highs, lows, and everything in between :)
by Sherry Shu
Yes, this is 3 months late. Whoops! Ah well, I’m gonna write it anyway.
I’ll start by reflecting on how grateful I am that my crazy life decisions have led to this. Attending the Vietnam World Universities Debating Championships was one of the coolest things I have ever done.
Thank you to Daniel for carrying me through the tournament, dealing with me for two weeks, mourning with me through the tough losses, and being a wonderful debate partner and Vietnam travel buddy.
Thank you to the rest of the Western squad (Ella, Grace, and James) for giving me hilarious stories to tell and being a joy to hang out with in Ho Chi Minh City.
Thank you to Eric for being a fantastic friend and shoulder to cry/vent on throughout the tournament - so grateful I met you at NAUDC!
Thank you to all the Canadian debaters (Mic, Jaleelah, Taira, Elaine, and others) who let me crash their late-night karaoke session and sing Hamilton songs while being viciously sick and coughing every second beat.
Thank you to Vy for showing me the beauty of Hanoi super last minute (and for saving Daniel’s wallet lol).
And thank you to the organizing committee, judges, sponsors, and every amazing person who made this incredible event come to life.
So how was the experience?
Hanoi (and Tokyo, technically): December 20 - 24
My trip to Vietnam started with a (totally unplanned) 24-hour layover in Tokyo. The city in the winter has a very different vibe than it does in the summer. The train cars are silent, and the streets are dusted with frost and eerily calm.
But even these unfamiliar streets bring back fond memories. I snack on a sticky hanami dango and smile at the familiar crowds outside Senso-ji temple. I gaze again at the Skytree across the Sumida River, sparkling with Christmas colours. I enter the same matcha shop as the day I left and fall in love again with the bitter-sweet ice cream. I walk into a cat cafe and meet another friendly Japanese lady, who tells me about her experience studying English in Kyoto while we gush over adorable furballs.
The quiet Japanese streets give way to a clutter of colourful roaring motorbikes when I land in Vietnam. The winding roads of Hanoi’s downtown quarter are packed with small shops and fresh food stalls. At night, they come alive with fluorescent lighting, crowds of diners, and blaring music.
I check into a youth hostel for the first time. I make a random friend by walking into the closest pho place I could find, seeing a fellow non-Vietnamese girl sitting at a table alone, and striking up a conversation.
Traveller tip #1: throw your social anxiety out the window in foreign countries. You can meet so many wonderful friends just by talking to strangers.
I find out she’s a French student studying in Canada (hey, that’s where I’m from too!) We spend several hours after lunch walking along the streets of Hanoi. We grab dinner again the next night. Nowadays, I still stalk her Instagram stories to see her ongoing travel photos and send her envious texts about being stuck in London.
Two nights later, Daniel arrives in Hanoi. Stepping out of the airport, he instantly almost gets kidnapped by the Mafia and scammed by a taxi driver.
This is Daniel, beaming and fanboying with pride as we’re eating bún chả at the same place Obama did when he visited Vietnam
He gets bailed out of the situation by our local friend Vy, who goes to Western but is in the city visiting family. She also kindly offers to take us around Hanoi. She talks about growing up in Vietnam as we sample a variety of her favourite local foods, ranging from classic phở to chè trôi nước to egg coffee. But a standout for me was this street snack called bò bía ngọt, sold out of a motorcycle stand on the side of a busy road. Local people would pull up to the side of the road and line up - almost like a drive-through - with 20000 Vietnamese đồng (~$1 CAD) in hand. The sellers would take these thin flour crepes, add coconut strips, sugar sticks, and black sesame, and roll everything up. So simple, but sweet, crunchy, and SO GOOD.
We end the day by visiting a temple in the city centre, a silent sanctuary that blocks out nearby traffic, leaving you with only the twinkle of wind chimes. From here, we watch the sun set over the lake, glimmering behind the shadow of the pagoda.
The next day, Daniel and I leave to admire the nature outside of the city. And holy shit. No words can capture the beauty of Halong Bay - even these pictures don’t do it justice. You have to see it for yourself.
Traveller tip #3: photos are great. Take lots of them. But spend most of your time at a natural/historical site just vibing - it’s not the same through a cellphone screen.
Phong Nha: December 25 - 26
It was Daniel’s idea to spend Christmas in a cave.
After our Hanoi misadventures, we head from northern to middle Vietnam - specifically, a place called Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng National Park, which contains one of the largest cave systems in the world. And we were going to sleep inside it.
On December 25, we get up bright and early. We hike for 6 hours, through remote mountain villages and muddy streams, to arrive at the gaping mouth of a massive cave entrance. And the view from inside…
!!!
Those little colourful tents you see? We slept in those. The little fireplace in the middle? We gathered around those at night to roast sweet potatoes and hear our tour guides tell stories about the cave’s geological history.
The next day, the view only gets better. We scale up from the entrance to explore the other end of the system. Our guides bring massive flashlights, pointing out every stalactite and stalagmite along the way. And then we see this:
Wow.
Traveller tip #4: when you get the chance to explore a big cave, always take it.
The whole cave-exploring group at the end of a long and sweaty hike!
Ho Chi Minh City (the actual competition): December 27 - January 4
After a quick sleeper bus ride to the nearby city Hue (and a quick street food stop, where I get to tease Daniel for his low spice tolerance), we finally make our way to Ho Chi Minh City!
Traveller tip #5: sleeper buses are a great way to travel large distances through Southeast Asia - if you are my height. They are far less comfortable if you are Daniel’s height or practically any height above 5’4”.
We arrive on the evening of December 27, and I see crowds of students - some familiar, many not - in the hotel lobby. I reunite with Ella, Grace, and James - the rest of the Western contingent. While Daniel and I were in northern Vietnam, they’ve been exploring Malaysia and Singapore.
December 28 is the opening ceremony. We pile into the conference center and witness a gorgeous dance routine performed by local students, inspired by traditional Vietnamese culture. It even included a lion dance to welcome in the New Year!
I can’t believe I’m here.
For those of you who have never been to a debate tournament because you’re not a freaking nerd, let me give you a quick run-down.
Every tournament starts with a big pool of teams of two. Every debate round has 4 teams; 2 teams that support the topic (“government” teams), and 2 teams that oppose the topic (“opposition” teams). Each topic is impromptu and announced before the round starts, giving all teams 15 minutes to prepare without Google or ChatGPT before the debate starts. During a round, each team member gets 1 chance to speak. Once a round is over, a panel of judges rank the teams from 1st to 4th. A 1st place gets 3 team points, going all the way down to a 4th place, which gets 0 points. The judges will also assign points to each speaker based on the quality of their speeches.
There are a series of preliminary rounds. After this, team points and speaker points are used to rank the teams. Depending on the size of the tournament, a certain number of teams will then “break” - the colloquial term for entering the elimination rounds (octofinals, quarterfinals, finals, etc.)
Simple, right?
WUDC has 300 of the best teams around the world. Only the top 48 would break after 9 preliminary rounds. We needed roughly 17 team points to make the top - or 1.8 points per round. Essentially, we needed an average of 2nd place each round, with some room for error. At a tournament this competitive, that’s all we were aiming for.
FPT’s beautiful campus!
Day 1 - December 29
The competition starts at FPT University. Each day, there are 3 rounds total. Daniel and I start relatively strong, taking two 1sts and an unfortunate 4th. We end on 6 points. As the day goes on, I feel a tickle in my throat develop, but I brush it off and buy 3 packs of cough drops.
Day 2 - December 30
We’re in tougher rooms since we’re slotted with teams on the same number of points. We do a bit worse, taking a 1st and two 3rds. My sore throat develops into a runny nose and cough. I have a slight, tearful mental breakdown over my inability to give good whip speeches (the last “summary” speech of the round), which eventually culminates in Ethan Curry (former UWODS debater) sending me an hour-long seminar over consecutive Facebook voice messages and begging me to calm down. We’re now at 11 points. We need 6 more points on our final day to break.
I’m pretty sure we took a 3 this round. But I look cool, don’t I?
Day 3 - December 31
For this final day, rounds are “closed”, meaning that judges no longer tell us the team rankings at the end of each round - to amp up the mystery (and my anxiety).
We start strong. Our first two rounds feel great, even though I do not (I am blowing my nose during other people’s speeches and looking at the judges with sad puppy eyes, hoping they take pity on us). We think that we’ve gotten a 1st or 2nd in both. In our very last round, we end up in a room with two Sydney teams and one team from Cornell - all excellent speakers who had taken decent rankings in Days 1 and 2. We suspect we’re in a “bubble room” - a round where your ranking will probably determine if you break or don’t break.
We watch the round play out. We scramble as the government team before us takes all of our arguments. Our speeches end, and everyone knows it - we take the clear 4th place. We shake hands with the other teams and silently leave the room.
The break announcements happen at midnight to ring in the new year. As the announcement slides slowly count down from 1st to 48th, we watch as a bunch of other Canadian teams break. We cheer and scream for their success. We watch as all the teams from our bubble room show up on the break slides - except for us.
On New Year’s Day 2024, I refresh the ranking page to find out that we ended on 16 points - 1 point away from breaking. I shriek in the library, startling bystander debaters and students. I’ve let Daniel down. We’ve let Western down. We were so, so close.
What a start to the year.
WUDC had been my most stressful, mentally exhausting, emotionally draining, and expensive tournament. Before WUDC, I’d never broken down crying because of a round or bad speech. Before WUDC, Daniel and I had spent weekends grinding prep tournaments and practice rounds. Coupled with all the other thoughts I’d been having about whether debate was wasting my time and money, whether this competitive activity was meaningful, or whether I should be doing more productive, pre-professional things instead because “you’re an adult now, Sherry!” — I seriously began to doubt my decision to keep putting myself through this.
Of course, the Canadian debater karaoke, the support of my friends at the tournament and back home, and the shenanigans we got up to in Ho Chi Minh (mostly getting smoothies and street food with the Western gang) helped me feel better. But it took a few weeks after the tournament to process the loss and realize that I wasn’t that upset.
Even if I didn’t have the titles or awards to show for it, I had gotten so much better since I started this funny little activity in high school, or even since I decided to continue this funny little activity in my first year of university. I had given speeches that I was proud of. I had faced some of the world’s toughest opponents, shaken their hands, and kept smiling when we took 3s or 4s. And I got to go to Vietnam!! I got to compete in an international tournament! I got to see old debate friends from the USA, Singapore, India, Australia, and Europe; and make new friends from a bazillion other places. Even after the tough defeat, I couldn’t help but look forward to the next tournament - and few activities keep me this hyped after this many Ls.
TLDR: travel is awesome, Vietnam is amazing, and, against all reason, competitive debate is an emotional rollercoaster that I will probably never get off.
Comments