As an American-born Vietnamese person, I'll provide context for other Western readers:
There is no real US substitute I can think of for experiencing living in Vietnam.
I grew up in NoVA, and would go on month-long summer trips to Vietnam with my family to visit relatives. My asian friends from China, India, and the Philippines would go on similar trips with their families too, so we would share stories and commiserate with each other. We joked with the Korean kids how they had it easy, and would tell the White kids how it's like the opposite of 'vacation'.
Living outside Hanoi with my relatives and seeing day-to-day life in Vietnam made me thankful for my Western lifestyle. I was used to the typical US suburban cushiness, and this was like bootcamp: no A/C, no American toilets (only squat ones), less reliable internet, widely varying food standards (having diarrhea in Florida-like weather is awful), and commonplace dirtiness and pollution (imagine NYC before the EPA but more widespread).
Even for me, there would be moments of culture shock seeing street food vendors selling field rats or shop owners dumping loose garbage into alleys. Things you would be shocked to see happen in the US without immediate reprimand and regulation are "just a part of life" in Vietnam. There is a huge cultural disconnect to hurdle between practices that are acceptable in Vietnam vs. the US.
Finally, there is the topic of education. For those asians who came from rural lifestyles not very long ago, education was not widely accessible or particularly advanced (e.g. college-level subject study), thus, many people did not grow up receiving the same learnings. This is where folk beliefs come in and fill the void (i.e. the "old wives tale" equivalent). It's information based on tertiary cause-effect understanding, or explanation derived from non-scientific study. For example, a handful of my older relatives believe that rains causes lice (as in lice spontaneously generate from rain), therefore, keeping your head dry in the rain prevents lice. This is something that could be easily discredited if there was effort put into convincing them otherwise or letting them discover it's not true.
It's really an incredible shame that ignorance, unawareness, and fallaciousness have lead to such a tragedy of animals and environments being destroyed. Vietnam needs more figures to go out into the public and address ass-backwards thinking like drinking bile or eating horns will cure ailments. It's certainly as dumb or dumber than anti-vax stories. Modern medicine is already a solution to many of these "folk cures", with greater efficacy and less harm, yet it's ignored in favor of some random concoction because that's the "traditional way". It makes as much sense as hanging herbs in my doorway to ward off the flu over getting a flu shot.