-^-for posterity-^-

the girls dress one of three ways in long xuyen. when i say ‘the girls’, i’m not just talking about the majority. i’m talking about every girl except maybe 2. i can’t figure out why they don’t deviate from these styles even in the slightest. here they are:

evening wear:
a lot of working girls, girls that work in the market, sell fruit or work behind small, mobile stands, wear pajamas all day. i say they are pajamas for two reasons. 1) people wear them to bed. and 2) they look just like pajamas should look. they are always two pieced and made from the same material. the pants almost always run to the ground but i have been noticing that a few people have been cutting the pants higher. the material is always strange. it is normally a very difficult to look at pastel pattern.

men’s wear:
on a normal school day, about 80% of the girls will come to class dressed in a very masculine way. they will have charcoal, brown or navy dress pants, a belt, a tucked in shirt and dress shoes. the men come to class wearing the same thing except for a few sizes larger. this is not my favorite style and i do not fully understand it.

ao dai:
this is, of course, the traditional dress of vietnamese women. even though ever part of the body is covered except for the hands, face and a small slit at the top of the neck, it is still one of the most elegant things i have ever seen a women wear. women who wear ao dai change dramatically. older women look wise. younger women look older. ao dai, while i have heard it is incredibly uncomfortable, is by far my favorite.

accessories:
the women who sell things will always (usually) have a gold chain around their neck with a little jade something or other at the bottom. they will usually have on a number of thin, gold bracelets that barely fit over their hand. the bracelets, i have been told, are never to be removed. the women who wear a man’s uniform wear bucket hats. these are hats that characters on gilligan’s island would have worn. they are tacky, pastel and make their men’s uniform even more difficult to stomach. women wearing ao dai sometimes will wear a necklace and sometimes bracelets. they don’t need to accessorize because the beauty is in the modesty.

i do not understand why there is no middle ground between ao dai and men’s wear.