When I saw the film 'Tom Yum Goong' starring Tony jaa, there was this muscular chinese looking guy.
I thought he was chinese but turned out he was vietnamese. He has very fair skin.

Does anybody know he is vietnamese of chinese descent or Kinh descent ?

If he is of Kinh descent , it certainly shoots down those people like dearcoolz and felixthecat's views.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1248798/

Johnny Nguyen




Compare him with Tony Jaa who is a Thai guy but looks very khmer/malay like

actually there were lots of intermarraige between the chinese and vietnamese but i think people just didnt want to say about it and slowly assimilate into the vietnamese community

tt guy coudl have passed of as a korean or japanese too

That's what we are trying to figure out.

Certainly, the vietnamese that I have seen are very southern chinese like. But I have not been to Vietnam to ascertain what most vietnamese look like.

Of course, I must discount those vietnamese from cham or khmer ancestries. Just like I would discount singaporeans from indian or malay ancestries if I were to look at purely east asians.

i have to say that this guy looks very chinese or japanese with small eyelids, longer face,but do the majority of the vietnamese people look like him? certainly not from what i have encoutered with the vietnamese people in the us. oh,btw,this guy is from the US.

American Asians look a bit different from mainlanders, have you notice that? Not sure if it's the skin tone or the face structure.

I personally don't a **** about it.

Clearly someone's UN-HEALTHY obsession with Viets never failed,seemingly it's becoming one-man crusade.

There are many Cantonese-Chinese families are truly of NON-Yue ancestry,they definitely deserved respect and acknowledgement of their proud heritage in honor of their Northern Han forebears from fellow Chinese so ignorantly lump them together with other ethnicities.

Nope .... absolutely not

Vietnam has high percentage of indigenous looking native Viets populated villages through out the country," Mr x " probably needs to make a few trips there instead of litter this forum with falsehoods.

Most of Vietnamese raised in the US are different
from their parents and brothers sisters who are
raised in Vietnam. They are generally taller, stronger,
more athletic, more handsome or beautiful, with more
foreign looking than the Vietnamese local.

Many Vietnamese suggest a hypothesis that not only
the nutrition and weather that effect the growth of a child,
but also culture and spritual nutrition as well.

I myself believe in this hypothesis, but I do not have
money to prove that with my own study.

You surely have made us laugh with baseless posts not even pertain to your heritage.

The same goes for the Chinese that I have seen born and bred in North America.

Nutrition and weather do change the appearance a bit. But not to the extent of changing the race. A khmer/malay people won't acquire those east asian features even if they have better nutrition.

xng technically speaking there there are "2 kinds" of vietnamese one closer chinese the other to the khmers i would definitely think he is chineise or has chinese ancestors.

Really? My feelings are exactly the opposite. No offense to Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians, but the Chinese girls I have seen in North America are much uglier than the Chinese girls I have seen in Beijing, Shanghai etc. Just my honest and biased observation.

Lucy Liu?

Hawaii-born Kelly Hu is prettier than most mainland Chinese girls in Beijing and Shanghai.

Kelly Hu is a celebrity.

My aunt will disagree She's truly white as milk because she eats well, but my mom would also disagree, even thought she have a lebanese look, when she was young she was also very light. I really can't speak for myself, but most malay/khmer have a certain look, they look like darker versions of chinese, well speaking for khmer but they have usually no eye fold. As for me, I recently got tanned, but I can well past for south chinese. You're talking about skin colors or bone structures and phenotypes? Skin color can change drastically, as for phenotypes,

You're choice on what viets looks like, not to metion heavy intermixing in the north by viets and chinese and intermixing between chams in the south.

Northern Vietnamese (just in case you wanna say the southerners are cham or cambodian seeing as 15 mils cambodian and cham affect the looks of 40 mils southern viets.)




cambodians, cambodians are dark and light.




Thais, dark and light, but their is a heavy chinese presence.


Chinese, they look chinese.



Muong, less sinicized viets.

Un-scientific assumption on your part for someone or own family never have lived in northern Vietnam could loosely make such blanket statement.Majority ethnic Chinese stayed as Chinese NOT intermixed with local indigenous Viets for your information.

Theoretically speaking,the so-called southern Chinese looks can also include aboriginal minorities populated China's SW region.

how do you know, then how do people say the southerners are mix cambodian or cham, and not just more sunburned? Thats right, they can't, do you think viets know if they have chinese admixture, i don't know but a 1000 years of domination sounds like a little some some between viets and chinese. I never seen north vietnam in person, but I have seen pictures, and as for pictures between the north vietnamese and the purer muong northerners, i have to say your ancestors may have looked less like viets of today, and one seem to mentioned that mon-khmer people are not austronesian like, the further north the less mixed austronesian mon-khmers are. Most people assume there is no relation between vietnamese and other mon-khmer, but when you see a mon-khmer such as de'ang, palung and so so you'll see unmistaken simmilarities, as you would also see in a khmer person with light skin. And for the epicanthics part, you do know that its not rare among mon-khmers, even khmer who are mix malay have epicanthics 40% of the time.



one of the mon-khmer tribes, what vietnamese could have looked like.

and i'm sure chinese didn't mix negritoes, they never co-existed but there is some australoid traits. One fail to mention that not only the people of southeast asia, but also south china have australoid traits, thats why most southeast asians are just darker version of south chinese. Excluding Viets, they're usually light, tho southerners do get more sun. I don't know what northern tai look like, but the southern thai get more sun, but you can't judge a thai because they're so mix.

no way i reckon the figure is closer to around 40%

She is alright. But that's just one person. Name another one.

Connie Chung

I am going to puke now.

Not only is she ugly and old, she is a disgrace to the Chinese community in the US with her "Chinese espionage" accusation.

Overseas Chinese living in south east asia that work under the sun may have as dark a skin as the malays but you can still distinguish them apart by the shape of the eyes, nose, mouth and hair.

Skin color alone is not enough to distinguish.

In summary, most southeast asians are NOT just darker version of south chinese. They are actually two different subraces of the mongoloid.

It depends on how you define 'southeast asians' . I define them as traditionally the malays from indonesia, philipines, malaysia and the khmer in cambodia.

Following your logic, can I assume that you are a Korean, and please refrain from commenting on the Chinese community??

Johnny Nguyen is full Vietnamese. His older brother used to look MUCH better than him



Johnny Nguyen or Nguyen Minh Tri and another Viet actress. His uncle is also a famous actor in Vietnam called Nguyen Chanh Tin.



AND NO, most Vietnamese don't look like him because he's a MODEL/ACTOR, however yES there are Viet people in villages that DO have features like him, but more tanned.

Sorry, you lost your credibility when I deleted your p** post

Most chinese don't look like Chow Yun Fatt (chinese actor) too. The southern chinese are usually smaller and shorter than him. But his looks is still considered 'chinese'.

The pictures of the people that you show here are clearly 'chinese-like'.

Tanning is more of an environment ie. sun. We must look at the original skin color when they were a child.

Good ...you could puked on yourself,how did it taste.

The only accusation was your false " accusation " of any Chinese espionage ever occured in her career.

GZ Warning: I am tempted to increase the warning level of Juchechosunmanse and RICECAKE if both of you continue to puke at each other.

Hey! I was merely saying Connie Chung makes me puke, I wasn't even talking to this Ricecake person, and somehow expressing personal opinion like this is prohibited?

Please be fair.

You can use the word "vomit" instead of "puke". The word "Puke" sounds rather unfriendly and crude in this forum.

I think even 2 person of the same parent may look different.
1 maybe inherit more from the grandfather side or another maybe of the mother side...
and another reason could be the way of life..
if one live in saudi arabia dessert and the other live in japan cool and refreshment weather..
one may look old and tired, while the other may look fresh..
just like what some of u have said that vietnamese who life in USA may look taller, muscular, handsome and so on.. bcos the life there are not as difficult in vietname, in USA the way of thinking are more positively too and so on...

That's just my opinion...

OK, I oblige. Thanks.

I have noticed something in large families. Families with at least 4-5 or more children. There is usually that 1 person who looks totally different from everyone. I think if you posted their pictures on this forum along with the pictures of the rest of their family you'd get people commenting about how they're not the same "mongoloid" type or whatever. I mean people on forums like this one classify people differently based upon minor differences. That just goes to show that even in the same family there's a huge amount of variation to the point where some people might classify them as totally different "races". In some families there are huge differences in how siblings and their parents look. You might come to think that people in the same family are totally different "subraces" even though they had the same parents hehe.

Although there may be slight variations among siblings but you can never have a north mongoloid child if both your parents are south mongoloid (meaning the malays / khmers) without racial interbreeding.

That is what you may think because obviously siblings are supposed to look similar. I've seen many large families that often have 1 person look totally different from the rest of their family. It's weird. Not just slightly different, but very different.

I said a child in comparison with his or her own closed relatives only.
I did not compare a child raised in the US to another child in another family raised in Vietnam.

If you want to look for the most beautiful and typical Vietnamese faces,
you'd better to go to Vietnam rather than to go to anywhere else in the world.

TV:

Beauty is in the eyes of beholders! Plus keep in mind, with better nutrition, education, trainings, social condition, living standard, etc the younger generations of Vietnamese in overseas would tend to fare much better than their counterparts in current Vietnam though!

Beauty <== measurement in general physical esthetic + education + cultural & social value .... guess who would fare better?

Vietnamese oversea are only a very small portion to people in Vietnam mainland.
No matter how better the enviroment in which you think Vietnamese oversea are,
they cannot replace 23 pairs of their chomosomes with those made in laboratories.

Besides, do you think everything in America is better than that in Vietnam?
How do you judge thing good or bad?
ect ...
You are a beholder, and how good your eyes are?

Have you been back to VN lately TV?

See the real people, face the fact!

Regarding the eyes .... I'm still 20/20 ... what about yours?

Your genes determine what you look like.
When someone's dad ejaculated, there were MILLIONS of sperm and therefore millions of combinations of how the child could turn out looking like. Everyone of us get 50% genetic material from both parents, and yes, some families siblings do vary in appearance because of factors like inheriting features from grandparents for example (generation skipping of baldness is an example). The environment you are born into plays a role, as do your diet & exercise or lack of it and immune system that your parents have passed onto you. Scientists have found that good looking people are generally healthier and have better immune systems, and the reason why when different races mix, the child usually has above average looks is because when two very different immune systems mix (eg. a Dutch man and a Chinese woman) they produce a stronger, healthier individual and it expresses this through appearance because afterall humans are visual creatures.

I'm not saying that people who are pure bred Chinese are ugly, I've seen beautiful Chinese girls and beautiful mixed asian girls. But when closely related people have kids, they always turn out a bit weird looking. That's why there's that small taboo which some asian parents don't want their kids to marry someone who shares the same surname.

ALso you can't generalise a whole race by looking at a few people and photographs, afterall their families might have migrated into that country but were from a totally different place. Maybe they're an odd ball compared to their relatives (eg. have sharp nose whereas whole family has flat nose).
Diet & environment may have changed their appearance (studies show teenagers in Holland are 25cms taller than their counterparts 150 years ago because of improved postnatal mortality and nurtrition.)
The sun can also alter your appearance, because how dark you are is determined by the melanin in your body.
People from southern China / asia might be darker because their bodies produce more melanin to protect their skin from sun damage. But those who stay out of the sun or has a parent who is pale can be pale even though they live in a warm climate. To see a dramatic difference in appearance thats shaped by where you are from, the people have to live there for thousands and thousands of years.

Think about it, will the white folks from England that's settled in Africa turn black in one or two generations?
Does living in the Americas eventually turn everyone into looking like the American Indians?
If a westerner is born in Asia and lives entirely on asian diet and marries other westerners who also live in asia, will their decendents one day have slanted asian eyes?

We can debate til the cows come home but the best way to find out is to do DNA testing for your racial background so you know once and for all where you're from.

Btw, did you know that native New Zealanders (they look kinda like islanders) have genetic material from Taiwanese materal ancestors and East Timor paternal ancestors combined. Apparently they travelled together by boat to NZ and created a whole new race!

Would it also be plausible that "good looking people" simply have higher self-esteem? It's also been found that higher self-esteem can also boost the immune system. And what qualifies you as being scientifically "good looking"? I always thought that was subjective.



That is extremely subjective. There's also the issue of having mixed race celebrities who may look good to many of us in magazines and on television, but there's those larger numbers of less attractive individuals who are never given as much attention.

I'm a guy so I judge girls. Usually us guys find girls more attractive if they're clean, dressed cleanly and have good hair. It doesn't matter what your genes are if your hair isn't combed or you don't keep yourself looking clean you're going to be considered unattractive. Depending upon how it is applied makeup, clothing and hairstyling can go a long ways towards making some girls look more or less superficially attractive. It also depends upon your taste, of course. But generally the cleaner you look, the better you look.

No. I have not been back to Vietnam for 6 years.

What do you see the face of billions of people in Vietnam?
What do you see in everything or many things in Vietnam?
My physical eyes are not good, for I am 57 now.
If you take some psychology clasees, you may know better on how eyes look and see.

We are now talking on Biology rather than the look of the Vietnamese.
As taught in High School, a pair of parents can have all white children except one in black,
and another parents have all black children except a white child.

I do not mean to talk on that matter, for I am talking about people in pure bred.
The environment have great effect on the behavior of one's set of gene,
but the environment may not immediately change the set of gene.
What we see in an individual are merely the interaction of the gene to its environment.
In other word, the appearance of people are the traits of genes.
Assume that a child has the same set of genes as his parents and brother and sisters,
in different environment, the child should look different, of course.
According to a biology hypothesis, in a long term -- that means many generations --
environment may change the genes eventually.
If the hypothesis is true, there will be no new bred that meets a certain criteria,
for in-breding destroy the bred.
In other words, an ethnic group is only heathy when the size of the group is large
enough to hold a great diversity of genes.
Therefore, the Vietnamese people in Vietnam mainland have the best chance to produce
pure Vietnamese in good health, and good appearance.
Also, the Vietnamese overseas do not have good chance to be healthy and beautiful
Vietnamese no matter how good their environment are.

Besides, talking about good and bad in America and in other countries:
Not everything in America is the best.
There are worse thing in America as well. For example: war and violent.
People have more choices to be better or worse than in other countries.

When I was a child, my parents did not take much care of me. My parents
went to work, leaving me alone, in the village with other kids. We run around,
climbing trees, swimming in the lakes and rivers. It is not lawfull to live that
life in America. We did not know TV or PC, but we had very good childhood
in different way than that of American mordern children. Which one is better?

In Vietnam, not all rich people with better living conditions live long lives.
On the contrary, people living on the mountains with simple diet, and never
take a drive on bus or bycicle can live over a century. In this paragraph,
I try to say, there is no clear boundary between what is good and what is bad.

I still don't get your point of contention at all! You sound way too subjective regarding both cultural and biological issues. It would help if you separate your personal feelings from certain scientific or social facts!

My husband would agree with you on the clean bit, being clean give a good impression. I personally think many Chinese cities need to improve on this, especially that 2008 Olympics is coming up...

Yes it all depends on your taste, some men only like woman with nice big breasts others don't care, some like the ones with nice butt or legs even feet...or face or hair...bla bla

Not subjective at all.
It is scientific biological facts, and studies, and phylosophy.

On Biological aspect, the Vietnamese in overseas do not have a good pool of genes
as the Veitnamese in Vietna mainland. The Vietnamese overseas have no way to
get more genes into their pool unless they go to Vietnam to get married at their choice.
It is not true that Vietnamese overseas are only the best Vietnamese. There are many
Vietnamese in Vietnam who posses millions of US dollars. They are much richers
than many Americans.

On Phylosophy, the Vietnamese overseas have more choices in both having better
and having worse lives than the Vietnamese in Vietnam mainland. The Vietnamese
in Vietnam can go to any countries in the word to get high education and degrees.
They are not worse than Vietnamese overseas in education.

In overall, there is no way to say that Vietnamese overseas have better fare than
the Vietnamese in Vietnam mainland in respect to the enhancement of the bodies.

In the following webpage, you can see Miss Vietnam 2006:
http://giaitri.homeip.net/tonghophoahau/

In this webpage, you see some pictures from Miss Vietnam 2006 event:
http://dactrung.net/phorum/tm.aspx?m=26118...page=1&key=

Personally, I don't think their look are typical Vietnamese.
There are a lot of European modification in them. I don't know how.

TrueViet:

I'm reallyl confused with your reference to certain studies have been done in comparing the Vietnamese who live in overseas versus their compatriots in Vietnam. Who doesn't know better economic condition would lead to better living standards, education, medical care ... thus people generally would have better opportunity to maximize their potentials including their physical attributes.

How could you make a comparison of the two vastly different social and economic condition of the overseas Vietnamese and those who are still living in Vietnam. We've already known that the economic output of 3 millions overseas Vietnamese are equal to that of the whole 84 millions Vietnamese in Vietnam. There is no doubt that there are a small number of people in Vietnam are quite riches; however, what would be the percentage of people who are still living in extreme poverty?

In summary, I would use the physical characteristic and/or appearance of Vietnamese from overseas to compare to other Asians from developed countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, Thailand ... so that one could see how people could improve their physical appearance from a better living standard and social condition. We've said enough about the Japanese notoriously knowing as rather "short people" from the WWII and before; nevertheless, how could such assumption come to be quite different during the past several decades or so. Similar analogy could also apply to South Korea, and elsewhere. Let's hope that, Vietnam will soon have an opportunity to reverse its course for the better well-beings in overall of her people!

Is there any point to this topic other then discuss certain ethnic stereotypes????

Let's see an analog in an experiment:

20 years from now, gather all children of all contestants in Miss America 2006 event,
and see how many of them who are female can be the contestants of Miss America 2026 event?

From that experiment, you may find that the group of most beautiful women cannot be drawn
from a limited source of people., but from a much larger pool of candidates,
regardless in what condition they are.

I do not deny that children in better condition have more chance to improve themselves.
I did say that the most beatiful and typical Vietnamese should be found in Vietnam mainland
rather than from amongst the Vietnamese overseas.

In summary, You believe that the living condition is the key for the improvenment of human bodies,
but I believe that the large pool of DNA resource is the key.