Status Updates From Zu Hause Sein Mein Leben In...

As much as I give the author credit for saying that her filming her documentary in Vietnam made her blinders regarding Vietnamese society fall off but she still has this generalizing attitude towards Germany and Vietnam, its just that in Vietnam she concentrates more on the positive side while in Germany its the negative side, or what she thinks positive and negativbe sides are... aka pretty typical German.

I find it astounding that the author can see cracks in the idealized images she had made e.g. about the USA but doesn't seem to realize that all this "where are you from?" "Wow you speak our language so well" and all that she gets in Germany you can get in the US as well. And that maybe the "I'm American" might be a defience position against the eternal foreigner stereotype.

Ps. I know this book was published in 2007 and the Dong Xuan Center was only opened in 2006, but still, her information seems to be pretty damn obsolete, the center wasn't built to attract Germans, no doubt, but it still attracted alot, as well as other ethnicities, roughly speaking: If you are of Central European, the Near Eastern and Southeast-Asian descent, you wont stand out there.
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Ok, I know this author has a generalizing attitude when it comes to countries and cultures, but I call bullshit on her claim that only few Germans ever "stray" into Berlin's Dong Xuan Center and that most staff there doesn't speak German and menues are usually in vietnamese. Not only is that no hindrance, but am I supposed to belief all these white people that I regularly see there are not ethnic Germans?

If there is something that is really annoying about the author is that she is so German that she doesn't seem to miss a chance to critisize and generalize about things she perceives as negative in Germany, like the myth that we all send our elderly to retirement homes. For the record: My family didn't, not once. However she has the same problem of generalizing when it comes to Vietnam.

According to this, most overseas Vietnamese usually have a leather couch in the living room (preferrably black), a glas table, many plants, a big wall unit with the ancestor shrine, glaring illumination and a big TV and stereo system.

This is indeed a pretty quick read. And alot more enjoyable when she just lets the story flow without constantly comparing Germany and Vietnam as iof to make a point.

I think its safe to say that the author is pretty damn westernized, going so far that she thinks wanting light skin and certain eye-shapes in Vietnam now is due to wanting to be "Western" despite saying herself that this colorism is based on older notions. Also what she describes sounds to me rather like:

This is an enjoyable and easy read so far, however I would recommend the author to study some more the various forms of buddhism. It would be more correct to say that it doesn't require a god or hell, not that there are none, since some forms do basically worship Buddha as a god and actually do have hells and the like.

I would not say that Vietnamese look totally different from Chinese all the time and have a very different culture from other "Asian" cultures. Due to old Chinese imperialism there is a strong chinese influence in the culture and some Vietnamese have chinese ancestors. But maybe the author is not aware of it, I mean lets be honest here: Who would not claim that this and that country/culture is totally unique?