Vietnam
When an American looks at Asia they often view the region as one big exotic place filled with people that look the same and are all sort of “Chinese.” It is only after you live or travel here that you truly come to understand the tremendous variation between the region and its people. At times these ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious and political differences combine to make westerners seem as if they are the ones that are the same. The differences between a French, White American, German, English or Italian start to seem so small in the eyes of an Asian and we are typically racially grouped together in much the same way. The Thais even have a word for it, Farang. The term Farang envelopes all white skinned western folk and places them into a single class of foreigner. President Tran Dai Quang I recently completed my third trip to Vietnam, a region of the world I am still struggling to define. The land is in a word fascinating. It is an inconvenient land. One tha