May Term in Vietnam

It wasn’t your usual classroom. It was hot, crowded, beautiful, and a once-in-a-lifetime experience for 28 members of the Lycoming College community who just returned from a 16-day tour of Vietnam and Cambodia as part of a Lycoming College May Term course.

The 28 people included 18 students and 10 faculty and friends.

The trip was organized by art professor Howard Tran, who spent his childhood years in Vietnam before immigrating to the United States at the age of 12.

The group toured Hanoi, Hue, HaLong Bay, Cam Rahn Bay, and Saigon, took a boat ride through the Mekong Delta, and visited the Angkor Wat temple site in the jungle of Cambodia. The trip included a visit to the Hanoi Art Academy, art galleries, the opportunity to meet Vietnamese artists in their studios, and an emotional visit to the War Remnants Museum and Memorial in Ho Chi Minh City.

Students earned academic credit in painting, photography, art history, biology, or psychology.

"It was an incredible trip," says Prof. Lynn Estomin. "We saw and did so much." Hanoi, with its volume of orderly but unregulated traffic, multi-story houses, and throngs of people doing Tai Chi by the lake at 5 a.m., impressed her profoundly, perhaps because, as she notes, it was the first stop.

Amy Ford, one of Estomin’s students, put it another way. "It was the coolest thing I’ve ever done."

"Hanoi is a very clean city," says Amy Ford, "because the Vietnamese recycle and reuse everything."

Well, not exactly, according to Michelle Taylor, who as an environmental biologist found the air pollution of Hanoi comparable to New York City and area lakes often clogged with algae.

At the Ho Chi Minh Memorial, the guide told the group about his life and what the Vietnamese call "the American War." "This brought me to tears," says Amy Ford. "There were 3,000,000 Vietnamese who died and 59,000 Americans. I am not sure how any Vietnamese person who lived through the war can look at an American with anything but disgust, but [the guide] said that as a country they believe they should "forgive but not forget" what happened."

"The most obvious thing to all of us," says Prof. Roger Shipley, "was how polite and welcoming all the Vietnamese and Cambodian people are. Vietnam…is very willing to move on [beyond the American War] and accept the American traveler."

Sarah Reich added the observation that some of the Vietnamese tended to be more polite to foreigners and treat them better than their own people. "If Anh (Lycoming student from Vietnam) or Howard weren’t near us, people would assume they didn’t have the foreign income to pay for food or souvenirs."

"Vietnam was like a whole different world," says Keri Fry, who took the May Term as a psychology course. One of the things that I [noticed]...is that people in Asia like their skin to be white, while we like ours to be tanned…my skin was white for about the first half of the trip so when we went into a marketplace, ladies kept grabbing my arms because they thought my skin was so white and pretty."

Alex Collins, who stands well over six feet tall with blonde hair and blue eyes, found himself the object of many stares from Vietnamese in his new experience as a minority.

As an archeology/religion major, Samuel Daniel enjoyed seeing the abundance of religious imagery in the relief, sculpture, and paintings of monasteries and temples.

"Actually, seeing the art and sculpture of the Kingdom of Champa that I had previously only read about was really cool…then to climb and explore the ruins of Cambodian temples like Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom was utterly amazing," says Daniel, who took the May Term as a course in art history.

Meredith Rishel, who took the trip as a photography course, became a kind of pied piper for local children. "The children I photographed were captivated by my unusual (medium format) camera. I would let them look into the lens from above, only to see the opposite of the image in the viewfinder. Somewhere in the amusement, I got many good shots. This trip was amazing, and I am incredibly lucky and thankful to have been able to enjoy it."

Michelle Taylor and Alex Tankeloff shared the observation that Vietnam would be a vastly different country by 2010, marked by the rise in capitalism and foreign investment.

Camaraderie is always a part of a May Term trip. Michelle Taylor, summed up the collective experience. "Traveling so closely with fellow students and professors made the trip a true college experience; that is including both education and a good time!"

For Howard Tran, the May Term to Vietnam was a return to his childhood home. Before "The American War," his family lived in the Tay Ninh Province of Vietnam, moving to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). When Saigon fell, the Communists confiscated his family’s assets. With a bleak economic outlook for his family, Tran’s father sought to leave Vietnam. After three escape attempts in four years, the family managed to reunite in San Jose, California, where Howard entered the American school system and began learning English.

For the Tran family, it was not the first time they had sought refuge in another country. Both sets of Howard Tran’s grandparents were Chinese, having immigrated to Vietnam during WWII.  In Vietnam, Howard was considered Chinese; in America, he suddenly became Vietnamese.

Having enjoyed art classes in high school, he applied to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, earning a bachelor’s degree in three years. He received a master’s degree from Boston University and has been on the Lycoming College faculty since 2002. He and his wife, Deirdre, have three children.

Just recently, his father returned to Ho Chi Minh City, where he now has his own business.