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How to Forge a Creative Student-Citizen: Achieving the Positive in Today's Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2013

SUSAN BAYLY
SUSAN BAYLY*
Affiliation:
Christ's College, University of Cambridge, UK Email: sbb10@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

The exaltation of achievement as a measure of collective and individual worth and moral agency has been one of the defining features of Asian developmentalism. Yet in today's age of globalized neoliberal attainment monitoring, the question of who and what an achiever actually is within an achievement-conscious society is far from straightforward or uncomplicated. In Vietnam, the notion of doing well and creditably for self and nation can be deeply problematic for those called upon, either officially or by living and ancestral kin, to embody qualities of attainment and creditable life-course functioning in ways recognizable to those who reward and monitor aspiring achievers. Building on recent fieldwork in Vietnam, this paper explores the ways young Hanoians have engaged with a rapidly changing set of ideas about how the country's tightly regulated schooling and examination system can both unleash and constrain the potential for new and ‘creative’ forms of attainment on the part of the nation's most promising and productive citizen-achievers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 493 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 For Lee Kuan Yew's exhortation to Singaporeans to become selfless ‘team achievers’ as well as embodiments of ‘Asian values’, see Oehlers, Alfred L. (1997), ‘Cultural Values in Singapore’, in de Zepetnek, Steven Tötösy and Jay, Jennifer W., eds, East Asian Cultural and Historical Perspectives: Histories and Society, Cultures and Literatures (Edmonton: RICLCCS), 97–123 (p. 99)Google Scholar; for Indonesia, compare Long, Nicholas J. (2011), ‘On Having Achieved Appropriation: Anak Berprestasi in Kepri, Indonesia’, in Strang, Veronica and Busse, Mark, eds, Ownership and Appropriation (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 47–50Google Scholar. Research for this paper was funded by ESRC award RES-000–22–4632 in support of a joint project with Dr N. Long on the Social Life of Achievement in Indonesia and Vietnam. For valuable comments and suggestions I warmly thank Dr Long, and Professor Caroline Humphrey, Dr James Laidlaw, Dr Maryon McDonald and Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov.

2 Ong, Aihwa (2012), Neoliberalism as Exception (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press)Google Scholar.

3 Bayly, Susan (forthcoming), ‘For Family, State and Nation: Achieving Cosmopolitan Modernity in Late-Socialist Vietnam’, in Long, Nicholas J. and Moore, Henrietta L., eds, The Social Life of Achievement (Oxford, New York: Berghahn)Google Scholar.

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9 It is a matter of great pride in Vietnam that in 2010 the country was ranked as the world's top CIVETS economy, i.e., the strongest of the world's emerging, fast-growth, non-commodity-dependent powers (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa), classed just behind the super-emerger BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) in terms of its globalized development potential. A key criterion for this listing was Vietnam's strong showing on the various international performance rankings attesting to its status as a site of high-grade ‘human resources’. See http://vietnamtodayonline.typepad.com/blog/2011/04/viet-nam-cements-ranking-as-ideal-investment-location.html [accessed 13 June 2013].

10 Among its commonly cited manifestations is the cooking of good-news statistics, e.g. the pressure to report perfect success rates in the annual higher-secondary graduation examinations; also 100 per cent upgrading rates, i.e. no children being made to repeat a year's study through failing to meet the passing-on standard (http://vietbao.vn/Giao-duc/Hang-tram-truong-THPT-do-tot-nghiep-100/55464263/202/ [accessed 13 June 2013]).

11 A related phrase is ý chí làm giàu – having and showing ‘will’ (ý chí) to ‘làm giàu’: that is the will and fortitude required to ‘make wealth’ or simply ‘get rich’. Ý chí means something like moral fibre; it entails being unswerving, never succumbing to demoralization—the qualities of the dedicated patriot and leader. So the notion of having the will or goal-directed energy required to get rich or make wealth is now something good and moral: the phrase is used approvingly in media stories about the worthy farmer toiling away until he finds the ideal crop for his hitherto unproductive soil, then sharing the knowledge he has gained so all his neighbours benefit. See http://www.baomoi.com/Y-chi-lam-giau-cua-anh-Nguyen/45/6401606.epi [accessed 13 June 2013]; Malarney, Shaun K. (1998), ‘State Stigma, Family Prestige, and the Development of Commerce in the Red River Delta of Vietnam’, in Hefner, Robert W., ed., Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms (Boulder: Westview), pp. 268–289Google Scholar; Taylor, Philip, ed. (2004), Social Inequality in Vietnam and the Challenges to Reform (Singapore: ISEAS)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for China, see Farquhar, Judith (1996), ‘Market Magic: Getting Rich and Getting Personal in Medicine after Mao’, American Ethnologist, 23(2): 239–257CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 This is a key distinction: a ‘tiger mother’ is Chinese or Chinese-descended, her children trophies and assets rather than the beloved little treasures for whom the Vietnamese mother gives her all. See Pettus, Ashley (2003), Between Sacrifice and Desire: Gender, Media and National Identity in Vietnam (London and New York: Routledge)Google Scholar; Werner, Jayne (2004), ‘Managing Womanhoods in the Family: Gendered Subjectivities and the State in the Red River Delta in Vietnam’, in Drummond, Lisa and Rydstrøm, Helle, eds, Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam (Singapore: Singapore University Press), pp. 26–46Google Scholar; for India, compare Donner, Henrike (2008), Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, Globalization and Middle-Class Identity in Contemporary India (Hampshire and Burlington Vermont: Ashgate)Google Scholar, Chapter 4). The Western notion of the pushy middle class parent unfairly ‘working the system’ at the expense of those with less social capital is also hard to convey in Vietnam. In theory, no-one likes the woman who buys her child a place at a favoured school or pays to raise a test score or ensure a teacher's attention in a crowded classroom. But such things are understandable, people say: no mother can or should deny her children's needs; where the child of the poor is a poor school performer, it is only natural to suspect fecklessness and lack of loving care in the home. On the centrality of female images of mother and motherland to the processes of nation formation enacted in Indian educational settings, see Benei, Véronique (2008), Schooling Passions: Nation, History and Language in Contemporary Western India (Stanford: Stanford University Press)Google Scholar.

13 Compare Long, Nicholas J. (2013), Being Malay in Indonesia: Histories, Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago (Singapore, Copenhagen and Honolulu: NUS, NIAS and University of Hawai‘i Press)Google Scholar, on Indonesian contexts where attainment can and should be both personal and a matter of emulation for all. The ‘remember the source’ epigram is: ‘[When] drinking water, remember the source’; [when] eating fruit, remember the man who planted the tree’. Like the other proverbs children learn as expressions of đạo lý (ancestral core values), this exaltation of the dutifully remembering self is identified as the essence of Vietnameseness: never as a Chinese-derived inheritance from Confucianism, nor as a precept known as widely in China as in Vietnam. See Oxfeld, Ellen (2011), ‘“When You Drink Water, Think of its Source”: Morality, Status and Reinvention in Rural Chinese Funerals’, Journal of Asian Studies, 63(4): 961–990CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Officially ‘morals education’ (giáo dục đạo đức) is the term for the primary school syllabus covering the initial basics of good conduct and social values, though the term is also widely used for the upper-level version taught at secondary school and university as ‘citizenship education’ (giáo dục công dân).

15 For an exploration of ideas of desirably teachable as opposed to subversively disruptive forms of creativity in a variety of past and present contexts, see Hallam, Elizabeth and Ingold, Tim, eds (2007), Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Oxford and New York: Berg)Google Scholar.

16 The newer idioms for achiever or winner are sometimes combined with the phrase người thành đạt, an old-style notion of the distinction achieved by laureates in the old imperial mandarin examinations, so attainment more exalted and also more specifically moral than mere ‘success’ in life. The sites feature Asians, especially Singaporeans, as well as American success gurus. http://www.hoclamgiau.vn/news/Onlinedetail.aspx?id=81 [accessed 13 June 2013] is one of numerous websites extolling the American ‘father of success-science’, Napoleon Hill, author of the most popular of the many self-help make-it books on sale in Vietnam under the title Think and Grow Rich. Hanoians who know that this Depression-era manual of ‘will to win’ positive thinking and personality enhancement was first published in 1937 say this makes it a ‘classic’ (kinh điển), rather than an outdated celebration of the American dream. In 2012–2013 it was made a featured free gift for those taking part in a widely publicized ‘Creative Youth for Vietnam Aspiration’ campaign jointly sponsored by the Communist Party Youth Union and one of the country's most successful private business corporations.

17 Susan Bayly (forthcoming), ‘Mapping Time, Living Space: The Moral Cartography of Renovation in Late-Socialist Vietnam’, Cambridge Anthropology.

18 ‘Vietnamese tradition’ is truyền thống Việt Nam; Marxist revolutionary science is tính cách mạng khoa học của Chủ nghĩa Mác.

19 http://www.ctu.edu.vn/associations/youth/dtn/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=516&Itemid=60 [accessed 13 June 2013].

20 Other contexts for debate about ‘achievement disease’ are explored in my contribution in Long and Moore, eds, The Social Life of Achievement.

21 ‘Not a good community person/not a joiner-in’ (không hoà đồng) is a black-mark comment no parent wants to see on a son's or daughter's school report. But no-one would think of ‘community-mindedness’ as anything like the ‘soft skills’ and ‘real-life’ capabilities aspiring high-flyers are told they now need for career success. (http://tuoitre.vn/nhip-song-tre/441589/di-ung-voi-lam-viec-nhom.html [accessed 13 June 2013]; ‘College graduates lack teamwork and communication skills’, http://tuoitrenews.vn/education/4962/college-grads-lack-teamwork-communication-skills [accessed 13 June 2013]). It is now official education policy to press the state schools to impart ‘real world’ capacities with new-mode teaching strategies (e.g., ‘democratic’ discussion in the classroom). The word used for ‘team’ in teamwork, ‘nhóm’, is the word for the ordinary kind of group from which ‘cooperation’ (hợp tác) might emanate. Hợp tác has connotations of businesses entering into mutually profitable cooperation deals; the team or nhóm group is thus quite distinct from the high-socialist term ‘đội’, used for work-unit or collective. For parents with the necessary means, the commercial sector is full of enhancement options for their children, including super-star private tutors like the so-called king tutors in Hong Kong, and the widely advertised operations identifying themselves as education centres which offer spare-time ‘life skills’ tuition at every level from pre-kindergarten to pre-university. There are important gender differences in the ways conventional ‘collective-mindedness’ qualities are represented and taught (see Rydstrøm, Helle (2003), Embodying Morality: Growing Up in Rural Northern Vietnam(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press))Google Scholar; commercial ‘life-skills’ teaching is ostensibly gender-neutral.

22 On the notion of socialist ecumene, a moral community in which Vietnam's remembered life is very much not that of cap-in-hand seeker of other peoples’ tutelage, see Bayly, Susan (2008), Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age: Vietnam, India and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)Google Scholar. There is no everyday noun for Vietnameseness, though people say ‘very Vietnamese’ (rất Việt Nam) of anything steeped in tradition yet consistent with modern ‘civilized’ (văn minh) life (Kelley, Liam (2003), ‘Vietnam as a “Domain of Manifest Civility”’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34(1): 63–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for China, see Anagnost, Ann (1997), National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press), pp. 77–78Google Scholar).

23 http://english.vov.vn/Society/Vietnam-lacks-high-quality-human-resources/230387.vov [accessed 13 June 2013]; http://123.30.128.29/cmlink/tuoitrenews/education/education-news/curricula-at-the-heart-of-3–3b-education-proposal-1.33732 [accessed 13 June 2013]; ‘Educational reform plan to promote student creativity’, http://vietnamnews.vn/Opinion/229830/educational-reform-plan-to-promote-student-creativity.html [accessed 13 June 2013]. This is emphatically not conceived as the kind of ‘creativity’ associated with Euro-American notions of ‘creative play’ and self-expression. And it is not publicly acknowledged that Vietnam's problematic ‘elder sister’, China, is also pursuing high-profile creativity goals as part of its neo-Darwinian quest for enhanced ‘population quality’ (Woronov, T. E. (2008). ‘Raising Quality, Fostering “Creativity”: Ideologies and Practices of Education Reform in Beijing’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 39(4): 401–422CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

24 Compare Lawler, James (1980), ‘Collectivity and Individuality in Soviet Educational Theory’. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 5(2): 163–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Humphrey, Caroline (2008), ‘The “Creative Bureaucrat”: Conflicts in the Production of Soviet Communist Party Discourse’, Inner Asia, 10(1): 5–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 It is rare for Hanoi parents to believe a child can achieve examination success and eventual admission to a good university without recourse to commercial after-school crammer teaching (‘extra study’/học them) provided by their own classroom teachers and/or the wide array of commercial study centres and private tutors whose operations constitute a massive free-market industry in today's Vietnam (see London, Jonathan D. (2006), ‘Vietnam: The Political Economy of Education in a “Socialist” Periphery’, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 26(1): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Language/literature is a subject rooted in elegaic evocations of Vietnameseness and a view of expressive communication as the chief embodiment of moral personhood. Teachers tell only the brightest students to opt for anything other than ‘safe’ examination answers, meaning rigidly formulaic essays on the ethics and ‘social truths’ to be found in the key works of the official syllabus. Today's curriculum follows a model introduced during the initial stage of market opening in the late 1980s, which in literature was considered a daring departure from the existing classroom staples which included elaborately formal penmanship and a narrow high-socialist reading list. What replaced this was today's far wider mix of highlights from the national literary canon together with selected global greats (still including Gorky; but also Tagore as well as Dickens, Victor Hugo, Jack London and Mark Twain), a juxtaposition establishing Vietnam as confidently ‘cultured’ in its own right and master of what the whole world creates and propounds, in no sense a humble heir to colonial or Soviet postcolonial versions of mission civilisatrice.

26 Part of the online controversy about the first ‘creativity’ examination was the claim by several commentators that the ‘fail don't cheat’ dictum was not an authentic Lincoln quotation.

27 (Kẻ cơ hội thì nôn nóng tạo ra thành tích, người chân chính thì kiên nhẫn lập nên thành tựu.) ‘Opportunist’ (kẻ cơ hội) is a slogan term known to students in the pre-marketization period as a classic high-socialist reference to Trotsky. It is used today for the depraved individual who profiteers from others’ need: ‘the man who sells rice to flood victims’. And the running after mere ‘target’ forms of achievement markers puzzled many more: most avoided the dangerous notion of ‘opportunism’ and simply produced unexceptionable variations on the theme of ‘my idol is my father/Darwin/Edison/our nation's leaders’. Students told me they struggled to point to any actual difference between the term they were supposed to understand as ‘great attainment’ pursued with selfless life-long dedication (thành tựu), and the mere win or gain (thành tích) for which one receives personal recognition and rewards. Markers said they were annoyed by the high proportion of answers saying with varying degrees of coherence that thành tích was an easier to achieve form of success like making a modest profit, and thành tựu a bigger one, i.e., a harder to achieve version of the same thing, with no idea of a moral difference between what the ‘opportunist’ and the ‘virtuous man’ were being said to aim for. They said that since the point of the question was so unclear to many candidates, they just gave better marks to those who wrote coherently and grammatically about ‘working hard’ and being determined and honest in pursuit of worthy aims. Some students told me they had imagined an answer saying that a big-name hero like Steve Jobs achieved great things because he had a ‘go-for-it’ personal sense of ambition, but would never have written in such terms, knowing that the ‘old professors’ who act as markers would never reward such indecent ‘Western’ sentiments.

28 As in headline stories such as: ‘Fans go wild, faint out of excitement at Soundfest’: http://123.30.128.29/cmlink/tuoitrenews/lifestyle/fans-go-wild-faint-out-of-excitement-at-soundfest-1.68620 [accessed 13 June 2013]. Compare Carruthers, Ashley (2001), ‘National Identity, Diasporic Anxiety and Music Video Culture in Vietnam’, in Souchou, Yao, ed., House of Glass: Culture, Modernity and the State in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies), 119–149Google Scholar; Taylor, Philip (2001), Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity in Vietnam's South (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press), pp. 43–55Google Scholar. One key social-media complaint after the 2012 examinations was that the fan/idol question disadvantaged students from the ‘mountainous areas’ where internet access is limited and the world of fandom outside most people's experience: many saw this as an example of what makes students from ‘undeveloped’ regions so much less successful in high-stakes examinations than their big-city peers.

29 Self-study (tự học), meaning the student working towards a personal understanding of material, rather than merely memorizing: like ‘soft skills’ (kỹ năng mềm) and ‘teamwork’, this is another key term in the current new-education lexicon.

30 The K-pop fan-bases call this ‘shipping’, and of course no Hanoi parent would regard it as in any way like the good forms of creativity the young achiever is now supposed to be taught and examined for. See http://seoulbeats.com/2012/07/why-homoerotic-fanservice-is-just-not-okay/ [accessed 13 June 2013].

31 Hanoians say the textbooks are about the ‘virtues’ (đức tình) a child must live by; the word usually translated as ‘value’ in Vietnamese (giá trị) suggests the possibility of difference and personal choice: present-day skills centres use such phrases as ‘life values’ (giá trị sống) to convey the idea of learning new ‘values’ for present-day needs, as in the idea of there being ‘science values’ meaning innovation, the spirit of creativity: creativity itself is now represented as something to be taught and developed as a ‘value’ in a wide range of Vietnamese contexts. Some centres go so far as to exalt creativity exemplars such as Steve Jobs whose life-values included ‘doing what he loved’: love is a selfless Vietnamese virtue, but to be expressed as ‘love of mother/love of country’, not pursuing ‘my dream’ or ‘doing what I love for the sake of the joy and fulfilment it brings me’. The key question in Vietnam then becomes whether the object of such love is creditable and ‘suitable’, i.e. a proper man's job, a proper patriot's work or aspiration.

32 There was a massive outcry in April 2012, including a widely quoted attack by a prominent member of the National Assembly, when students sitting a creativity-mode entrance examination for admission to a private technology university were set a question raising precisely this kind of issue about the Kiều story. The question was deemed indecent for quoting from one of the poem's passages about the value of chastity, and asking candidates for their ‘opinions’ about the value of virginity in contemporary life, although readers surveyed by the main national education newspaper reported approval ratings of 10 to 1 in favour of the examiners’ daring (http://giaoduc.net.vn/Giao-duc-24h/De-thi-trinh-tiet-cua-DH-FPT-co-giet-chet-su-sang-tao/152316.gd [accessed 13 June 2013]; http://giaoduc.net.vn/Giao-duc-24h/Bat-ngo-hang-nghin-doc-gia-ung-ho-de-thi-trinh-tiet/151622.gd [accessed 13 June 2013]).

33 http://english.vietnamnet.vn/en/education/24679/vietnamese-k-pop-fans–throw-stones–into-literature-exam-question.html. [Bo-Giao-duc-phai-xin-loi-vi-de-thi-van-Khoi-D/2131503989/202] [accessed 13 June 2013]; ‘Shock: Fan Hysteria—demand that the Ministry Apologise for its Group D Literature exam question’ (Sốc: Fan cuồng đòi Bộ Giáo dục phải xin lỗi vì đề thi văn Khối D), http://vietbao.vn/Giao-duc/Soc-Fan-cuong-doi-Bo-Giao-duc-phai-xin-loi-vi-de-thi-van-Khoi-D/2131503989/202/ [accessed 16 June 2013].