So Happiness to Meet You: Foolishly, Blissfully Stranded in Vietnam

by Karin Esterhammer

Overview

After job losses and the housing crash, the author and her family leave L.A. to start over in a most unlikely place: a nine-foot-wide back-alley house in one of Ho Chi Minh City's poorest districts, where neighbors unabashedly stare into windows, generously share their barbecued rat, keep cockroaches for luck, and ultimately help her find joy without Western trappings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938849978
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Karin Esterhammer is a travel writer whose work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Christian Science Monitor, Orlando Sentinel, The Standard—China's Business Newspaper, and more. Her diary-style article in the Los Angeles Times about the move to Vietnam earned more letters to the editor than any travel story the paper had ever published. Karin has also had essays published in the Chocolate for a Woman's Soul series, and she once won the grand prize in a romance essay contest for Harlequin Books. After their years in Vietnam, Karin and her family are now living again in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

A lighthearted memoir of new friends, delicious food, and culture shock…A brisk chronicle of a family's (mis)adventures in Vietnam.”
—Kirkus Reviews

"Karin Esterhammer has artfully delineated what it's like to live outside your comfort zone. Her sharpshooter's eye for detail captures the Vietnamese people, their culture, and the pretzels an American family has to twist themselves into in order to adapt."
— Phil Doran, author of The Reluctant Tuscan

"When life hands you financial ruin—as the Great Recession did to former L.A. Times journalist Karin Esterhammer—the answer might seem simple: Why not move to Vietnam? Along with her husband and child, Esterhammer did just that, facing her new life in Ho Chi Minh City with courage, wit, and an open heart, all the while examining one of life's biggest questions: What is it that truly makes us wealthy? It's an unforgettable—and important—adventure of the body, soul, and pocketbook."
— Alison Singh Gee, author of Where the Peacocks Sing: A Prince, a Palace, and the Search for Home

"A loopy adventure and charming cautionary tale for anyone who's ever dreamed of packing it in and starting over somewhere new—the perfect read for the armchair expat."
— Mark Haskell Smith, author of Naked at Lunch and Baked

From the Publisher

06/01/2017
When faced with the loss of her job during the U.S. recession, author Esterhammer and her husband decide on a get-rich-quick scheme to rent out their L.A. house and live in Vietnam for a year at a fraction of the price. Excited at the prospect of living luxuriously while saving money, they find upon arrival that the rent in Ho Chi Minh City has jumped and they can only afford property in one of the poorest districts. In their year—which stretches into almost three years—abroad, Esterhammer, her husband, and son are threatened with a lawsuit from their renters, battle massive cockroaches, confront heat and flooding, and fall in love with their quirky and uninhibited neighbors. From the little children that run into their house as soon as the door opens to the neighbor who sells heavenly iced coffee to the sounds of karaoke going till midnight, the people they meet prove to be unexpected and unforgettable. Esterhammer creates laugh-out-loud moments of at times daunting or utterly embarrassing experiences. VERDICT An energetic mix of wry humor and heartwarming moments, this engaging account will appeal to armchair travelers and memoir lovers alike in its representation of the people and culture of Vietnam and Esterhammer's experience of a lifetime.—Stacy Shaw, Orange, CAThe issues that made Mead tic; Danticat confronts death; why likeable equals happy and fulfilled

Library Journal

2017-04-18
A lighthearted memoir of new friends, delicious food, and culture shock.Laid off from her job at the Los Angeles Times during the recession of 2008, travel writer Esterhammer realized that she and her self-employed husband could no longer afford their huge mortgage payments and car loans. There was nothing for them to do, she decided, but leave for someplace where they could live cheaply. They sold everything, rented their house, and, with their 8-year-old autistic son, moved to Vietnam. In a year, she calculated, they would have saved enough money by teaching English to return home with a comfortable financial cushion. The author portrays herself as cheerful, unflappable, and sometimes too clueless to be believed. She was astonished by the heat and humidity, for example. Completely mistaking the cost of housing, the family wound up in one of Ho Chi Minh City's poorest districts, in a tiny, cockroach-infested house crammed into a noisy, dirty, densely populated neighborhood where daylong power outages are common. Esterhammer also underestimated the challenges of homeschooling their son, whose attention problems and constant talking proved overwhelming. Months after settling in, she "began to wonder why the loss of something as temporal as my material possessions and job had caused me to turn and run away so quickly." She paints affectionate portraits of the kind neighbors who looked out for her, helping her to learn Vietnamese, teaching her how to shop and cook, and sharing with her stories of the extreme deprivation they suffered growing up; apparently, she knew little about the reality of postwar life. She was shocked both by their reminiscences and lack of "anger, resentment, or defeat." Although she wants to convey an image of cool adventurousness, she admits that the real reason she left was not because of money but "to avoid my own embarrassment"; she preferred that friends think she was daring and impetuous than to "see what losers we were." A brisk chronicle of a family's (mis)adventures in Vietnam.

Kirkus Reviews