When I got the news that I would be teaching in Soc Trang, I tried to learn as much as I could about the province and the surrounding Mekong Delta region. That is when I learned about the Khmer Krom, the indigenous people of this region. As I read more about the history and culture of Khmer Krom people, I started to see more ways in which Vietnam is similar to the U.S. Just like how there are Native American groups who have been living on the land now called the U.S. before Europeans came, Khmer people have been living on the land now called southern Vietnam before Vietnamese people came there. Many Khmer Krom people have preserved many of their cultural traditions, including their language, even though doing so is difficult. Many indigenous peoples living in the U.S. have preserved and revived, or brought back, their traditions and languages too.
I feel like a lot of people in the U.S. think that there is only one culture in Vietnam, only one group of people who share the same traditions here. In fact, like in the U.S., there are many different groups of people who live in what is now Vietnam. In different parts of the country, you can meet people with different traditions, hear different languages and try different special foods. In Soc Trang, for example, you can hear people speak Khmer, Vietnamese, different forms of Chinese and different forms of the Cham language. You can hear some people speak English too. You can also try foods and see different festivals that are connected to different culture groups. Pretty incredible, huh? It's kind of like New York, right?
