Southern and Northern Vietnam

Elijah Vu

Professor Reeves

ENGWR 300

June 14, 2015

Free Writing Draft

In Vietnam, Southern people stereotype Northern people and people who speak Northern dialect as the dishonest people. My ancients’ origin was Northern Vietnam, but they moved to Southern to escape the poverties. After they moved to Southern Vietnam, they lived in small village and become farmers. I was born in Southern Vietnam, but I speak Northern dialect although it is not original Northern dialect. Since the farming was a heavy job but didn’t have much profit, so my family moved to another city to start a business. I still remembered that happened when I was in sixth grade. After a week, we took a sixty minutes math exam. Two days later, we received the results from the math teacher, and it was surprised for me when I had the highest score in the class. I just hoped that my classmates would better know about me, but instead of getting some respects from my classmates, I heard some students gossiped that I was a cheater because they heard some rumors that Northern people are dishonest. Instead of thinking in an objective ways, my classmates immediately jump into an erroneous conclusion. They thought that a student who didn’t come to tutor service wouldn’t get a better grade than other students who did. In Vietnam, we have tutor services, and most of the tutors are the teachers who are teaching in the class. The test that they gave to me that time had already done many times by the students who came to their tutor service. And of course most excellent students of my sixth grade class came there. Although I didn’t come to that tutor service, I had a clear understand of my subject. When I lived in my countryside, I didn’t have such kind of tutor service, so I had to study everything on my own. Also, I didn’t practice the test so many time before I took it. Since I transferred to another middle school in a city, I believed that the test would be more competitive and more challenging, so I reviewed all my notes and practice all the important math problems until two o’clock in the previous night. However, instead of earning some respect, I became a cheater.

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