Kendall Stempel and Chloe Starr were ready for a scam. Most American tourists in Asia are. Then a gap-toothed 6-year-old named Hieu walked up at a lake in Hanoi. Money wasn't what he came for. He came for words.
The Vietnamese have a name for it. San tay, hunting foreigners for English practice. At Hanoi's Hoan Kiem Lake, a tourist is a free lesson on two legs. Hieu, who says you can call him Theo, is the star. He got near fluent in a few months, the Journal's Stu Woo reports. His mom posts videos of his chats online. Strangers in the comments say he's amazing. She has to trust them. Her own English is limited. "I don't really know how good he is," she said.
Stempel, a 34-year-old healthcare marketer from Nashville, tried to compliment him. He was all business. Thanks, next topic. Teachers are in on it too. On a weekend, the lake fills with kids holding clipboards of questions. Where you're from. What you like to eat. The older kids want a real conversation. They say tourism and export jobs are booming, and they're curious about the world. Schools don't teach English well, said Le Van Tai, a 40-year-old English teacher. Vietnam has been open to the world for only about 30 years, he said.
What a Saturday costs, and what it buys
Hieu's mother is 34 too. She knew no English in college, so she never joined in. She wanted more for her three sons. Workbooks came home. So did flashcards. English lessons played on the speakers all the time. Then one day this spring, her oldest was talking mostly in English. He'd gotten past her. That's when the Saturday trips to the lake began. The family lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs. Together his parents bring in about $10,000 a year. Most of it is his dad's pay from a bank. Getting to the lake takes 45 sweaty minutes on a moped, Hieu squeezed between mom and dad. The reward afterward is ice cream.
The payoff can be big. Dan Truong did this in the 1990s in the city of Hue. He had school lessons and Voice of America radio, and he wanted to test them. One tourist he stopped was a professor visiting from the University of Oregon. That talk grew into a scholarship there. By the time he was done he had a master's degree. He also had a wife. Today he's 56 and makes hats in North Carolina. Hieu has simpler plans. He wants to be a policeman. "I want to catch thieves," he said.
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This is a Career and Time Value of Money story, module M3. The family's biggest asset isn't in a bank. It's a 6-year-old's growing skill. They put in flashcards, Saturdays and a long moped ride. Skills work like money in a savings account. The earlier you put them in, the longer they grow. Dan Truong's one chat in Hue compounded for about 30 years into a degree, a wife and a business. Nobody could've priced that conversation on the day it happened.
Here's where it touches your own plan. Most of us have a line for the house and a line for the 401(k). Almost nobody has a line for skills, our own or a child's. Look at what you spent on learning this year. A class, a tutor, a certification, a language app. Then look at what a raise or a new job would be worth over the next ten years. That's the one investment in your plan a selloff can't touch. If the line sits at zero, that's your check for this week. You don't wait for the rain to buy the umbrella. You teach the kid English before the tourists arrive. If you'd like to put a learning line into your plan, that's a short conversation.