The Need to Educate Draws the United States and Vietnam Together

When Biology Professor Phillip Watson recently traveled to Vietnam, he discovered the same thing that noted New York chef Anthony Bourdain found while on a world tour to compare cuisines—the Vietnamese are great cooks. In part, that’s because food isn’t overly processed and packaged. At a dinner just outside of Long Xuyen in the Mekong Delta, Watson was treated to a six-course dinner that culminated with snake soup whose main ingredient was chosen by the dinner’s host from a bag full of snakes.
“The waiter took the chosen snakes and whacked them on the floor to make them more agreeable to being our meal,” says Watson.
According to Vietnamese proverbs, someone can “eat strongly as an elephant”—an khoe nhu voi, or an nhu meo—as small as a cat. Watson himself was an adventurous eater, although he kept mixing up the many dipping sauces the Vietnamese use.
“I amused my hosts by dipping fish into the vegetable dip and vegetables into the snake dip,” he says.

A Tale of Two Universities
This was Watson’s second trip to Vietnam. His first was in the spring of 2000, when he went to Ho Chi Minh City to give a talk on forensic entomology. He also traveled in more rural areas to collect insect specimens. Because of that experience, Watson was invited to meet with the rector of An Giang University, Dr. Vo-Tong Xuan, when he and others from An Giang visited Ferris State in September of 2000.
The An Giang delegation was touring the United States on a fact-finding mission. Their university had been founded in December 1999 and faced with rapid growth they were looking for ways to manage their expansion. Vietnam is running two and three shifts of all schools, including universities, due to a population boom that began to occur after 1975.
Watson met with the delegation, and ultimately was invited to visit An Giang University. “My official mission is to help the biology department organize its curriculum, teaching methods and Web presence,” Watson explains. “The department will then serve as a model for the rest of the university.”
With an emphasis on applied science and technology, An Giang has a similar mission to Ferris State, so drawing upon Ferris’ experience is a natural fit.
“An Giang would like to set up a reciprocal arrangement between the two universities where faculty from several disciplines would visit, learn and teach in each other’s environment,” says Watson.
Dr. Xuan, An Giang’s rector, seems like the perfect choice to head a new university faced with explosive growth. An expert in rice production and a former member of the Vietnamese National Assembly, and a recent addition to the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, Dr. Xuan transformed post-war Vietnam from an importer of rice to the world’s third-largest producer of rice.
“I hope Ferris State University can continue to send ambassadors to An Giang University in the near future,” says Xuan. “I am deeply grateful to Dr. Watson, and to Ferris State, for sharing his expertise to help me develop this young university.”

An Appetite for Change
Watson prepared for his trip by learning a few phrases of Vietnamese, helped by Ferris State students Phuong Thi Chan Duong and Hac Hoang Nguyen. “Tên tôi là Phil,” Watson might say to introduce himself, or at the restaurant to say he is hungry, “Tôi dói bung.” He even brought a language translation program to run on his laptop computer.
Mostly, though, Watson managed to get along with just “hello” and “OK,” which everyone seemed to understand. Even when he broke down on one of the ubiquitous motorbikes he was given to use during his stay, it took only sign language to find one of the many repair shops and to get his flat tire repaired for 17,000 Dong—a little over a dollar.
Since the United States ended military involvement in Vietnam in 1975, the two countries have moved ever-closer together. In 1997, former POW Pete Peterson became the first post-war ambassador to Vietnam, and in 2001 President George W. Bush signed the United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement, normalizing trade relations.
If Watson’s experience is any indication, Americans face no lingering hostility. Most Vietnamese are now too young to even remember the war. After that dinner of snake soup, Watson and his son Scott were guests of honor at the annual English festival in which students sang, talked and put on skits entirely in English.
The evening ended when the students sang a Happy New Year song in English. In 1968 Tet, the Vietnamese New Year marked the beginning of one of the largest communist offensives in the Vietnam War. In 2002, it marked only the celebration of the incoming Year of the Horse and the passing of the Year of the Snake.

In addition to his work with helping to structure An Giang’s biology department, Watson also was conducting experiments and collecting specimens, especially of the Buprestid beetle, commonly known as “jewel beetles” because of their often striking, iridescent coloring. Collecting a few bugs is not quite as simple as it might sound. In addition to legal collection for scholarly purposes, there is a world-wide illegal insect trade. Last year, two Russians were arrested in India for illegally collecting 2,000 species of butterflies, moths and beetles. They were allegedly part of a large-scale poaching operation that mounted expeditions in Russia, China and Tajikistan. A similar incident took place in Vietnam. A Japanese trader, along with a Thai man and his Vietnamese driver, was fined after being caught with nearly 11,000 beetles and butterflies, the Viet Nam News reported in July 2000. Some families hired by poachers reportedly earn thousands of dollars in the illegal insect trade. Some of the more dramatic specimens Watson collected from his earlier trip are on display in the Card Wildlife Museum in the Arts and Sciences Commons.

 

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