this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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That would be 12 years ago! I didn't see any acceptable future for me in North America, and immigrated to Vietnam. I integrated reasonably well, and this is my culture now. You could say my last vote was with my feet, labor, and wallet :D
I don't hate the West or anything, in fact I wish you all the best! However I am fully invested in working towards the success of my new country and this part of the world in general.
I gotta figure out how to pull off what you did. I can't be paid to sell out my principles for these cracker-assed settlers; and especially not my life.
It's actually just immigration (or, well... technically emigration from where you're standing). Which is, in itself an absolutely miserable amount of work dealing with a bunch of systems that don't really want to deal with you, but at the same time, expect you to be an expert in how they function.
Also a bunch of employers looking to exploit you (so if that's a problem now, expect it to get worse until you learn the ropes), since your visa status depends on them in most cases and they know it. Everything about immigration is harrowing -- but if you don't like where you are, leaving to be somewhere else is a solution that is occasionally not insane! Asia is very hard to immigrate to though.
I knew around 30 other people that tried to immigrate here. ~22 got kicked out for non-compliance, ~6 died (mostly from alcohol or drugs). Of that group, some rich guy that doesn't have to work, and myself are left. I don't remember their names or faces, only their misplaced optimism.
If you're interested in how the legal paperwork gets done, I'm happy to share! I just don't want to misrepresent how miserable the first few years will be -- I've been run over, exploded, robbed, bankrupt, severely poisoned with neurotoxins, and I nearly died of cholera. While working 70-80 hour weeks and getting paid only about half the time. I also got shipped into a literal civil war to do accounting of all things. The building next to me blew up, and I shared the streets with insurgents with machine guns. I was so dead inside by that point, I just shrugged and bought a t-shirt. Because of course they were selling t-shirts.
If you've got a couple hundred thou saved up, the process is probably less terrible. I came here with 30k and just barely bootstrapped myself to Vietnamese middle class over the course of 10 years or so. Overall I'm glad I did it, but a lot of the stuff I've survived haunts me. So in other words, I fit right in with most Vietnamese people about my age.
I'm glad you at least made it against such steep odds. For me, it's just idle wishing-- I've got like three disabilities that automatically strike me off the lists of just about every country where I could actually put my skillset and training to use, and not enough money to offset those disabilities. At this point, I'm just rolling along until I either neck myself, or I get shot twice in the back of my head by some settler pig and they file it as a self-frag on my death certificate. Only living out of spite for the world I was born into, really.
That's a bitter pill. I was lucky in that regard -- my disabilities might be mild problems in the big picture, but give me a significant advantage in specific contexts like cram-studying. Surviving out of pure spite I am also quite good at too.
If we're being honest, I don't even know what I'd do if I had to deal with racism and armed police in my daily life. My biggest challenges were smaller things like poverty, bureaucracy, and hunger. Overcoming them made me stronger, sure -- but strong enough to deal with that? I think I'd fall apart.
Integrating here was a strange thing. I more or less consider myself Vietnamese (if this isn't my home and my culture, I don't know what would be) but I was born white in Canada, and that's what people see. It's a weird mix of undeserved privilege and inconvenience. What's really screwed up, is when other white people in Asia just start casually telling me about their crimes as if it's a normal thing to talk about when there's only white people in the room. Most people are not like that of course, but when it happens, it's so fucked up. I don't even know how to respond.