-^-for posterity-^-

i teach an american literature class and in that class we are currently studying the ‘great gatsby’. in that book there is one character who is an arrogant jock named tom. he is described by mr. scott fitzgerald as ‘one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty one that everything afterwards savors of anticlimax.’

i am doing my best to fend off arrogance and a large head but sometimes this experience makes me feel like a movie star or something better. maybe an astronaut.

in vietnam, there are two newspapers with a huge circulation. ‘tuoi tre’ and ‘thanh nien’ are the two most popular and people here love to read their papers. they both mean ‘youth’. every morning and afternoon the coffee shops are full of young men sitting around and staring at the football scores and what not.

someone wrote an article about me and put it in the ‘thanh nien’ newspaper. the paper is published in ho chi minh city but it is circulated throughout the country. i was news.

you can see a picture of my head (it’s a big picture and i do not look good) and the whole article here
here is a translation of the article:

“AN AMERICAN GENTLEMAN WITH A VIETNAMESE HEART”

(under the title there’s a huge picture of my head which is hilarious.)

if you have the opportunity to visit long xuyen and an giang university, you might just meat an young american who is tall, handsome, always with a fresh smile and someone how especially speaks vietnamese wonderfully named jonathan david moyer (everyone calls him jon). he came to vietnam with the mcc organization (mennonite central committee) in order to improve the english speaking skills and education at an giang university. after he graduated majoring in international business with a minor in spanish at bluffton university in bluffton ohio, jon came to vietnam following the advice of his former teacher, dr. dan wessner who used to teach in can tho university. his mother has been the principal of a high school in america for 15 years and his father is a business man. unlike the majority fo voulenteer teachers who come to vietnam only fulfilling an obligation, jon works very enthusiasticly and happily at a university that was founded only 4 years ago. jonathan lectures english and american literature, has organized english speaking clubs for non major students and the people’s committee, and has organized a special friday night movie club. he is very busy at work but every free opportunity he has you can see him happily with his vietnamese friends drinking coffee or eating at a road-side stand. his vietnamese skills are fairly fluent and if you make friends with him he’s sure to surprise you. when asked about living in vietnam, jon said he really likes it because vietnam is very safe and the food is very good. jon really likes the coffee in vietnam and also enjoys some food that is very special to vietnam like (and here they list foods that most foreigners find disgusting). jon finds vietnames culture to be fascinating and he hopes to travel back to vietnam and possibly do some research for a post graduate program. you can say that he is an american who has a vietnamese heart and soul. whether you are near or far, you can get in contact with him at 076942721. if you do, you’ll find something very interesting and exciting.

and that’s the whole article.

while it’s not very long, it did appear in the middle of the fourth page and i was swarmed with people in the coffee shop who wanted to congratulate me for being so famous. everyone has wonderful things to say. the article made me out to be some sort of super human that is able to cross over all barriers. the article was a absurd glorification of a normal person. i did a bad job of translating it.

so, my phone number is at the bottom and i didn’t think anything about it until i came back to my room. i came back to my room at 10:00 and my phone rang.

from 10:00 until 11:00 i received phone calls one after another. i would hang up the phone and it would ring again. sometimes i would have to wait about 30 seconds between the rings, and other times it would ring the second i put it down. i received 12 calls from girls and 6 calls from guys in one hour. the phone conversations went something like this:

hello, is jon there?

this is jon.

oh, i just read an article in a newspaper about you and i was talking to my friends and wanted to call you. can i ask you some things about your life?

sure.

how old are you?

guess.

27?

24.

i think you’re very handsome and very lovely and i would love to get to know you.

thank you. where are you from?

(people called from everywhere. from hanoi, from ho chi minh city, from da nang, from da lat, from can tho, from vung tau. they wanted to meet me and they were a days trip away. amazing.)

oh. next time i go to _________ i’ll make sure to look you up. do you have a phone number?

yes. it’s _________________. i think if you meet me we’ll have a very good time together and we’ll be best friends. i want to start learning english and i would love to talk to you in english and i want to introduce me to my family. you’re very interesting jon!

bla-bla-bla.

that was for a normal girl who called. the men were different. one man called and he was 75 and had a doctorate from russia. he was from hanoi. he rambled on for a while in russian and was fun to talk to. another man who was also from hanoi wanted to practice spanish with me. we had my first conversation with a vietnamese person in spanish. an older lady called me looking for information about my mother’s school. she has a nephew studying in america and wanted to know if he could get a scholarship. amazing.

my ego is inflated and i float on air. i will walk out into the world again and people will wave and point and congratulate me on the specious story about a young man in the mekong.

oh, and i unplugged my phone long ago.