ALL VIETNAMESE PEOPLE LOVE KARAOKE.
I just got back from an evening at the karaoke cafe with fifteen belting 15 year olds, some new students I’ve recently acquired from Hai Duong’s gifted secondary school. They’re hoping to go to high school abroad, so for the past month I’ve been helping them prep for their big interviews.
Today after our class they took me to a Karaoke joint which was deceptively disguised as a coffee place. Downstairs, it was all little tables and individual Vietnamese-style french presses. Upstairs, it was all private rooms with group-sized leather couches and wide screens.
Of course, I was all but made to sing by FORCE.
I tried to get out of it by saying that I needed to get home to prepare my dinner since I live alone, unlike my students whose mothers still do that sort of thing for them. (How lucky they are!!)
They would have none of my excuses. The other teacher of the class told me not to worry and promptly left the Karaoke Cove. 20 minutes later she returned carrying a large plastic bag filled with cabbage and a small plastic bag which appeared to be filled with some sort of raw meat mixture. Holding up the bag she proudly exclaimed,
“I have brought you the meat of two fighting cocks!”
It is not laying in my room, watching Sex and the City DVDs and eating tofu with noodles which makes me sometimes wish another American friend was here, nor is it sitting in cafes or bicycling through town which makes me pine for Western company.
No no.
But it is times like this, when I am surrounding by a group of Vietnamese teenagers singing their hearts out and someone uses a term like “the meat of two fighting cocks” to describe my dinner, that I wish there someone else who could, as I do, see the sweet hilarity.
Watch this Video. It makes me very happy.
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