issue 54 - AsiaLIFE Magazine

or most of their wedding, Do Thi
Thanh Thuy and Andrea Da Gasso
Ffollowed Vietnamese tradition, lighting
incense, wearing ao dai, and marching gifts
over from the groom’s house.
But as for the ritual of clinking glasses at
every table, Andrea didn’t want to drink that
much alcohol. So his aunt brought from their
native Milan what he called 'a kind of keo' —
confetti, or chocolate-covered almonds that
brides and grooms deliver, table by table, at
Italian weddings.
Such cultural compromises began long
before the nuptials and, as with so many
mixed-nationality couples in Vietnam, they
continue long after.
“She’s open to learn about my culture,”
Andrea, 42, says of his wife, “and that’s
important to me.”
Couples like Andrea and Thuy represent
roughly 2 percent of marriages in Vietnam
each year, according to the Ministry of
Justice. Of 668,026 marriage certificates
issued in 2010, for instance, 13,882 went to
foreign-Vietnamese couples.
When people travel to Vietnam and fall in
love with locals, the couples embark on not
just long-term relationships but long-term
questions about how to marry their own habits
and traditions with those of their partners.
Dating the family
More than anything, Confucian obsession
with filial piety can complicate romances,
from day one. Gia dinh la tren het, as the
Vietnamese say. Family first.
Thuy, 30, met Andrea in 2008 when he
visited the art gallery she was managing, to
see about displaying his photography. He
teased her about pronouncing 'next week'
like 'Nesquick' and asked her out. After
some qualms about dating a client, she
finally agreed.
But like the majority of single Vietnamese,
Thuy was living with her parents, so early on,
dates ended with the pair sitting outside her
house. From a balcony, her mother could
watch over them or shout down to them
about how late it was and shouldn’t he be
going?
Doru Tudose, from Bucharest, met similar
suspicion when he started dating Nguyen
Han in 2006.
“In the first days, when I was picking her
up, her mother was looking mean, no eye
contact,” Doru, 34, says.
The two have since married and opened
Bootleg Cafe together. But Han, 32, explained
that at the time her parents were wary
of foreigners, whose time in Vietnam could be
fleeting, and they didn’t think it was proper for
her to go out with Doru.
But the couple didn’t have as hard a time
as Sonia Watson, 29, and Nguyen Hung, 28.
Raised in Paris but identifying as British like
her mother, Sonia is a rare white woman to
marry a Vietnamese man. Hung says the gender
reversal was a problem right away, in part
because his parents expected him to marry
a Vietnamese who would move in with them.
On the other hand, a Vietnamese woman
wed to a foreigner could make a smoother
transition, because custom already requires
that she move out of her parents’ house. Tuoi
Tre newspaper quoted government statistics
in July estimating that four in five Vietnamese
who marry foreigners are women.
“It’s easier for a foreign husband and Vietnamese
wife, because in Asian countries the
man is usually more important. So if a daughter
marries a foreigner, parents think she’ll
26 asialife HCMC