Tag: Child

Feminism Vietnamese way

I have seen them in Ao Dai, on scooters.

I have seen them in Ao Dai, holding child, on scooters (perhaps on the way to childcare) before work.

I have seen them with child canvassing the street selling lottery tickets.

Perhaps I used to be that very child my teacher mom in Ao Dai used to carry.

I remember we had to get help. Live-in maids. Four working adults in a family were not available for one child.

Existential loneliness. Thay, nhay, chup (stand on the table, toss the ball, jump in mid air, and catch it while falling).

I repeated that drill so many times, it now stuck in my memory.

Then, luckily, I got a hold of my brother’s guitar.

So, from then on, me and the strings.

Back to feminism in Vietnam as I experienced it.

Vietnamese female went professional such as accountant (my sister), teacher (my mom) , pharmacist (my sister-in-law) and dentist (my niece), during the 60’s and war time.

They put in long hours, performed up to par.

Then came home. Another round of expectations: that of a housekeeper, to have home-cooked meals on the table and clean sheets in the bed (Vietnamese female version of Papa – “keep those shoes on my feet”).

Fast forward to the here and now.

Some took a short cut (yahoo news features a mug shot of a supposedly $2500 per night call girl). Others migrate overseas under pretense and pretext of marrying to foreigners.

I only know how my mom lived her life.

From morning to mid-night.

I refer to her in another blog (Mom’s Ao Dai).

But I cannot help mentioning her again since I saw another mom-type, holding baby in arm, while riding the scooter, in Ao Dai (receptionist uniform at a Vung Tau resort).

Good luck to all the children without a helmet. Good luck to all those moms who struggle to raise a family in a very hot, flat and crowded city.

Good luck to young and emerging female type who has to juggle between tradition vs modernity without tossing the baby out with bath water.

Everyone I spoke to agreed that here in Vietnam ,

it’s the women who actually run the show: power, money and happiness/well-being of their children.

Betty Friedman would have been proud: here, they practice feminism without labeling it as so. Just do it. Lean-In. Thanks Mom.

Rough “road” to learning

 Please fasten your seat belts.

The road to learning is rough: one has to survive the transportation to and fro, bullies and academic pressures.

“it’s the same river, same ferry, and coconut trees along the banks, but, it’s different today. The difference is, …today, I am back to school” (paraphrasing a poem by Thanh Tinh)..

When their age, I got picked up by various adults in my household: father, brother, sitter and sister (my mom was a school teacher at another school, so she couldn’t have due to schedule conflict). They picked me up by VeloSolex and Mobylette. Twice my little foot got stuck in the back wheel (once I ended up in the emergency room).

Rough road to learning.

Seeing school children in An Giang getting ferried to school brought back some memories (last week, on PBS Newshour, on the subject of the Keystone pipeline,

one commentator even mentioned that current climate change was due to global increased energy consumption in countries like Vietnam and China etc… That prompted a rebuff from the environmentalist, who said “how much an average Vietnamese uses energy per day compared to the developed world”. We should chroma-key in above picture to make his point).

School could never equip us with survival instincts.

The best teachers can do is to create a sense of normalcy, habit-forming, and hopefully,

plant a desire for further learning.

Besides, they already got “tiger moms” at home who ensure conformity to village life.

Those are end-products based on century-old Mandarin system (to supply new blood to run the admin system).

Except now, we don’t face shortage of labor at all (fewer people are required to produce the same amount of agri and aqua products, fewer employees per factory/offfice square foot etc…No more “where is the white-out”.

Yet, children are risking their young lives to get to school across the river.

Quite a “distant” learning.

Could someone throw a safety jacket?

Here, people blog about  (wearing) “White after Labor Day“.

I just hope that one of those children will make it to the big city, and propel into the big league (statistical outcome of a large gene pool of 90 million). Perhaps through IT, or Math (one already won the most prestigious award).

One charity in the West was exposed for trying to build schools in Afghanistan while pocketing the rest.

He even wrote a book about it. PR man. Opportunist man. Spare a jacket?

I am sure these schoolchildren pick up on some survival skills during their one-hour commute (team work, social awareness etc..) before setting foot in the classroom.

And should one of them be drowned, (as already happened) I hope for the rest a quick move forward over survivor’s guilt.

Those scars take a long time to heal.

I know what I am writing about.

I still have the aching ankle ground by Mobylette to prove it.

It took place from a rough road back from school.

It’s the same road that I saw every day, but the difference was, that day, was the day I arrived home via the hospital. Rough “road” to learning, I tell you.