I honestly don’t know how relevant this is in the present discourse anymore. It’s just something I quickly whipped up well over a year ago to convince colleges to let me pay an absurd amount of money for a four-year campus pass. It’s not to say, however, that I’m disinterested in this conversation at all; in fact I still like to think of myself as pretty committed to the fight against chauvinistic misogynists well pomaded with toxic masculinity and a dash of homophobia for good measure. But do take it with a grain of salt will you.
If one were to copy and paste verbatim said phrase into Google translate or some passing-grade Vietnamese dictionary out there, they would most likely receive a result of “woman” in any respective tongue. Makes perfect sense, since “đàn bà” IS Vietnamese for woman. But ask any Vietnamese who are up with the times what those three ostensibly innocuous words mean, and you should expect answers along the lines of, and excuse my use of profanity in this one, “What an effing woman!”
If the exclamation mark is any less of a dead giveaway, then yes, this has been vernacularized as a full-blown insult, and a rampant one at that. It has become a de facto staple in the home and out and about in the society at large, a constant whether you are talking shop or table. The sordid low blow is meticulously engineered to ridicule weakness, codependence, fickleness and gossip, all of which belong to the same propagated plane of female conventions. Most likely perpetuated by men, the insult is finding itself a fan-favorite even within women-led battle royales, accountable ( or commendable, as a particular few may insist ) for countless takedowns of genderless self-esteems. After all, it might not be so bombastic of a notion to say men are really from Mars ( not all of them of course ), considering how they are completely missing the gravity of the situation they themselves gave rise to north of the solar system.
What is most perplexing is how and why this deprecating reimagination of an otherwise holy image even came to be, let alone catch on like wildfire, especially when it is Vietnam we are talking about, a culture built primarily matriarchal with women at the helm of it. Vietnam as a people boasted “humble” beginnings as fairy-born, and ever since, has witnessed rises and falls of history along the footsteps of powerful women, from elephant-riding warriors to gun-wielding war heroes, we’ve got all bases covered. There is even an entire religion dedicated to the mother figure, held in high regards to this day. What, then, allowed the STDs of the pederastic ideologies from male-dominant cultures to take roots and self-crown ? What, then, persuaded open-ended ranks of internalized victims to pledge allegiance to such pseudohierarchy ? Where did it all go wrong?
That is not to say, however, that we ought to yield, that I will to surrender. It is time like these that drive us to fight, and win. Obsolete is the talking and whining, Vietnam has to act its way out against the armada of male supremacists. That is How We’ll Win.
Toaster Oven Potato 