In my research for moving to Vietnam, I must have accidentally Googled “Vietnamese party girls” because my basic impression was that Vietnam is full, brimming even, with beautiful young party girls who always wear mini skirts and tube tops and other tops with gold sequins and lamé bikinis and who are always with, like, five other party girls, and who are always partying and taking selfies, and who will invite me on a motorbike ride to a decidedly untouristy part of town and leave me in an alley to be robbed by five guys who aren’t nearly as short as I’d thought they would be.

You can imagine my disappointment, then, when I discovered that the internet had totally misled me about the Vietnamese party girl situation, at least in Hanoi, which I understand is pretty conservative by Southeast Asia standards. Sure, there are definitely some baddies about the place. But they tend to be hard at work washing dishes on the sidewalk or frying delicious fried treats or pointing and yelling and otherwise using their wiles to persuade you to buy and enjoy a Bia Saigon. They are not wearing lamé bikinis. Or they’re out with friends and family enjoying a nice meal and maybe some of the secret rice whiskey-type libation they bring in a Tupperware-type bowl and which is served around into little cups with a ladle and are definitely not offering body shots to premium middle-aged American males like the internet would have you believe.

But I’ve never been one to let the reality get in the way of the fantasy, and I don’t intend to start now, here, where the opportunity for the unfettered projection of my fantasies onto reality is so ripe it practically runs down my chin peach-like. And so I basically let loose imaginatively, turning every, and I mean every, woman I see who is not an apparently Western tourist—who, ironically enough, pretty regularly do conform outfit-wise to what I’d imagined the Vietnamese party girls would be like, except that they’re blond and braless and not at all exotic looking or Vietnamese and so don’t really get it done for me fantasy-wise—into Vietnamese party girls. This might make some of the more uptown liberal college-educated type folks who maybe are reading this squirm, but it’s my mind and I can drag it through the gutter if I want.

And this strategy works most of the time. Except that I still have this nagging idea in the part of my mind that’s not busy projecting my Vietnamese party girl fantasy onto every woman I see in Vietnam: All of my internet research about the women in country cannot possibly be Western imperialist hegemonic ideology propagated to oppress the subaltern other, right? I mean, there’s gotta be some truth to the Vietnamese party girl situation that’s so clearly photo documented on the internet especially when you turn SafeSearch off, right? Right?

I have a theory: The Vietnamese party girls are hiding in plain sight. They are everywhere, all at once. They are simply in disguise. You see, my wife who, remarkably, still loves me and I are in bed by 9 o’clock, every night, long before the Vietnamese party girls who really do wear miniskirts and tube tops and gold lamé bikinis 24/7 hit the streets in high heels to offer body shots of Hennessy to premium American males who just want to have a good time and party and take body shots off of glistening Vietnamese girls before heading back to the apartment for a good night’s sleep because they’ve gotta get up at the crack of it to go do some “cultural” nonsense with their wives who still love them. As if Vietnamese party girls are not culture.

Culture is ordinary.

But I miss out on this particular aspect of ordinary Vietnamese culture because by day, when we’re out on the streets walking and sweating and eating tasty food and looking at decidedly less interesting to me cultural stuff, the Vietnamese party girls are in transit. Oh, they’re around. They’re just on their motorbikes, almost completely covered in burka-like hooded jumpsuits and face masks and gloves that look like the kind you use when you’ve got to put some serious elbow grease into washing the sheet pan you cooked BBQ ribs on in the oven. They wear this outfit because Vietnamese families are really close, and so they will be seen and judged severely not only by their moms but also by their grandmas who don’t understand them and who had it easy in their day entertaining premium American GIs who’d requisitioned their homes and so didn’t have to go out to party and take selfies every night when they were young. The only thing giving away the bikinied and glistening foxiness of the Vietnamese party girls on the motorbikes in the burkas are the really very high-heeled shoes they wear because cute.