Todays (Any day)
2023

Why do we bow our heads down when greeting others?

 

Ever since I was a child, I always see Mother greeting my teachers with the most sincere head bows, as if they weren’t just her daughter’s teachers but hers as well. It was never a slight nod, but a full head bow and arms crossed - a greeting manner that Vietnamese children were taught to greet our elders. She kept the same greeting even with my foreign teachers when I entered an international study environment as well. I remember how they - especially the younger ones - were caught off guard for the first time and didn’t know how to respond to that. Yet, soon after a few of those “awkward” moments, they got used to it and started to greet my Mother the same way. Suddenly, it became a special thing for me. Being under the influence of her actions, I had adopted the same greeting manner from a very young age - or should I say that it is one of the rules in our family. Still, I only used such a manner with my teachers for they were older than me (obviously), and I found it hard to understand her nature of treating someone much younger as if they were her superiors.

 

I will never forget what she told me in a conversation that we had - when I was 13, maybe 14 at the time. “If you call someone your teacher, that means there must be something you can learn from that person. Suppose without that person, it must have taken you much longer to know that one thing, isn’t it? It is thanks to them that you - my daughter - were able to learn something, to know something that will be useful for you in the future”, she said. “Imagine after a long school day, you will go home, you will take a rest, and perhaps have some homework to do, but you never have to worry about what’s going on with the people you see in school, isn’t it? Your teachers, on the other hand, have to worry about that. They have to take care of every single student from their 20-30 people classes, they have to think not only about what to teach you but also how to teach you. They have to take responsibility for your well-being in those 8 hours in school, and probably think about it for the rest of their day as well - if you are having trouble with studying (or worse, your behaviour). That responsibility that they are willing to take, I’m telling you, is much greater, much heavier than a single, simple head bow that we give whenever we meet them. Your teachers deserve such respect.”

 

Recently, I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot, and then I started to think about those who aren’t called “teachers”. It is true that nowadays, a friendly “Hey!”, “How’s ya goin?”, a “Good day!”, or a “You had lunch yet?” - an interesting way between the Vietnamese -  a shout of “Hi Miss…”, “Bye Miss…” with an exciting wave that juniors give to their teachers, etc, are more commonly found in daily conversations. Yet at times, I still noticed the people around me greeting each other in a much quieter, much subtler and gentler manner - a head bow. Of course, it wasn’t the type of dramatic bows that we normally see in movies or theatres, but still one that was sincere enough to make me suddenly think “Ah, I may be witnessing a deep, heart-to-heart connection right here.” It makes me wonder, what’s with our habits of bowing to someone that is not our elders, nor a teacher, sometimes merely a stranger. What’s the idea behind that action of lowering our heads to the person who was standing in front of us, who we were looking at, at the moment? 

 

Sometimes I think of this life as a journey of collecting “lessons”, a collage of every relationship, every person, and every new-thing that I happened to learn from any circumstances that I had a chance to encounter. I realised that I didn’t just learn something from the teachers that I had in school. My present was built up of bits and pieces that also came from the people who had no intention of being my “teacher”, but ended up becoming one. Sometimes it was just their existence in my life, the words they said, or the actions they made, taught me something that could be completely unnoticed until one day years later, something happened and suddenly I was brought back to the day I gained such a treasure from them. Even the ones who brought me pain and sorrow and hardship taught me things I wouldn’t be able to learn myself. “Have I ever done this to the people around me?” “This must be how other people felt when I treated them in such a way.” Learning something new doesn’t always come with excitement or the joy of pride, especially learning something new about myself. But at least, it means I was able to take a step forward, I was able to gain another piece for the puzzle of my life, to see more of its full picture. And that, to me, is enough. 

 

“It is because I was able to meet you, it is thanks to the journey that we had shared, it is thanks to your guidance, your presence, and the connection we had, that I got to learn such priceless, treasured things. Therefore from the bottom of my heart, I am grateful for all the days and the moments that we’ve known each other.” I think this, is the true meaning behind every head bow that we give to one another.