Reintroduction

 Salut,

It has been a moment, hasn’t it? But also no time at all.

I am restarting this blog right before orientation in Hanoi.

My last blog, for all the new people, followed my two-and-a-half-year-long escapades across Central Asia. It features a host of wild and crazy stories. Linguistic messups. Adorable host kids. Some amazing (and not so amazing) food. Incredible friends and people. That chapter is over, and here I am now, one year later, to start another.

My journey to get here started in the fall of last year. Shortly after Peace Corps wrapped up, I arrived back in the United States. I spent some time at home before moving to DC for just a year. There, I worked for Kid Power, an educational nonprofit, in conjunction with AmeriCorps. You’ll notice I have a certain affinity for collecting US government sponsored service programs. I collect them like Pokémon. I loved loved my time in DC, but here I am back again, now on my way overseas again. My sister’s mother-in-law once told me that I was born with wings. I applied for Fulbright and successfully got it, navigating through some annoying visa shenanigans and medical clearances.

For those of you new, old, or from the far reaches of the internet, my name is Grace Baldwin, and I am an incoming Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. I previously served in the Peace Corps as an English Teacher in Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan, which you can read about in my many old blogposts. I am quite proud of a few of those posts. In between my time in both these programs, I worked for AmeriCorps. There are many blogposts and social media posts about both the Peace Corps and Fulbright. I aim in my blogposts to delve a bit deeper into the programs, highlighting the highs and lows, explaining a bit about the culture of the country I am in.

 My blogs have some funny stories. Some low points and crazy antics you might think could be found only in books. The first thought that came to mind was that one time our hotel nearly burned down in Bishkek (iykyk). Or that one time my host sister-in-law shoved a frozen chicken’s corpse into my host brother’s suitcase. Or that one time there was a six-car pileup accident on the highway on the way to the airport. Or that time I was given sheep’s ass to eat. Or that time my host brother was shooting feral dogs outside our house with a rifle. Or that time I got locked inside the school building and had to jump out the window to get back to my house. Adelya’s failed attempts to vacuum. That time I learned to sing poetry in Kyrgyz. My failed attempts at learning Russian. Tajik and Uzbek men in a taxi talking about Donald Trump shortly after the 2024 election. That time I was a trendsetter at my school by wearing a northern-style dress. That time we almost broke a host family’s TV. Or that time a Kyrgyz police officer told us he loved us. Or that time there were blown-out tires in a taxi I was in at 4 am in heavy rain in Uzbekistan. No matter how perilous, funny, or amazing, I learned to embrace the notion that every mishap or embarrassment can lead to a great or funny story.

Later on, and throughout this next year, I may reference and compare Peace Corps and Fulbright, as they are fairly different. Fulbright is, right off the bat, shorter than Peace Corps; it is only about roughly 10 months of work, and I will be gone by the beginning of summer. Needless to say, that may result in fewer blog posts, but that’s ok.

I had the wonderful chance to meet a few others in this upcoming cohort in person. An old friend, Michael, introduced me to a mutual friend he knew who happened to also be a part of Fulbright, with the same country post and who also happened to live in the DMV area. Fulbright, like Peace Corps, is an international government program that sends Americans abroad to different countries in cohorts. My cohort for Vietnam is roughly the same as my Peace Corps one, 22 to 26. Much like the Peace Corps, they make placements of individuals to individual schools. In this case, our assignments are colleges, universities, or gifted high schools. If you remember, our Peace Corps assignments were K-12 schools in suburban to very, very rural areas. My entire experience in the Peace Corps has heavily swayed my understanding or perspective on size. To me, a village in excess of 8-10,000 is large. It is often forgotten by most people that Vietnam is one of the largest countries by population in the world, with over 100 million people. That’s more than France, Germany, and the UK. It is less than Egypt, but more than Iran. Kyrgyzstan, by contrast, was the size of Arizona. The same population as Hong Kong, larger than Nicaragua but considerably smaller than Switzerland. Anyway, all this to say that I expect a lot to be different, in more ways than one.

Before I have even stepped foot in the country, a lot will be different. I already have a placement. Diu Vu, our Fulbright contact, works with us closely, and I’ll affectionately call her Chi Diu in this blog (Chi is a pronoun or term to refer to an older woman in Vietnamese, though in northern Vietnamese Diu is pronounced like Ziu). I’ll be working in North Vietnam near the Chinese border. My college is a vocational and medical college recently combined, with over 200 teachers and over 3000 students. For my purposes, there are about 150 English students and over 15 English teachers, which is more than enough to get on with and befriend. Compare that to the singular 3 English teachers in my village and maybe 30 students with dubious English skills I could sufficiently talk to in Kyrgyzstan. Once you’ve done that, and once you’ve lived in the mountains and farms of Jalal-Abad, you can do almost anything. I suspect, because I was placed in a more remote, mountainous region, that Chi Diu saw where I had lived and decided to place me somewhere almost exactly like Kyrgyzstan. Lang Son Province is famous for its hilly, mountainous terrain, and the province is one of the few in the whole country that does experience winter and cold. Thank goodness for that, as I don’t take well to overly hot year-round, tropical weather. I simply melt and melting puts me in bad moods. Although “winter” is a relative term, as I don’t expect several feet of snow, which I got in Jalal-Abad (and Jalal-Abad was one of the warmest areas in the country by comparison).

Already, there was a lot to unpack behind the scenes. I already had a headache trying to get my visa, an annoying problem Kyrgyzstan never gave me.  The day before I departed to Vietnam, Chi Diu called me to tell me my visa was finally available after a delay due to a variety of factors. My visa needed to be processed in the Vietnamese embassy in Washington DC. At the time, I was in Houston, packing up some things. I had listed the Washington DC embassy as a suitable location for me to pick it up, due to the assumption that it would not take as long as it did. All this to say that Max, a member of my cohort, was my savior, spending his last morning in the US travelling to the embassy on my behalf to pick it up for me. I paid for my visa over the phone to a Vietnamese diplomat in the embassy, who apparently himself had done Fulbright. (Fulbright also sends non-Americans to the US for university research and study). Max told me the diplomat in question was exhausted, having rushed my visa that Wednesday morning, but otherwise was sympathetic and told Max (and me) he understood and to pay it all forward. 

Fulbright is often said to be “more posh” than Peace Corps, and that is definitely true. I was already “posh” by Peace Corps standards. Some volunteers in the more rural and lower-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa bike on dirt roads to school or live in mudbrick houses. I’ve been told my accommodations will be at the university dorms, in the wing that houses “foreign experts”, which I guess I am.

In Hanoi, we start a three-week-long orientation. Much shorter than the 11 weeks for the Peace Corps, where time ran away from me. Peace Corps is a marathon, while Fulbright feels like a sprint, or more aptly, a runaway train. As opposed to the Peace Corps, you can only do everything here once, because soon enough, it will all be over.

The flight over was different. In the Peace Corps, we all flew over together, packing ourselves into a large flight from New York City to Istanbul, then packing ourselves into the flight to Bishkek. Now, we fly ourselves individually, some flying together, others arriving as early as they wish. A few are already in the country and have been for days or weeks.

Compared to most other places, Fulbright Vietnam unusually has significantly more Americans of Vietnamese heritage in its usual cohort than most other places. Many with close familial connections, some who have lived or traveled in Vietnam before. The ⅓ or ¼ who are not Vietnamese, when I ask them why they chose Vietnam, often say something to the effect of “just because” or “it sounded cool”. A few referenced the Sympathizer, an HBO show and book I may need to pick up at some point. 

Anyway, when I left, I left alone, flying to Salt Lake City, with a short transfer then to Seoul, then onwards to Hanoi. I lucked out that I chose Salt Lake City, a rather random place to transfer, evidenced by its plethora of empty seats. I heard a flight attendant say that there were 30-40 open seats. The night before, I stayed up entirely, as I have heard doing that helps force you to fall asleep on planes. Despite the constant flying I have done in my life, I don’t fly as often as people do for business or work. I also am horrible at sleeping on planes. Despite being small and readily fitting on economy seats, it’s not great. Regardless, on the flight to Seoul, it was one of the best economy flights I’ve ever been on (I flew in business class only 2 times internationally, but that was over a decade ago). After talking to a flight attendant, I stole a row entirely to myself, pulling down the armrests and lying down flat on the 3 seats. When I got off the plane, the flight attendant asked if I had successfully slept the whole flight, as she had seen me passed out. I woke up intermittently every 1-2 hours, but I most definitely slept through dinner. All in all, during the 12-hour flight, I slept a record maybe 9-10 hours of them. I’ve had comparably good sleep only on trains or buses. I had some Burger King in the Salt Lake City airport and some gelato in Seoul to tide me over.

Language here will be difficult. I just saw a NYT article stating that Vietnam had over 22 million international visitors in 2025, so although most people don’t speak English there, they are far more familiar with and expectant of foreigners than Kyrgyzstan is. But to acknowledge the elephant in the room, I am in fact Vietnamese. There is enough of a Vietnamese American diaspora after the war that settled in the US for Vietnamese now to be able to tell if you’re local or not, or if you are doing the “homecoming” tour. It’s a strange feeling I admit that I share amongst many in my cohort. In the Houston airport, the attendant wondered aloud why I needed an e-visa to Vietnam if I was born there. I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t been back since I was born nearly 24 years ago. Thoughts raced in my head before I even landed. Can you claim to be a part of any of it if the entirety of it is foreign land? What sort of home is soil you’ve never spent any part of your childhood on? My mom tells me that I did once, that she carried me through Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. And will I be the only one? Will my older sister touch this land again? Probably, once she and her husband have higher-income jobs. As for my younger sister, will she see China once more? Who knows.

I can’t say that touching down in Hanoi was the rosy, romanticized view I thought it would be. For one, it was unbearably hot, which I was prepped on early. That didn’t mean it wasn’t abrasive and difficult. The heat and lack of AC in the airport felt reminiscent of the airport in Lagos that I spent too long in years ago. I got to meet several of the other Fulbrighters in my cohort, who I’ll speak more about later. There isn’t a great name for people in my cohort; in the Peace Corps, everyone is a volunteer, here I suppose I could call them ETAs (English Teaching Assistants, as that is what we all are). I may end up defaulting to Fulbrighters, even if that isn’t a great technical term. Anyway, I digress. We loaded ourselves into a hotel taxi. On our first night, Jessica, Megan, and I went looking for food, but this time it was late at night, midnight and 1 AM on a Friday. We found a cute little Banh Mi place. I need to work on my Vietnamese; it’s all too easy to just let the native speakers and fluent ones do it all for us. It does feel like a radical departure from my experience last time; only 2 of my cohort of 26 knew some Kyrgyz beforehand (a handful knew Russian). Here it looks like maybe over half are heritage speakers who have some fluency in Vietnamese. Most of the Vietnamese Americans, both in general and our cohort, come from Central Vietnam or the South. There is a lot to be said about the regional differences between North, Central, and South Vietnam, and the average American probably knows more about that due to our history in Vietnam than I need to explain. All this to say that I suspect I may be one of the only people in our entire cohort with roots in North Vietnam, which is where we are staying.

This iteration of my blog will be slightly different. I may post more frequently, maybe less frequently. It will feature less of a rumination on a host family dynamic, as that is something we don’t have this time around. There are things far more familiar to the American eye. Some things have changed, and others have stayed the same. While I anticipate hardships, I suspect this blog will be more about discovery than about hardship or resilience. I may complain incessantly about the humidity. Due to Fulbright’s closer proximity and relationship to the American embassy, it may feature more about US soft power politics and the role of American diplomacy. Vietnam is also a country of two worlds to the American mind: one embedded in the psyche of a lost war, another in a beautiful, touristic and cheap haven for food and motorcycle loops. More people in my life have been to Vietnam than I can count. My grandfather and mother have been, and some of my closest friends have been as well. Vietnam is no foreign land, but I suspect more lies beneath it than its nutritious food and its motorcycles, more beneath its unbearable humidity and French architecture.

Already I may stick out amongst my cohort in some ways. I have far more in common with many of the non-Vietnamese Fulbrighters here than I do with the Vietnamese Americans in our program, but then again, Vietnamese American identity is not a singular thing. A year is not enough to parse out the answers to the millions of questions that may arise, and not even a lifetime can easily bring resolutions. But this time, this blog is a reintroduction to a not-so-foreign foreign land.

À Bientôt,

Grace