Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Six

134 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World Six Life in a Reform School 134 At the start of my time in Hanoi I did not expect to find children being routinely sent to reform centers, and I could not have predicted that this discovery would result in my doing fieldwork in a reform center. While I was doing fieldwork in the city, however, I was repeatedly a firsthand witness to routine arrests of child street workers. For example, I had been meeting with Hiep for little over a month when we got caught up in a police raid. I was sitting by the side of Hoan Kiem Lake with him when without warning police rode up on motorbikes and all the working children in our vicinity began to shout warnings to each other and run off in different directions. Hiep, whose shoe-cleaning box was by his feet, panicked and froze as he saw all the children either disappearing down alleys or being arrested. By this point the police were everywhere, chasing children in all directions, and if he had set off Hiep would have drawn unwanted attention to himself. So I grabbed his box from under his arm, threw it in my bicycle basket, covered it with my sweater, and pulled him down onto the bench, whispering that we should continue as if we were still deep in study. Once the police had disappeared Hiep put down the book and we grinned accomplice’s smiles at each other. It was then that he started telling me about his experiences of being arrested. Judging by the number of arrests I bore witness to, I might just as easily have met Hiep for the first time in a Life in a Reform School 135 reform center; equally, if some of the boys I later met in the reform school had not had the misfortune to be picked up by the police, we might have first come across each other on the streets, because by working on the streets or begging on the streets they were breaking the law. Understanding this aspect of their lives is important to gaining a complete view of their circumstances, so in this chapter I follow the progress of children who had been arrested for some form of petty crime or for working on the streets and then placed in a reform center. In particular, I look at the manner in which the experiences of children in the reform school were shaped by a merging and shifting of two quite disparate influences: that of the dogma-led Communist approach to re-education and that of the more flexible approach adopted by the progressive Vietnamese director of the reform school, supported by an enlightened NGO. During my time at the school, I was also able to observe how between them the school’s director and the NGO workers gradually moved away from merely imparting political doctrine to the children in their care toward recognizing the complex needs of each child and markedly improving the children’s chances of achieving a better life. Gaining Access Vietnam has a poor human rights record, with many arrests and imprisonments occurring without trial. By the very nature of Vietnamese society and the secretiveness of its government, the reform centers to which the children are sent are difficult to gain access to, since their existence is an acknowledgment that not all is well within the politically controlled environment . For example, such is the secrecy that surrounds hard labor centers that foreigners are very rarely allowed access, and so I was never able to follow up what happened to Luong, the boy arrested for selling drugs whose experiences I describe in chapter 5. While living in Hanoi and researching the work of the numerous NGOs I was lucky to make contact with some expatriate staff of an international NGO that had been asked by the director of a reform school to help with his teaching program. The staff were willing to let me accompany them on the understanding that Mr. Son, the school’s director, and Jack, the NGO’s site leader, were happy to give me permission. I ended up spending nearly two years visiting the school, initially on a weekly basis and for the final 136 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World year on a twice-weekly basis, following not only the children’s progress but also observing...