Yesterday Tim and I went to a press conference for a new gym chain launching in Vietnam in December – California Wow! – which was replete with a dance squad from Thailand, a yoga performance by Master Kamal (!):

, etc.)  I think California Wow! is being started by the same guys who started California Fitness and 24-Hour Fitness – it’s a big mega-gym.  They’re planning on having 4,000+ members or something insane like that.

Anyway, Tim and I were standing there at the reception after the press conference talking to one of the guys from California Wow! and the guy, who is new to Vietnam, started talking about all of the problems he was having trying to speak to the Vietnamese in tiếng Việt.

So Tim says he’s got a great mis-translation story and tells us the following:  A buddy of Tim’s was dating, and is now married to, a Vietnamese woman here whose father is a high-ranking general in the Vietnamese army.

Tim’s buddy was going to his girlfriend’s house to meet her father and the rest of her family for the first time and he was very nervous about it.  So they’re having dinner at the woman’s house and the father and the rest of the woman’s male family members are all being very gruff and stern with Tim’s buddy since he’s a foreigner, etc.   He had recently started learning to speak Vietnamese and decided that he was going to wait for an opportune moment to impress his girlfriend’s family with his tiếng Việt prowess.

At one point during dinner, the woman’s father started going on about how easy kids today have it, how they have no work ethic, etc., and reminiscing about how hard he and his generation had it during the U.S.-Vietnam War.  Tim’s buddy decided to seize the  moment by telling his girlfriend’s father – in tiếng Việt – that he put himself through college working as a soldier in the ROTC.  The Vietnamese word for “soldier” is “bo dội”.

So Tim’s buddy proceeded to say in Vietnamese to his girlfriend’s entire family:  “I put myself through college working as a pe de” – which means “gay prostitute”.

Tim’s buddy said everyone at the table stopped eating and the room was completely silent until his girlfriend got up from the table and ran out of the room crying.

Everything worked out in the end, though, as Tim’s buddy and the woman are now married.  Everyone in her family does still call him “pe de” though.