The Vietnamese Family in Change

The Case of the Red River Delta

Pham Van Bich

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136818929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Like most societies Vietnam has seen marked changes in family structures and dynamics this century. For Vietnam however these changes have been especially radical. After decades of French acculturation the 1940s brought sweeping economic changes and a move away from collectivism. Perhaps because of Vietnam's long isolation from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, very little has been written on the Vietnamese family.

This text provides an examination of the Vietnamese family focusing on two fundamental relationships – husband-wife and parent-children – within their wider social and historical context. The author explores how and why marital partners are chosen; individual's domains within the family; reproduction and birth control; son preference; ancestor worship; and the role of the state.

As such, the study will be of interest not just to sociologists but also to those scholars looking to understand the current social transformation of Vietnam.

Chapter One

The Traditional Family

This chapter is about the family from the beginning of this century to 1945. The task of studying family change entails looking at the traditional family, but that is not simple for the reason that to date there have been very few studies about the topic. Moreover, the question of the validity of available data and evidence is difficult to resolve.

Based on fragmented evidence from different sources, chiefly studies by historians’ and ethnographers as well as literary works, this chapter is designed to give a general view of the family during the period under consideration, a basis for comparison to find out the changes that the family has undergone. This chapter attempts to place the traditional family in the context of the French influence on the one hand, and the long-standing traditions on the other hand. In so doing it seeks to analyse and explain why the traditional family was criticised by a great many participants in the liberation movement that was well under way at the end of the period, as well as the new government established later.

However, the chapter does not exhaust the comprehensive evidence about the traditional family. A more detailed view follows in the subsequent chapters. Here we shall first examine the French influence on the family, then evaluate it in relation to the family form shaped by long traditions. From this general view of the family in this period we go on to examine how it later changes.

The French Influence

The establishment of French rule at the end of the nineteenth century brought about some changes for which the Vietnamese paid a heavy price, especially between 1915 and 1925 (Buttinger, 1967: 160). These were the construction of roads, railways, and coal mines; the establishment of small-scale industrial enterprises; the peasant migrations; and an increased economic dependence on the world market. Under French rule, the old civil service examination system that recruited the members of the Vietnamese bureaucracy was eliminated, and replaced by the new education system based on the French curriculum and the romanised script (chu quoc ngu), not the Chinese characters (Nguyen The Anh, 1970). All those changes led to fundamental transformations in the social structure.

The traditional society is often said to have consisted of the following four categories: Confucian scholars, peasants, artisans, and traders. The scholars and peasants were of prime importance; artisans and traders were small in number, occupied low ranks, and played an insignificant role in social life. However, like many other agricultural societies, the traditional one in Vietnam consisted of mainly two categories: upper and lower classes. As Buttinger (1967: 160) has put it, precolonial Vietnam was a society consisting of a single class ruled by an educated bureaucracy. There was no middle class like in modern Western societies (Dao Duy Anh, 1938/1992: 373; Buttinger, 1967: 116). Under the impact of French rule, the Confucian scholars lost their predominant role, though their prestige was still maintained to some extent. As a result of the French colonial economic policy, since the beginning of this period, two new social categories gradually appeared in urban areas: the middle class and the working class (Dao Duy Anh, 1938/1992; Nguyen The Anh, 1970).

TWO NEW FAMILY TYPES

In terms of the family, this period saw some remarkable changes. The extended family ideal began to break down; the concept of romantic love blossomed among some young, French-educated people in urban areas; a new form of marriage (between French men and Vietnamese women) appeared; and some distinctive small groups – for example the Vietnamese women who served as wives, mistresses and prostitutes to French soldiers, and administrators -emerged (Woodside, 1976). Nevertheless, the most significant change was the appearance of two absolutely new types of urban family: the middle class and the working class.

According to the historian Dao Duy Anh’s (1938/1992: 374376) vivid description, middle-class families were wealthy (by middle class he meant senior officials, landowners, big traders, businessmen, contractors, medical doctors, lawyers and engineers). Many members received a French education and enjoyed a high social rank. They adopted a Western style of dress and housing, and had Western facilities in everyday life. They followed Western practices (greeting each other by shaking hands, embracing, etc.) in social communication. Many of them married freely, and lived separately from their parents after the wedding. A limited number of women from this class were French-educated. They adopted a Western style of dress which showed off their bodies; they freely embraced their male friends, or even danced with them – all this was previously unheard of in a society where the Confucian maxim Nam nu thu, thu bat than [Men and women should remain physically distant] was still powerful. Some of these women had jobs; so they were no longer under the control of their mothers-in-law and their husbands. The children of this family type were often sent to France for their education.

As for workingclass families, they were a totally new phenomenon. Nonetheless, the study of Nguyen The Anh (1970: 257) has pointed out that those families were of peasant origin (they became industrial workers as a result of harsh recruitment measures brought in by the French), and that they kept in close touch with their relatives in the native villages. A great many workers did not bring their families with them; they often left them behind, and supported them by sending part of their wages home. They usually went back to their villages during the strikes that were caused by brutal working conditions and low pay, and also at harvest time (when labour was much in demand) or for festivals. Since working conditions in the towns were uniformly grim, there was a tendency to gravitate back to one’s home village whenever possible (Marr, 1981: 29). We have little evidence to establish the accuracy of these accounts. They also tell us that only a small number of mineworkers and industrial workers became permanent members of the working class.

LIMITS OF THE FRENCH INFLUENCE ON FAMILY PATTERNS

There are conflicting evaluations of the French influence in general. On the one hand, Paul Mus, a French researcher well known for his book Vietnam: la sociologie d’une guerre (quoted in Nguyen The Anh, 1970: 228) holds the view that the traditional Vietnamese society was not affected strongly by colonialism; the latter just added some new elements. On the other hand, Buttinger (1967) supposes that the economic changes under the French rule destroyed the traditional Vietnamese society ‘as effectively as the conquest of Indochina had destroyed the political structure of mandarinal Vietnam’ in the sense that ‘these changes resulted in the rise of social classes unknown in precolonial Vietnam’ (ibid.: 160). By new social classes he means an upper class of capitalists that was, however, largely foreign and outside of Vietnamese society, a small middle class, a relatively large intelligentsia, and a working class.

Nevertheless, it would be safe to suppose that the French influence varied from domain to domain, and was seen mainly in the above social strata of urban areas. Different studies (Dao Duy Anh, 1938/1992: 376; Nguyen The Anh, 1970: 254) showed that the middle class was still weak; the working class bore many characteristics reminiscent of peasant origin. Buttinger (1967: 193) quotes the official count of workers in the whole country by the 1930s as 220,000; ‘if this figure were correct, it would mean that only one person out of one hundred Vietnamese was a salaried worker.’ Nonetheless, he points out that ‘all its members were former peasants; what is more important is that the majority would sooner or later become peasants again’ (ibid.: 194–195). As for the middle class, not only was it ‘numerically small, but it also was of little social importance’ (ibid: 196).

Altogether, the new classes were insignificant in comparison to the absolute majority of rural population. As late as 1936 it was not too difficult to find a large village, not too far from the town, where young children had never seen a single European face and where no French administrators had ever set foot since the beginning of the colonial period (Woodside, 1976: 118). New institutions coexisted with old ones. Confucian conventions still existed although they had lost much of their vitality.

As for the family relationships, one may say that during the period many old patterns changed very little among the overwhelming majority of population, even among the above-mentioned two family types. Marr tells us that although members of the middle class thought of themselves as urbanites, and tried to model themselves on their Parisian counterparts, complete with champagne, fashionable furniture and clothing, dinner parties, government medals, and advisory council positions, most of them still depended on rural income, many had concubines, and many arranged socially advantageous marriages for their children. The same source also tells us that in the countryside, despite the commercial character of relationship with tenants and wage labourers, most village landlords thought of themselves as inheritors of the traditions of the local literati and the village notables. They tended to be staunch upholders of status hierarchy, traditional festivals, rites for village tutelary deities, and patriarchal discipline (Marr, 1981: 26–27). We have so far no evidence to refute this; in fact what evidence we do have (including literary works), strongly supports this argument.

During this period, there was a gradual increase in the number of girls attending school, most of them came from a minority of upper- or middle-class families. By 1930, according to French administrators’ recordings, there were 40,752 girls undergoing public or private instruction out of a total of 435,782 primary pupils (Marr, 1981: 206). Although these educational statistics demonstrate an unprecedented phenomenon, the significance is somewhat diminished when we remember that this was a country of about twenty million people. According to the above researcher, a new market had developed in textbooks written for female students in the new script. Nevertheless, the predominant topic of textbooks for female students were the traditional feminine norms ‘three submissions’ and ‘four virtues’, which were the dogmas taken from orthodox Confucian texts. The first textbook of this kind (with a print-run of 1,000 copies) was printed in Hanoi in 1918, entitled Nu hoc luan ly tap doc [Reading lessons in feminine moral conduct] by Phan Dinh Giap. In the next decade, about twenty-five other such texts, written especially for young women, appeared for sale; quantities ranged from 1,000 copies per edition to 10,000 (Marr, 1981: 207). In other words, the new educational developments and the new script were just the means to communicate the traditional norms to young, French-educated female students.

So in cities, many women received something that had eluded them in the past: an education. However, this did not always lead to free and self-determined marriages. By contrast, the custom of the bride-price¹ was maintained, even strengthened, in accordance with the education. A study by Woodside provides the following evidence.

Thuy An, a female novelist and poetess, noted sardonically in a 1933 Hanoi journal article that the higher educational qualifications of these girls ‘were simply absorbed into the mercantile ferment of old-style family marriage politics’. For those girls who have some learning, and a capacity of making their own living, the bride-price becomes increasingly expensive. In addition to computing the value of their own efforts at raising the daughters and giving moral instruction, their mothers count in addition the extra efforts at giving them some education … If one adds together all these efforts, the bride-price amounts to a formidable sum of money, and terrifies the grooms when they hear it. In a middle-class family that has a daughter about to be given in marriage, ‘the go-between bargains, the mother persists, and the daughter is no different from an article of merchandise displayed in a market, with sellers and buyers agreeing on a price’.

(Woodside, 1976: 99–100)

If this is accurate, in the lively description of the haggling there are some points indicating that the old family system had not yet been destroyed. First, married daughters – even without any level of education – were a net gain for the family they married into, because they no longer contributed to their family of origin. If they had some education, then that would be an extra merit. Second, although there was some modernisation in the rituals of the wedding (e.g. cars would be rented for the wedding procession), its purpose was to keep face and maintain the social standing of the bride’s family with other people in the community, not to serve the interests of the young people concerned. Third, the go-between still played the same role in a marriage as before.

We can see the vestiges of the traditional family from other sources. It is no accident that this period witnessed the appearance of many novels and short stories based on family issues. A number of them were award-winning; in general they provoked an explosive reaction from readers for their realism. The typical plot often involved a young man and a girl falling in love, but then being forced to part due to social restrictions, and being driven into loveless marriages. Young people at this time were absorbing French ideas about romantic love, but they encountered the strong disapproval of older people. In the transitional period between the old and the new, the new ideas were not yet strong enough to vanquish the old. As a result, young people had to give up their romantic love or choose another option, like committing suicide or running away from home. Such events were not merely works of fiction. In big cities, there were often media accounts about parent-child conflicts; abandonment of the wife by the husband; young boys and girls running together away from home; and suicides committed by young people. That was why the historian Dao Duy Anh (1938/1992: 133) reached the conclusion that the Vietnamese family had to transform in step with the new era.

There were a number of reasons for the slow rate of change. The first one was the vitality and the persistence of traditional norms. Since the 1930s the traditional family as an institution had been encouraged by a number of French rulers. Its autocratic, hierarchical nature was useful for the colonial government because it provided them with a cheap source of social control and political stability (Woodside, 1976: 96–97). If we can lend any credence to literary works, it is worth pausing to consider the famous novel Doan tuyet [Breaking the Ties] by Nhat Linh (1935). In it the French-educated Vietnamese heroine has to struggle against an old-fashioned family. Finally she is taken to court, and made to face a conservative French prosecutor. The writer makes the prosecutor admit the growing identification of interests between the colonial government and the supporters of the hierarchical Confucian family Uamieson, 1993: 143).

That may be open to question, but it cannot be ruled out that from the 1930s onwards, the French rulers deliberately kept the traditional family to serve their interests. Especially during the period 1940–45, according to one source, the Vichy slogan ‘Work-Family-Fatherland’ was hoisted on banners and splashed on walls because to the mind of the Governor-General Decoux, it corresponded marvellously with the deep-seated and traditional aspirations of the Vietnamese masses, and tallied with Confucian morality (Marr, 1995:72–73).

FRENCH ECONOMIC POLICY AND THE PEASANT FAMILY

Probably the clearest impact of the French rule on the ovenvhelming majority of families was the colonial economic policy that aimed at the capitalist exploitation of land, labour, and natural resources. That exacerbated the problems the peasants faced in maintaining their precarious livelihoods. It should be pointed out that the colonial policy was not static, but changed in response to both the altering needs of the colonial economy and Vietnamese reactions. In the summary of Luong Van Hy (1992: 43), this policy included the following measures: direct and indirect taxation were introduced; the payment of taxes was converted from kind to cash; indigenous land was conceded to colonial settlers for the development of major cash crops; labour was appropriated through a corvee system, and repressive labour laws were introduced to keep down labour costs for capitalist agromineral ventures.

Meanwhile studies have emphasised the subsistence orientation of peasants in the Delta. In the precise words of Gourou, agriculture here is ‘an agriculture of subsistence which is limited exclusively to feeding those who practise it’ (quoted in Scott, 1976: 22). Scott has characterised it (ibid.: 25) as having little land, large families, highly variable yields (because of the vagaries of the weather), and few outside opportunities in overpopulated regions. To borrow the imagery of R. H. Tawney, the position of the rural population ‘is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him’ (Tawney quoted in Scott, 1976: 1).

Therefore, the peasant family as a unit of production as well as a unit of consumption had to adopt the so-called ‘subsistence ethic’, as Scott has observed. In his view, unlike a capitalist enterprise, the peasants’ ‘hand-to-mouth’ existence forced them to follow the ‘safety first’ principle. This meant that emphasis was placed on minimising the risk of disaster, not on maximising the average return (Scott, 1976: 17–18). Scott goes on to tell us that peasant families also had to look for ways to survive, including tightening their belts; making use of small trades, e.g. handicraf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Traditional Family
• 2. Social Changes Affecting the Family, 1945–95
• 3. The Husband-Wife Relationship
• 4. Reproduction and Its Socio-cultural Meanings
• Conclusions
• References
• Index