Terms of Address 1 - anh, em, chị

[garunya]

Happy New Year, everyone! Not that it’s Vietnamese New Year yet… we’re still on the lead-up to it, but Vietnam uses the Western calendar like most countries (actually it uses the Western and the Chinese calendars, for different purposes, but that’s a topic for another post), and so even while Tết is the most significant holiday in Vietnam, the

Comments

[bogwitch64]

That is so interesting! Great post to start off the year anh ba. :)

[garunya]

Cảm ơn, chị Terri :)

(You can Google Translate that. The translator doesn't get the correct nuance of chị, but I've explained that part well enough already, I think) ;)

[bogwitch64]

Too cool.

[eljaydaly]

That's so interesting!

Now, the brother who calls you anh ba... does that mean Nhu is the second oldest sibling? Or do you fall into some sort of structure with just the males?

[garunya]

Yep, you got it right, she's the second oldest, and gets called chị ba by her younger siblings :)

[sartorias]

This is fascinating!

[zoje_george]

Em, the #2 is used in addressing your first born so that the bad spirits won't know who the #1 child is and carry him or her away.

One of my favorite things when I lived there was as my acquaintance with certain shops and cafes grew, they would stop addressing me as Madame and start using chi. Or if they knew I was a teacher, co.

[garunya]

Yeah, I'd heard that before, though unfortunately it's not quite as conclusive as I'd like... That's true of many things around here though, I suppose ;)

[zoje_george]

My sources were my mentor, who is married to a VN man and he is #4 out of 7 or 8 kids, and he gets called #5. This was according to her mother-in-law, they live in the Mekong.

The other was my dear friend Diep, her family is city people, but still her older brother is #2 to this day, as is her son. Her daughter is #3.

I think I've got a book of VN folktales around here somewhere that my friend Handsome Pham gave me, and I think there was some story about the topic.

[garunya]

It's not the numbering system itself that I find inconclusive - that's a pretty solid fact in southern Vietnam - just the origin of the superstition behind it, as even in English-speaking cultures we often can't get this sort of thing straight.

Not that I'm actually disputing that origin, btw - it's the most common answer I've heard myself too and seems quite a likely one, but what I find interesting in this case is how the practice itself has long become removed from the superstition, and is now just standard practice. People are no longer doing it for superstitious reasons in many cases, which is strange considering all the things that Vietnamese people still do for very specific superstitious reasons.

Clearly "superstition" will be getting its own post later.