He has since done many surveys of Vietnamese women born after the war.
“I want to discover common aspects among them in terms of work, love, success, courage, efforts and family,” Hung says.
“I feel close to them, love and admire them since I’m the same age as them.”
His assistants are senior students of sociology at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities (HUSSH).
They help him find subjects, including hundreds of diverse people like journalists, advertising executives and housewives.
The assistants have to convince the subjects, making friends with them and gaining their confidence so that they open up to talk honestly and comfortably, Hung says.
Hung returns to Vietnam six months at a time to conduct studies.
He and his group have done extensive surveys in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and some Mekong Delta provinces.
“I feel happy that I can know about many people’s destinies and make many new friends,” Hung says.
“Women are always an interesting topic. Who knows, maybe I can find my better half [amongst them].”
He wrote a book titled “For Better Or for Worse – Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy” based on his decade-long sociological studies in Vietnam.
The book depicts the development of society through marriages between Vietnamese women and overseas Vietnamese.
The book, which resembles a collection on different women’s lives, has drawn the attention of many foreign academics.
Some libraries in American and European universities have begun to use it as reference material, including Rutgers University in the US and the University of Rome, Italy.
The book is expected to be reprinted next October with 300,000 copies.
It will be translated into Vietnamese next year.
Interpreting Vietnam
Hung is invited to lecture on the Vietnamese community and Vietnam’s integration trends at many universities around the world.
He has been receiving more invitations since the book’s publication.
During a four-day visit to the University of Rome, Hung was amazed by the fact that hundreds of people attended his lecture.
The questions they posed showed how much they knew about Vietnamese society, Hung said, making him more eager to study his motherland.
Hung often brings a few excellent American students with him to Vietnam.
This is to give them an opportunity to learn about Vietnamese culture, life, food and drink, and the language, he says.
He has also organized trips to the US for HUSSH professors so that they can meet US students and discuss Vietnamese society.
Home, sweet home
Hung was taken to the US by his father when he was just four or five years old and he hardly remembers his mother.
But more than 20 years later, he found out his mother was still alive.
This persuaded him to choose Vietnam as the base for his sociological studies instead of Africa as he had originally planned.
Upon arriving in the country he met his mother in Dong Thap Province.
Later he kept coming back to Vietnam to work until she died of an illness.
But he has continued his research.
To him, studying Vietnamese society has been akin to finding his way back to his mother.
“Every time I came to Dong Thap, I felt as if I was coming home and back to my mother,” Hung says.
“My mother was always by my side, giving me love, warmth, encouragement and has shared [everything] with me.”
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