In 2006 I went overseas by myself for the first time. I chose Vietnam for no other reason than my friend Sam had been there a couple of times and I thought he was cute. Within fifteen minutes of my arrival in Ho Chi Minh City I was in the back seat of a cab with no seatbelts whizzing through night-time streets slightly wider than queen-sized bed, while surrounded on all sides by hundreds of locals on Vespas, all beeping like a flock of deranged road-runners. Within an hour I was ensconced in my hotel room drinking Vietnamese beer (which looks like VB and tastes like awesome), lying on my Vietnamese bed (which was twice the size of any bed I'd ever seen in my entire life), watching Vietnamese television (which, on the bizarre-o-meter lies somewhere between Mexican Soap Opera and Japanese Game Shows) while bright orange Vietnamese geckos ran across my ceiling going 'gnak! gnak!' at each other (which was cool).
The point is that from my first night in Vietnam I knew that I was a total outsider. I had no idea of cultural norms, I didn't speak any Vietnamese, and so I could cheerfully bumble my way about the country for two weeks while the locals good-naturedly tolerated things like amusing mispronunciations of "thank you" or gross violations of holy buildings. I was a tourist, I was an idiot, and that was fine.
Living in America as an Australian is a little more tricky. As we all know, American culture leaves its Yankee fingerprints all over our dinky-di media industry (except of course for the ABC, which the British have claimed as their own). A lifetime's exposure to everything from "Seinfeld" to "Sesame Street" has lulled me into a false sense of familiarity with America, and the fact that everyone here speaks English only aids my delusion that the US and Australia are essentially the same place, just that they're on different sides of the world and one has far superior coffee (hint: it's not the US). In reality, there are a whole host of subtle yet bewildering social norms here that I grapple with on a daily basis.
The most obvious of these is tipping. EVERYONE knows that in the US, you tip in restaurants and bars (although on my first night ever in the US, way back in 2007, I forgot to tip the waitress. I still feel guilty about that). What no one told me is that there's a whole HOST of other people you have to tip. Catch a cab, and you have to tip the taxi driver. Get a haircut, and you have to tip not only the hairdresser, but also the person who washes your hair. Most recently, I paid eighty bucks for a fairly ho-hum massage, and on my way out the door the receptionist asked me, "and how much tip will you be leaving today?"
"Tip?" I asked, a little incredulously. "You tip masseurs here, too?"
"Yeah. Usually fifteen to twenty per cent," came the reply with smiles.
"Well, what did I just pay eighty bucks for?"
"Yeah, the minimum wage is pretty low here," was the explanation. I left a fifteen dollar tip, but I can't help but feel pissed off about some capitalistic yoga master sitting somewhere in Williamsburg on a pile of eighty-dollar massage money, while his poor little massage-minions wait hopefully for tips huddling for warmth around burning barrels in the street wearing Thai fisherman pants and Crocs.
The thing that is most bewildering about tipping though is that it seems completely arbitrary who you do and don't tip. If you go to a cafe and order a coffee and you collect it at the counter, you don't tip the person who made you the coffee. But if you order a coffee in a cafe and a waiter brings it to you, you tip the waiter. Surely you should tip the person who makes you the coffee? Doesn't that require some level of skill, more so than merely bringing a coffee to your table, which simply requires functioning arms and legs?
At first I thought I had it sorted out - you tip someone who actually physically does something for you. But then on closer scrutiny this doesn't hold out - you tip cab drivers, but not subway drivers. You tip waiters but not the garbage man. You tip the girl who pours your beers all night, but not the girl who later splints your leg after you fall down a flight of stairs, drunk as a skunk from aforementioned beers. I would say each of these services are just as important as the others, but only some of them are deemed worthy of a tip.
It's heavy. Being the caring individual that I am, I feel as though I'm exploiting the poor people who rely on tips to make a living. If they were simply earning enough from their wage to put food on the table or a roof over their head then I wouldn't give a shit. But to know that I personally have it within my power to either make their night or starve them to death is a responsibility I'm uncomfortable with. I almost feel as though I need to carry around a basket filled with one-dollar bills and skip down the street hurling handfuls of cash at anyone who so much as steps out of my way on the footpath.
The upshot to this is that the service industry here is a genuine service industry. Sure, it might be mercenary, but the promise of a crisp dollar bill is all it can take to encourage the waitress to smile and pleasantly offer you more beer rather than scowling, snatching away your pasta primavera before you've finished with it, and then arguing with you for five minutes as to what constitutes a "finished meal" (which happened to me once in Australia. Bitch). A tip is leverage to ensure that the service you are paying for is actually done properly and politely.
Damn, I wish I hadn't tipped the cab driver on the day I arrived. Stupid me.
