Being a single mother in Vietnam
From: Minna Hakkarainen <minna.hakkarainen@helsinki.fi>
Date: Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 1:39 AM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Dear all,
referring to the discussion on single mothers below, I would like to use the opportunity to ask if any of you could recommend literature explaining the "social stigma" of being a single mother in Vietnam. My PhD case study is about women headed households also including women who had their child(ren) outside marriage as well as those who were left by their husbands and some widows as well. I would say that particularly the first two groups are if not marginalized at least vulnerable in many respects. I would love to get your ideas on the literature you find best to explain the social stigma of being a single mother in VN.
Best,
Minna Hakkarainen
PhD candidate
Institute of Development Studies
P.O. Box 9 (Unioninkatu 38 E)
00014 University of Helsinki
FINLAND
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From: Tobias RETTIG <tobiasrettig@smu.edu.sg>
Date: Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 4:10 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear All,
I would just like to follow up on Minna's post and hijack - out of
curiosity - the original question by asking whether the traditional
practice of allowing Vietnamese men to have more than one wife would
have been the solution to the stigma of being a single female female
(with or without children; whether single due to husband's death or
departure).
Best,
Tobias
Tobias Rettig
School of Social Sciences
Singapore Management University
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: 2008/10/21
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
There are single mothers and single mothers, and a very sharp distinction needs to be made.
Traditionally, there was great honor attached to a widow foregoing remarriage. This was the cult of widow chastity encapsulated in the phrase: "a chaste woman does not have two husbands, a loyal subject does not serve two rulers." In fact, this was the assumption behind the discussions of the Tale of Kieu: just as a prostitute had many "husbands," collaborators served more than one ruler. Chaste widows might be written up in the Liet nu truyen section of their local gazetteers. Another more colloquial way of putting it would be "o vay tho chong nuoi con" (staying "put, worshipping one's husband and raising one's children." The cult of chaste widowhood applied more to the elite than to ordinary women. Phan Khoi in 1930 wrote a scathing critique of the cult which his ancestress had violated when she remarried in order to provide for her orphaned children. The writer Da Ngan in 1990 wrote a short story that Rosemary Nguyen translated and Dan Duffy published in Literature News, "The House with No Men" in which a young widow with a small child is pressured by her widowed mother and aunt to abandon her plan to remarry on the ground that she should follow their example of chaste widowhood. In fact, remarriage was very common, whether in China or Vietnam.
Unwed mothers, however, suffered social opprobrium, and their children were considered "hoang" or "wild" that is, unclaimed by a father. This was quite different from children born to concubines who were fully acknowledged by their father and their father's lineage. Indeed, according to strict rules, they were to be considered the children of the first wife rather than of their biological mother. This was the context of the conflict between Ly Thanh Tong's widows in 1072: the Queen who did not bear him an heir, but was the nominal mother of the crown pince and Y Lan, his commoner concubine who was the biological mother of his heir and was determined not to yield her hold on her son or her grip on power. Y Lan, with the support of Ly Thuong Kiet dispatched her rival and attendant ladies by having them buried alive.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Christoph Giebel <giebel@u.washington.edu> Date: 2008/10/21
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Nguyen Thanh Van's movie Doi Cat (Sand Life), variously dated 1999/2000/2001, could be of interest to Mikka and Tobias. It is set in Central Viet Nam, both south and north of the DMZ, and focuses on the tragedies and dilemmas of Canh, presumably a 1954/55 Viet Minh regroupee from Quang Tri (?), Thoa, the wife he left behind who will become an NLF guerrilla, and Tam, the eventual second wife in Quang Binh, with whom Canh has a daughter during the war, and their painful reunion and encounters after 1975. The movie is a tad too symbolic/didactic for my liking, but has rich materials to ponder in this regard.
Harriet Phinney's work on post-war single women with few marriage prospects "asking for a child" is of course important to this question as well.
C. Giebel
UW-Seattle
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From: Tobias RETTIG <tobiasrettig@smu.edu.sg>
Date: 2008/11/3
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear List Members,
Following Professor Ho Tai's email, I responded directly to her, upon which I received two more very generous emails on this topic.
As she did not object to her first response being shared with the list, please see further below. In an additional email, Prof Ho Tail also tried to distill, after having cited different reactions to a number of examples of mixed-race children at her school etc, an overall pattern as to how society reacted towards mixed-race children:
"This suggests that the social status of the parents was a crucial factor in how each child was regarded. Whether the parents were married was perhaps less important as Vietnamese tended not to accord the possession of a marriage license the same importance as Westerners do. This is why the notion of "con hoang" is of such limited applicability. Vietnamese of my parents' generation often said that a piece of paper would not keep a couple together; the wedding ceremony, which included the ritual in front of the altar of the ancestors and involved the famillies, was more consequential. A "con hoang" thus was a child who was not acknowledged by the two lineages."
On mixed-race children in French Indochina (and beyond), see also Emmanuelle Saada's recent Les enfants de la colonie.
Best, Tobias
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai [mailto:hhtai@fas.harvard.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, 21 October, 2008 9:37 PM
To: Tobias RETTIG
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Being a single mother in VN
My sense is that there were relatively few children born out of wedlock "con hoang" as the children of concubines were considered fully legitimate. Harriet Phinney could tell you more about the incidence of children born from the phenomenon known as "asking for a child" in which unmarried women deliberately sought out men--often married--with the aim of having a child but not being interested in marrying the fathers.
The ideal of chaste widowhood was just that--an ideal-- and therefore deeply honored as means of providing exemplars. Chaste widows in China and Vietnam sometimes had stone steles erected in their honor. What this means is that in practice, the ideal was not upheld, and indeed, women did remarry.
In the South, where Confucian ideology was weaker than in the North, one might expect the incidence of widow remarriage to be higher.
As for women who had entered into temporary marriages with French soldiers, they were treated very differently, and so were their children. You might want to read Vu Trong Phung's The Industry of Marrying Frenchmen which was translated into English by Tran Thuy Viet.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai