Uncle Ho's Good Children Award and State Power at a Socialist School in Vietnam

• In Event: Toward Decolonizing Childhood: Researching Memories of Everyday Life in (Post)Socialist Societies

Abstract

Embracing the teaching of Ho Chi Minh’s philosophy and Marxism-Leninism, Vietnam’s school programs and activities in the 1980s were designed to evoke patriotism and to ensure Vietnamese children would revere Uncle Ho and stay loyal to the Communist Party. In the name of the nation, this system also motivated youth to dedicate their lives, to commit their time and energy, and to sacrifice personal interests for “the success of communism.” Within this system, symbolic rewards, such as the “Uncle Ho’s Good Children” award, provided important meanings that could make childhood under socialism a fulfilling and memorable experience. Who was Uncle Ho in the eyes of a school childen, and why did his teachings have such influence over them? How could a little girl construct her own world in a cultural context defined by Ho Chi Minh’s teachings and the VCP’s ideologies? What did it mean for a child to participate in the process of building a socialist nation? And how did a child’s commitment to Uncle Ho’s teachings reveal the state’s power and national ideology in a Vietnamese socialist school setting in the mid-1980s? This paper explores these questions using an autoethnographic approach, which utilizes both author’s memories of childhood at an elementary school in Long Xuyên, a small town in Southern Vietnam, and data gathered from interviews.
The paper begins with a brief discussion of the autoethnographic method, providing details of how the author critically examined her own memory in order to collect her past narratives, followed by a description of the analytical frameworks employed for composing the texts. In particular, the autoethnographic representation of this research takes the form of what Maanen (1988) describes as “impressionist tales,” which provide a balanced account between the researcher’s own story and the culture under investigation. Using “narratives of space and place,” the approach is “to create an impression, rather than a true and certain reproduction, of an experience” (Adams et al., 2015, p. 84-86). By using anecdotes to introduce meaningful events within their social and cultural context, rather than presenting them as a simple set of historical stories in chronological order, the goal is to reconstruct a lived experience and move readers closer to the real-life experience of a young girl’s education under the Vietnamese school system in the mid-1980s.

The paper vividly illustrates what it meant to have lived as a schoolgirl under the massive training program in Communist ideology, providing an autoethnographic account of how state power influences and shapes youth’s concept of nationalism. It discusses how Uncle Ho was perceived among elementary students and explains why Vietnamese schoolchildren felt motivated and honored to become his “good children.” The paper argues that while many students found the process of obtaining Uncle Ho’s Good Children prize meaningful and enjoyable, the reward had become a virtual site where the State governed young people’s devotion and willingness to sacrifice their time, energy, and personal interests in the name of the nation.

Author

• Violette Hoang-Phuong Ho