Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Four

Why Children Work 85 Four Why Children Work 85 Most of the Vietnamese children who appear in this book were working or had worked to earn a living at some point in their lives. This is a common feature of most countries in the South (Boyden and Holden 1991; Fyfe 1985). The recognition that many of the world’s children work is a difficult and disconcerting subject to address. Those who are opposed to child work tend to think of all forms of child work as bad. While I would much rather that children did not have to work, as I show later, an all-out ban on child work could be catastrophic for individual children. Any talk of banning child work is premature, and we do children a disservice when their status as workers is overlooked or criminalized. A great deal more could be done for working children if we accepted the more realistic premise that most of them are working because they have no choice. The reality is that child work will only become a thing of the past if standards of living go up in Vietnam; to overlook this fact is to dismiss the experiences of millions of children who are working right now. From the moment I arrived in Vietnam in 1996, working children were highly visible. On my second day in the city I woke up early to the hot sun streaming through my windows, and I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of urgency to get myself organized. Embarking on an extended period of fieldwork can be a daunting process, and before leaving for Vietnam 86 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World I had been concerned that I would never meet enough children to adequately support the type of in-depth research I would need to develop my ideas. But that day I felt irritated with myself for indulging in such selfabsorbed anxieties. Compared to Xiem, the young maid who had settled me into my room the previous night, and the countless other children I would meet over the next two years, my worries were totally insignificant: like most people born in the West, I already had far more lifestyle choices than any of them would ever know. Still chastising myself, I quickly dressed and went out onto the streets to explore the area on foot. My first objective was to find the university where I was to enroll as a language student, but in retrospect walking there was a crazy idea. Once I found out how far away the university was, I decided to use a bike to travel around the city, but on that first day I had no idea that the scale of my map was so inaccurate. I was also unaware that when Communism was at its most radical, maps had been banned for national security reasons so that the people I asked for help were completely unaccustomed to deciphering them. Most people that I showed my map to smiled at me in a way that I took to be encouragement, but in reality they were probably smiling in bafflement, because they had no clear idea of what they were looking at or perhaps why I might be showing a map to them in the first place! Not surprisingly, I was soon lost in a maze of back streets and resorted to stopping every so often to ask the way. It was while walking those streets that I began to notice that where families were running small businesses, family members of all ages worked alongside each other. In mid-morning I stopped at a noodle stand run by a young woman and her two daughters. While the mother cooked and served up the noodles and broth, the youngest daughter, who looked about twelve years old, chopped the vegetable garnish. Her older sister took orders and carried the steaming bowls of noodle soup to each customer. Later, I walked by a photocopy shop, and the eldest daughter of the owner invited me to join the family for tea. As I sat down, her grandmother, who had been collating papers to form a book, joined us, along with a toddler who had been sitting on the floor next to her and whose job it had been to hold the papers down so they didn’t flutter away in the wind. In this family, everyone talked and laughed as they worked. A seven-year-old poured us tea while her father carefully studied...