Walking Lạng Sơn (Vietnam)

In a small Northern Vietnam town, that eats everything. Including dog.

(There are no pictures of dog meat here. I could have taken them. I didn’t, because I just couldn’t.)

I randomly chose to walk Lạng Sơn, a beautiful city of two hundred thousand, because I wanted to be in a “normal” Vietnamese city. I wanted to find the Scranton, or Buffalo, of Vietnam.

Lạng Sơn fit that. It has no big footprint. Not in tourist sites, or even among the Vietnamese I spoke to. It popped up on my radar only as a mid-sized city in the hills near the Chinese border.

So when I arrived¹ and realized (slowly, then abruptly) that one of its signature dishes is dog, I found myself facing the reality Vietnamese do eat dog. Lots of it. Certainly in Lạng Sơn. Something I had thought was largely an unfair caricature.

While I had known they eat dog, I thought it was confined to a small niche of the very poor, or the very stubborn, or the very old, or the very whatever. An outdated thing that only existed in the cracks.

Still in Hanoi I saw lots of pet stores and well cared for dogs (mostly mini poodles and corgis) being lavished over by their owners in parks. That pushed the “dog eating” thing deeper into the back of my brain, to the point where I’d pretty much forgotten about it even after two weeks in Hanoi.

So when I got to Lạng Sơn I wasn’t expecting the trip to turn into a two day long struggle fest with cultural respect, animal rights, and my own awareness that no matter how much of a local-ist I might claim to beo matter how “I’m here to blend in and be culturally malleable” I try to be, no matter how much of a third culture kid I am, I’ve got a culture, and am from a culture. One that is disgusted by eating dogs, and no amount of intellectual whatever will change that.

And I’m ok with that.

We all inherit cultural boundaries defined by our disgust, and one of mine is eating dog.