u/FirthWynnAndMeyer

Wasnt quick enough to snap a photo, but this is peak grantland content

Hello, I’m an American born, half Chinese-Vietnamese. I work in healthcare in United States and make a good living. I recently took a year off from work and spent it in Saigon. It was great for the most part. I picked up Vietnamese very naturally, I’m about c1 or c2. Did a ton of networking in my time there and make loads of friends as developed a bunch of contacts through my family. I have extended family in Saigon who are in manufacturing and tourism.

I presume is that there is a certain novelty of someone “returning home”. I speak fluent Cantonese, and being a trilingual American in Cholon won me a ton of brownie points. One older gentleman took a particular liking to me. He has offered to mentor me and do business together in Vietnam if I were to ever move there. He is an Indian man who owns a company in China but has been expanding into Vietnam the last 4 years or so.

I guess my question is whether this is a typical occurrence in Vietnam or Asia in general. I know one of my uncles got his start in manufacturing because a patron on one of his tours liked him and took him under his wing. I think a lot of my apprehension is that being from the states, everything feels like it’s resume based and I really have no experience in this field (packaged food and beverage). I will say that I do have incredible soft skills and am generally liked by most people. But it just seems a bit out of the norm from my American perspective

Any thoughts?