parts of the Midwest. I felt different because I was a token, but being a token doesn’t make you feel special. White men, at least from my personal viewpoint, have always been the pinnacle of the male (beauty) standard – in every stage of my life until now, for the last 8 months in Vietnam.

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Beauty is subtle and varied:

Vietnamese people look so different from each other. In just one class – around 35 students – every student has a different face shape, skin tone, facial features, height, body type, the list goes on… I grew up in a small group of Vietnamese people (my family), but I wouldn’t always see my extended family or community very often; the limited amount of Vietnamese faces, skin tones, and facial features I’m used to seeing or think of as “Vietnamese” generally belong to people who are related to me. Being in Vietnam and having a world that reflects and challenges my own internal standards of beauty, masculinity, and looking “Asian” has been absolutely vital to how I see and think about myself moving forward. I am worried, though, that I will lose this the moment I come back to the United States, where Asian, Southeast Asian, and particularly Vietnamese people are not the majority. We’re growing, but we’re still in the minority.

It's hard to articulate how I have reimagined masculine beauty or standards of attractiveness in general. With a lot of things in the East, beauty in Vietnam is subtle. I’ve learned, when I meet or see people, to look at the subtlety of their features: eye shape, nose, the way they smile. I love noticing and recognizing students just based on their eyes because their faces are sometimes covered up with a mask. In my small town, people may not have access to braces or orthodontia – just like in some small towns in the states. But just because people have “nice” teeth doesn’t always mean they have a smile you find attractive. The way that someone’s whole mouth, eyes, and even nose light up when they smile is what I remember. You don’t have to have fence-like, bleached-white teeth to have a kind, beautiful, and unique smile.

Many of my students wear glasses. The image of wearing glasses, to me, is always connected to being wimpy, weak, nerdy, and unattractive. I almost never wear glasses in public for many of these reasons. Very stupid, I know. Now, I see how attractive people can be because they wear glasses. I think, especially for men, that glasses help balance out aggressive masculinity, making people look softer and kinder, and their beauty more subtle.

Being called đẹp trai is a nice compliment, but I try really hard to make my characteristics as a teacher, mentor, and friend much more important than how people think of my appearance. This constant, grounding exercise of reassessing how I look or how people think of me is shifting, a bit volatile, but in the end, much, much healthier.