Color Chart

I met my conversation partner, a young woman who came here from Vietnam just a month or two before the semester began, in the grungy cafeteria of our dear Saddleback College. Perhaps not the most comfortable setting, but servicable and offering few distractions to the task at hand.

She was, perhaps, a year or two older than I and quite a bit shorter. Her grasp of English was actually quite firm (as it turns out, English is a very common second language in Vietnam,) though I, at times, had trouble with her accent and had to ask her to repeat herself now and then.

We settled down this particular day to talk about color perception.
Curiously, I had some trouble in getting her to understand the assignment, but, eventually, she was assured that she wasn't being graded and that she could make definitions wherever she pleased.
As seen here, our color charts are remarkably similar. Remarkable largely due to my color-blindeness. Indeed, I suspect the similarities to be otherwise expected, as the Vietnamese people had been under Western colonial rule for a considerable amount of time. They even changed their language from a pictographic one to one with words in the Latin alphabet with a large number of diacritics to distinguish letters.

In addition to following the listed assignment, I also took the liberty of asking a few questions of my own about her culture and her country, owing to a particular interest in Vietnam. My partner, who I shall not name in these pages, was born in a small town near Saigon called Tien Giang, and she came to the United States for study purposes. She first learned English in the Sixth grade, a key subject in Vietnamese schools. She currently lives with her aunt and uncle, the latter of whom - a veteren of ARVN, or the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, who fought for the South - I asked more questions about in a later piece.