The Conceptualization and Representations of Adolescence in Vietnamese Media during the “Reform Era” of Vietnam (1986–1995)

Materials

Data for this study are mass media archives, especially newspaper archives. Since newspapers, radio, and television in Vietnam served the same purpose, were all exclusively controlled by the Vietnamese government, and were supposed to reflect the same government-dictated agenda, I only chose newspapers as primary data for the following three reasons: (1) television was not common in Vietnam until the mid-1990s while newspapers have been widely circulated through government-subsidized distribution networks since the 1950s, (2) newspapers emphasized news and information rather than entertainment, and (3) newspaper archives were much better preserved and accessible in Vietnam. I collected newspapers from the following two main sources:

Two newspapers directly targeting adolescents: Thieu Nien (Vanguard Teenagers Newspaper) and Hoa Hoc Tro (School-Flowers Newspaper). Both newspapers are the largest circulated among Vietnamese youths.

Among these newspapers, I only used Thieu Nien and Hoa Hoc Tro as data for direct analysis. Nhan Dan and Tien Phong were used to understand larger political, economic, and social context of Vietnam and to provide a comparative reference point to Thieu Nien and Hoa Hoc Tro in the conceptualization and representation of adolescence in the media. Thieu Nien Newspaper was founded in 1954 by the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth League and remained the largest newspaper targeting the age-group from ten to fifteen. In fact, it was one of the largest newspapers in Vietnam with 156,000 copies published each week, second only to People Newspaper. ²¹ Hoa Hoc Tro was originally created in 1991 as a special edition of Thieu Nien before becoming independent, aiming at the newly established and fast expanding group of high schoolers and college students. As dominant newspapers targeting adolescents, both Thieu Nien and Hoa Hoc Tro Newspapers were distributed widely in Vietnam through many channels, including publicly and privately owned newsstands, nationwide public libraries, school libraries, public cultural centers, schools’ weekly reading programs, and daily national radio programs for children and adolescents. Vietnam’s national radio program (The Voice of Vietnam), for example, regularly used materials from the two newspapers for its many daily programs, which were broadcast at specific times for children and adolescents. In addition, students received contents of the newspapers through mandated “discussion sessions” that were organized weekly at every school by the Communist Youth League. These syndicated and monopolized mass media and class programs resulted in a relatively unified and ubiquitous message that Vietnamese adolescents consumed and internalized.

Besides the newspapers mentioned previously, I collected supplemental political, historical, and cultural materials in order to establish the larger context in Vietnam between 1986 and 1995. These materials included relevant textbooks for junior high school and high school students; mandated teaching guidelines issued by the Ministry of Education and Training; laws, policies, and programs related to children, families, population growth, family planning, and related issues. I also collected political speeches at different Congresses and meetings of the VCP; posters, meeting memoranda, leaflets, and propaganda documents distributed by the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth League; songs, popular paintings, and other cultural artifacts about adolescents or youth.

Procedures

Because the Vietnamese government had a monopoly of the media, the conceptualization and representation of adolescence in Vietnam at any given historical moment was contingent upon the government’s agenda at the examined moment. Since that agenda was officially reviewed and revised every five years at the National Congress of the VCP, the conceptualization of adolescence should be examined along the phases marked by these Congresses. Thus, I divided the period between 1986 and 1995 into three phases, marked by the two Congresses of the Vietnamese Communist Party, namely, Congress 1986 and Congress 1991. For each year in which the Congress was held, I collected three months of data, namely, the month before the Congress, the month with the Congress, and the month after the Congress. For each year without the Congress, I randomly selected a month from Thieu Nien and Hoa Hoc Tro newspapers and then collected issues published that month. Supporting historical archives were collected on the principle of availability and data exhaustion. I continued to trace events and compare and contrast multiple sources until I had a comprehensive story. In many ways, data collection and data analysis happened simultaneously.

Education reforms

One of the most important events contributing to the birth of Vietnamese adolescence was the establishment of the twelve-grade system with a new configuration for high school. In the decades before Reform, Northern and Southern Vietnam, separated by the Vietnam War, had two different education systems. In the North, a ten-grade system was implemented; thus, by the age of fifteen, most youths already finished general education and were expected to move into the workforce and only very few would go on to college education. Following the end of the Vietnam War (1975), the Vietnamese government was determined to unify the two systems into a single national twelve-grade system. However, it was not until 1989 that the ten-grade system finally ended. The school year 1990–1991 marked the first time that Vietnam had a unified twelve-grade schooling system in which primary school included grades 1 to 5 (ages six to eleven), secondary school included grades 6 to 9 (ages eleven to fourteen), and high school included grades 10 to 12 (roughly ages fourteen to eighteen). Within this new schooling configuration, the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training defined high school as “the final stage of general education consisting of three years and for pupils between ages 14 and 18.” It also specified that high school education aimed at “preparing youths to enter the working and social life, and to execute their responsibilities as citizens.” ²³ This neutral language, free of communist political jargons, was very different from the pre-Reform discourse but aligned well with the “thought reform” favored by the new leaders of the VCP. In essence, young people were now expected to become the new labor force of the country rather than miniature communists.

The establishment of a national unified high school system, together with economic and social policies that encouraged Vietnamese parents to invest in children’s education, led to a steady expansion of the number of students enrolled in high school during the Reform era. Statistics showed that in 1991, Vietnam had 2.2 million youths enrolled in secondary school (grades 6–9), half a million in high school (grades 10–12), and 152,000 in college. From 1991 to 1994, these numbers increased by 66 percent, 63 percent, and 132 percent, leading to 3.6 million students in secondary school, 863,000 in high school, and 354,000 in college. ²⁴ Since the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training dictated a national standardized education program, all Vietnamese youths entered and finished each grade at the same age, shared the same national curriculum at each grade (including same textbooks and subjects), and took the same required exams to graduate from high school and enter college. Thus, for the first time during the Reform era, millions of youths between ages fourteen and eighteen formed a critical mass that shared a relatively uniform school environment, which was the center of their life in accordance with Vietnamese culture. It was these youths, with their shared reality, that woke Vietnamese society to the unique concerns and characteristics of adolescents, thus marking the development of the concept of adolescence.

Population and family planning policies

Parallel with education reforms, population and family planning policies contributed greatly to the birth and conceptualization of adolescence during the Reform era. In the early 1960s, on average, a North Vietnamese woman had six children. ²⁵ Concerned with an almost 4 percent population growth rate that the economy could not accommodate, the government of Vietnam had, in 1963, encouraged each family to have only two to three children. However, this family planning program was only strongly applied after the Vietnam War ended; in particular, in 1978, the government issued a decree that further pushed families to reduce the number of births to two children. However, when the population growth rate was still well above 2 percent in 1984, the Vietnamese government established the National Committee for Population and Birth Control in an attempt to organize an unprecedented, nationwide program on population and family planning. With a strong reform mentality, in 1988, the government issued a decision that, for the first time, legally enforced that Vietnamese families must have no more than two children with the two births spaced five years apart. Childbearing age was also increased to twenty-two for women and twenty-four for men if the couples were both cadres, manual workers, or civil servants; and nineteen for women and twenty-one for men if otherwise. Those families that violated the new law were punished in various ways, including not being permitted to move to urban areas, receiving pay cuts, and being demoted. ²⁶

To further enforce family planning measures, in 1989, the Vietnamese government issued the Law on Protection of People’s Health, which stated that “women have the right to have an abortion if they so desire” and that the State “uses incentive policies and measures and creates the necessary conditions for everyone to implement the family planning program.” ²⁷ Abortion, which rarely happened before 1980, ²⁸ now became an acceptable, even recommended, measure to control the growth rate of the population. ²⁹ In fact, the government opened up a nationwide network of local health care centers (tram xa) with the purpose of helping women implement birth control measures and undergo abortions if needed.

The effects of family planning policies and programs in the late 1980s were manifold and should not be overlooked when we seek to understand the emergence and reconceptualization of adolescence in Vietnam during the Reform era. The most obvious effect of these policies was that it reduced the growth of the Vietnamese population, which in turn eased the burden on the economy. Second, the family planning policy also associated fewer births and birth control measures with “family happiness” (hanh phuc gia dinh) and the liberation of women by emphasizing that having fewer children would give women more time to have a career, take care of the family, and participate in social life rather than busying themselves with childbearing and child-rearing. And finally, the family planning policy emphasized that the success of a family depended very much on the parents’ investment in children’s education. This message was instrumental in the increase in education investment by families in the 1990s and 2000s, and the subsequent increase in the number of high school enrollments and the extension of youths’ time spent in school. But more importantly, the ubiquitous messages about reproductive health, family planning, birth, and sexuality that were repeated around the clock by the mass media planted and grew the idea about adolescence as a stage of development in the life span of an individual—one that was seen as the onset of reproductive ability. In rural areas in particular, adolescents became the focal point of family planning policies in order to stop the custom of getting married and bearing children early. Youths were encouraged to prolong their youthful years with extended education, vocational training, or other community activities instead of getting married and having children.

The first newspaper for adolescents

The rising number of high school and college students as well as the government’s loosened grip on its control of the media during the Reform era might be the reason for the establishment of Hoa Hoc Tro in 1991, the first authentic newspaper for Vietnamese adolescents, which contributed greatly to the construction of a solidified and shared concept of adolescence in Vietnam. Published for the first time on October 15, 1991, Hoa Hoc Tro showed that it diverged boldly from Thieu Nien Newspaper, its umbrella newspaper. The address of the editorial board of Hoa Hoc Tro to its readers included the following words:

As you see, everybody has used many beautiful words for our age group: tuoi hoa (the flower age), tuoi hong (the pink age), tuoi ngoc (the jade age), tuoi xanh (the green age), tuoi trang ram (the full-moon age).

Tuoi moi lon (coming of age) is such a beautiful time, when our souls open widely with many shades of colors, like shy rosebuds in a fragrant flower garden. We only start to dive into a mathematic equation when we suddenly stop to ponder over a poem. We are sentimental when the season changes, or when it suddenly rains and suddenly shines. We are caught by someone’s glance, we suddenly miss and are suddenly frustrated with someone. ³⁰

As the earlier statement revealed, Vietnamese adolescents, labeled as tuoi moi lon (coming of age), were considered a specific age-group who identified with “flower age” or “the full-moon age,” phrases that indicated the maximum point of physical growth in the life cycle. The statement also portrayed tuoi moi lon with distinct biological and psychological dynamics, which was manifested in many verbs that suggest transformative actions such as “bud,” “open,” “dive into,” “stop,” “ponder,” “change,” “rains,” “shines,” and “bloom,” all of which were reminiscent of Hall’s storm and stress.

Starting rather modestly as a special issue of Thieu Nien, within two years, Hoa Hoc Tro had expanded exponentially and become the dominant newspaper in the discourse targeting young people in Vietnam. After the first issue, its editorial office received nearly 4,000 letters from the readers, a number that surpassed even the established Thieu Nien Newspaper, all of which expressed high schoolers’ excitement and happiness in having found “our own newspaper.” ³¹ The demand for the newspaper was so high that after only three issues, Hoa Hoc Tro doubled its frequency. By the end of 1995, the newspaper published one issue per week, plus multiple special editions and supplemental publications.

Adolescence (tuoi moi lon) as a distinct developmental stage

Analysis of data revealed that the Reform era marked the first time that adolescence started to be conceptualized and represented in the media as a distinct developmental stage, stripped of most political connotations that dominated the concept in previous decades. Newspaper stories did not focus on the importance of traditional political rites of passage into adolescence such as admission into the Youth League; rather, they emphasized physical and psychological transformations (i.e., puberty) as signature markers of adolescence but also to educate young people on sexual and behavioral health, which aligned with ubiquitous family planning propaganda. Throughout the first year of Hoa Hoc Tro, a major theme running through most articles and stories was to confirm that adolescence was a “special” age—one that “sprang up” and would likely catch youths off-guard; thus, youths needed to be very mindful. This theme was particularly emphasized and made vivid through poems and short stories, which were believed to be accessible to young Vietnamese readers. An example is the poem “Don’t know since when” (Khong biet tu bao gio), written by a fourteen-year-old girl in the first issue of Hoa Hoc Tro.

The above-mentioned poem carried a clear message: biological and psychological change, and more importantly, the onset of and reason for change was signature marker of adolescence. The girl in the poem expressed that she was oblivious to both the starting point and the reasons why there were biological, psychological, and behavioral changes that she observed in herself. She only noticed them all of a sudden when she was already seeing a pattern of these changes that she stopped certain behaviors (playing freely) while performed other behaviors more frequently (combing her hair, writing poems, and talking to mother). Eventually, she arrived at the self-revelation that these changes meant she was “no longer little” and that in fact she had already entered “the dreamy age.” The mobility from childhood into tuoi moi lon was seen here not as a gradual process of “aging”; rather, it was a fundamental reorganization at a structural level of one’s body and mind. The girl in the poem showed both a quantitative and a qualitative development in her faculties: She had a new ability to analyze and assess what was happening in her surroundings (peers, mother, school, and nature) as well as what was going on inside her. More importantly, by comparing and contrasting what was inside her and what was happening around her, she developed a sense of self, gender (that she was like her mother and that she liked to take care of her appearance), sexuality (that she was different from the boys), and responsibility (sharing with mother).

As a developmental stage, puberty was mentioned as a signature social marker of the onset of adolescence, marking also the import and influence of Western theories of adolescence. In newspapers, puberty was expressed in two ways: as a romantic developmental transformation and a health subject. Consequently, media stories and articles about adolescents served as a venue for experience sharing, meaning construction and reconstruction, and as an alternative source for health education. Regarding the latter function, Hoa Hoc Tro in fact had a column called “Diagnosis Through Letters” (Kham benh qua thu) between 1991 and 1995, in which it published various letters of adolescents asking about pubertal issues such as growing too fast or too slow, irregular menstruation, unusual hair growth, sweating too much, unusual breast development, acnes and skin problems, bronchitis, thyroid lumps, obesity, and so on. Answering these letters were real medical doctors collaborating with the newspaper. This phenomenon coincided with the fact that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, medical doctors and health experts dominated the Vietnamese media (including television, radio, and other public means of communication) due to pervasive nationwide family planning programs. It should be noted further that most of these medical doctors were trained with Western theories of medicine (vs. traditional Vietnamese medicines and healing methods), especially those serving as experts on reproductive and sexual health. Their explanations about pubertal issues used mostly Western medical jargon and theories associating puberty with universal hormonal fluctuations. For example, responding to a girl’s concern about her small breasts, Dr. Ngoc Toan said in Issue 45, published on October 1993, that “breast size depends on the hormones in the pituitary gland and ovary. The onset of breast growth as well as menstruation varies among people, some are early (12-13 years of age) and some are late (17-18 years of age). If you are too thin and have no fat under the skin, your breasts might be small too. If you pass puberty and your breasts are still not growing, you should see a doctor.”

Running parallel to a medical discourse that presented adolescence as a developmental stage inherent with biological and psychological transformations, Hoa Hoc Tro primarily used a literary discourse (poems, short stories, songs—often written in Romantic style) to convey the idea of adolescence and its associated puberty. The use of these literary forms is derived from a Vietnamese tradition, which has used literature (stories, poems, proverbs, lyrical prose, etc.) for thousands of years to educate both intellectual classes and the mostly illiterate lower classes. In these literary forms, puberty was described as a unique and endearing phenomenon of adolescence that should be celebrated. Puberty, therefore, was often represented with positive and romantic phrases such as “entering the moon age/the flower age,” “growth,” “budding,” “blossoming,” “blooming,” or “becoming full,” all of which signified that adolescence was the maximal point of physical development and of promise. At the same time, physical beauty was celebrated, instead of being portrayed as a potential risk that caused adolescents to become distracted from cultivating their political and moral worth as was the case in the media before the Reform era. ³³

Adolescence as a stage of identity search

As a distinct developmental stage, during the Reform era, adolescence was conceptualized and represented in the Vietnamese media as a stage characterized by identity search—again, a newly imported idea from the Western theory of adolescence and human development. In different media stories, that identity search often materialized through two questions: “What is wrong with me?” and “Who am I?” There was in fact a very common script in media stories about adolescence, which consisted primarily of three acts: (1) one day, a boy/girl started to realize there was something “wrong,” “weird,” “different,” or “strange” about himself or herself; (2) he or she “freaked out” and committed unusual behaviors or misunderstood the behaviors of people around him or her; (3) he or she resolved the crisis through the insight that he/she was now “coming of age” and these changes were “normal” or even endearing. The subsequent story is an example of such a script:

Story: Dream of a white butterfly

For the past few days, Hong didn’t want to step out of the house. Besides school time, she just lay in bed, flipping through the novels and forgetting to help her mother in housework. She was even surly to her mother. She dropped the dishes and broke the coffee mug. Mother looked at Hong worriedly:

“What is wrong, honey?”

Hong shook her head. She wanted to break the mirror because it was telling her that there were red ugly dots on her face, which Mom called acne. She poured all her frustration onto the logs of wood. She chopped a big pile of wood.

“I don’t know what is wrong with me,” Hong thought to herself. She felt strange changes inside her.

At night, she lay next to mother. When she suddenly turned around, her mother’s hand accidentally touched her nipples. She shrank back and mumbled:

“I’ve been feeling pain there. Do I have a lump?”

Mom sat up to look at Hong. Now she understood why Hong had been acting strange. Mom said:

“No, there is nothing wrong with you, it’s normal. Oh, my daughter is growing up!”

Hong nested against Mom’s chest, embarrassed. She thought to herself, “What did Mom say? Oh, she said I was becoming an adult.” She started to drift into the magical world of adults. ³⁴

Hong in the previous story went through a signature three-act drama. In Act One, both Hong and her mother noticed “something wrong” in her behaviors: She did not step out of the house, she did not do housework, she became surly to her mother, and she behaved in very unfeminine ways (dropping dishes and chopping wood). In Act Two, she interacted directly with her mother and revealed the problem: She had been feeling pain in her chest and was worried that she had a lump. In Act Three, the solution arrived: her mother explained to her that the pain in her chest only meant she was growing up and it was normal. Throughout the script, what’s notable was that Hong was described as behaving in a rather nonfeminine manner, which was unconventional to Vietnamese girls; however, these behaviors were not mentioned in a condemning way but in a sympathetic way as if they were “natural” for individuals in Hong’s position. In that sense, Hong and her story served mostly to illustrate and educate young readers on what adolescence was like and how to recognize its onset and issues. Again, the story focused on Hong’s physical, psychosocial, and behavioral changes, all of which were developmental dimensions. No political element was mentioned.

What’s worth noting further is that while Vietnamese media embraced the Western idea of identity search during adolescence, they presented a different interpretation and solution for this search. Whereas Western youths were encouraged to establish their own identity as an individual through separating from family (e.g., moving out, starting work, and sharing financial responsibilities), Vietnamese youths were encouraged to reevaluate and restructure their relationships with family, friends, and community. In most cases, this restructuring meant to tighten the already tight multigenerational family bonds that were typical of Vietnamese families and to learn to establish or balance one’s position within the family in a more mature, adult-like way. Because Vietnamese culture emphasizes the importance of family over individuals, familial harmony over personal pursuits, the marker of an individual making a successful transition from a child into an adult was, in fact, not to strike out but to be incorporated further into the family and navigate his or her own identity within that delicate network. Youths were expected then to internalize their identity as brother/sister, son/daughter, grandson/granddaughter, and so on in the family. In the previous story, for example, if Hong was to successfully navigate through her adolescence, she must develop a strengthened, more mature relationship with her mother. She was also expected to take on more social responsibilities at school, in the community, and in society at large. In many ways, to become an adult in Vietnamese culture means to be able to make personal sacrifices for the community instead of claiming one’s individual rights, as was the case in Western cultures.

With identity search featured as the signature mark of adolescence, stories in the media also crystallized gender norms and expectations for adolescent girls and boys, which had been vague in the decades before Reform. ³⁵ Stereotypical gender-loaded phrases were pervasive in the media. Adolescent girls became “Miss Seventeen,” “the long-hair camp” (phe toc dai), “the sentimental camp” (phe mit uot), “the graceful camp” (yeu dieu thuc nu), or even “the weaker sex” (phai yeu). Adolescent boys became “Mr. Stubborn,” “Mr. Mischievous,” “the beard-and-hair camp” (phe may rau), or “the short-hair camp” (phe toc ngan).

Adolescence as romanticized mood swings

Intertwined with emphasizing puberty, the Vietnamese media during the Reform era portrayed adolescence as characterized by mood swings and, once again, used both medical and literary discourses to convey the idea. In Hoa Hoc Tro, a separate column labeled as “Thoughts and Emotions of tuoi moi lon” (Tam tinh tuoi moi lon) was established to answer adolescents’ questions about love, friendship, family relations, social roles, and expectations. Replying to these letters was a composite figure called Sister Hien, who was likely to be a psychologist, counselor, or youth leader. Sister Hien, similar to the medical doctors who were in charge of “Diagnosis Through Letters,” often used Western psychological jargon to advise her audience how to act “appropriately to your age.” But unlike the medical doctors, Sister Hien also made use of Vietnamese social norms and expectations, particularly those culturally approved and censored by the government at the time, when she replied to concerns of tuoi moi lon about their emotional life. For example, she said that having love-like feelings for the opposite sex was “normal” (binh thuong) during adolescence; however, she still recommended that adolescents keep these feelings at bay and in the form of friendship to wait until they get “more [developmentally] mature” (truong thanh hon). More often than not, she advised her readers to be mindful of the complicating nature of tuoi moi lon and to try to preserve innocence through focusing on studying, friends, families, and social activities—a familiar doctrine that has been spread by the Vietnam Communist Youth League throughout the decades. She also advised them to act based on their life-long career plan, to think of consequences to themselves and their families instead of reacting to their current feelings. Her recommendations were very much in sync with the overall perspective of the Vietnamese government and society at that moment, where young people in high school were expected to put aside love and personal relationships to focus on their education in order to become good members of a reformed labor force that Vietnam desperately needed. ³⁶

But on the other hand, the media throughout the 1991–1995 period made good use of poems and stories to portray adolescents’ trademark mood swings as an endearing phenomenon, especially when they were associated with love-like feelings. Expressed frequently as sudden change from happy to sad, like to dislike, frustrated to forgiving, and compared often to fast-changing natural phenomena like clouds, flower blooming and fading, rainbows, wind, change of season, or a quick rain shower, which is typical of Vietnam’s tropical weather, mood swings of Vietnamese adolescents were conceptualized as sentimentalities more than “swings” or tantrums as was the case of the Western conceptualization of adolescence. Interestingly, while the Western notion of adolescent mood swings was labeled storm and stress, in Hoa Hoc Tro, the most poignant and frequent image of mood swings in tuoi moi lon was “sunshine and rain” (nang va mua), suggesting that emotional disruptions in Vietnamese adolescents were of milder scope and magnitude. Here is an illustrative poem published in 1991 and later turned into a popular song for youths:

In the above-mentioned poem, mood swings of Vietnamese adolescents were symbolized as the quick change from sunshine to rain, signifying that they were expressions of “mischief” rather than serious tantrums or rebellious behaviors. In the above poem and resonating throughout stories and poems in Hoa Hoc Tro, girls were often portrayed as having more mood swings than boys because they naturally were more sensitive and possibly coming of age sooner than boys. Very rarely was anger in the form of destructive behaviors mentioned; even milder forms of tantrum were only described through much quieter proxies such as silence or avoidance. This conceptualization and representation fit with the Vietnamese culture where visibly “acting out” one’s emotions is frowned upon, especially in young people.

The above-mentioned mind-set of romanticizing tuoi moi lon and associating it with innocence (as well as danger of losing innocence) coincided somewhat with the early conceptualization of adolescence in Western countries where the birth of adolescence in the Western world in the nineteenth century came with the bloom of Romantic literature featuring adolescents struggling with coming of age. Rousseau’s influential novel Emile, for example, postulated drastic changes at puberty while Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther radically told the story of a young man who committed suicide due to his desperate love for a married woman. ³⁸ On the other hand, this strong sense of romanticism might have stemmed from an inclination to recapture the feeling of “lost youth” that a significant part of Vietnamese adult population felt at that moment. After French colonization, the Vietnam War, and a hard struggle in a subsidized economy, the Reform era was the first period where Vietnamese society could somewhat comfortably look back and reevaluate its collective and individual mental and material damage. In that evaluation, society started to express a sense of frustration, confusion, and nostalgia toward the youthful years that so many Vietnamese had spent in the war and the hard years of socialism, which eventually did not lead to the rich, civilized, and abundant life that was promised to them. With this mood of frustration and nostalgia over “lost prime years,” during the Reform era the older generations in Vietnam seemed to view their children and their children’s youthfulness as the rebirth and reward for the sacrifice of their own youthfulness. Therefore, Vietnamese adults tended to “double-price” the emerging adolescents (i.e., to value adolescents’ “youthfulness” as twice as precious because it also embodies previous generations’ lost youth), seeing them as the future and hope for a reformed Vietnam.

At the same time, the Vietnamese nostalgia for adolescence might have been a side effect of the market economy, which introduced to Vietnamese society the idea that everything came with a cost in concrete monetary terms rather than in abstract terms like effort or political maturity. In that way, and especially since the government started applying tuition and school fees since the 1990s instead of providing free education to every child, Vietnamese parents saw more clearly the actual “price” of raising a child successfully into adulthood. Coupled with ubiquitous government-backed propaganda about family planning, family happiness, education, and the new economy, the concept of adolescence took on a new meaning: adolescence became a precious age because it was gained through parents’ monetary investment, and it was the last stage of innocence where an individual did not have to think about making money to support themselves or their families.

Adolescents and problem behaviors

During the Reform era, the Vietnamese media portrayed adolescence as an age likely to be involved in problem behaviors due to biological and psychosocial transformations; however, for the most part, the link between adolescence and problem behaviors remained as potentiality rather than reality. Here, the media targeting adolescents and adults seemed to diverge. Data showed that, compared to the decades before, each year during the Reform era saw 3,000–4,000 more cases of delinquent crimes, a “sharp increase” in the words of author Tran Duc Cham. ³⁹ Most of these delinquent crime cases were perpetrated by unemployed youth with economic motives. However, newspapers for adolescents such as Hoa Hoc Tro did not emphasize these negative realities of tuoi moi lon and chose instead to focus on painting high school life as being filled with interesting games, interactions, and romantic stories. This emphasis suggests that, loyal to the educational and propagandist tradition of the Vietnamese media, newspapers targeting adolescents chose to educate their readers through the appeal of good models rather than warning against bad models. Only occasionally did Hoa Hoc Tro cover stories about gangs and violence, ⁴⁰ drug addiction, ⁴¹ delinquency, ⁴² cheating on graduation exams, ⁴³ or suicide. ⁴⁴ These stories were mentioned as extreme cases of adolescent problems and served as cautionary tales to the readers of Hoa Hoc Tro.

Even though the Vietnamese media did not emphasize delinquent and rebellious behaviors during adolescence, they did frequently discuss a particular problem behavior, such as unwanted pregnancy and early marriage, which was in sync with national family planning propaganda and overall social reform policies. Problem behaviors for Vietnamese adolescents during the Reform era, therefore, would involve immature love affairs leading to sex, teen pregnancy, abortion, or dropping out of school to get married. The following story about a rape case is an example:

Story: The bitter taste.

At 14, T suddenly grew up so fast compared to her peers. The physical changes and sudden psychological transformations had given her a curvy body, a sentimental heart, and an ebullient yet burning soul. An innocent love had come to T. In fact, before T had enough time to distinguish between early thrills and love, she had fallen into a trap. Unfortunately, the persons who trapped her into this evil crime were only a few years older than her. The four of them, who are now sitting in the police office, were not yet adults.

The story started from the day that T visited a girlfriend in her class and met Nguyen Thanh S. Before an attractive man, new exciting emotions suddenly aroused in T’s heart. They fell in love. To T, it was an innocent love that did not need to ripen through friendship. In fact, friendship had not grown in her when love had already exploded. Like a thirsty traveler on the desert of puberty, she did not think if the fruit she saw was sweet or bitter … she had picked it up and tasted it. And then, love became an exciting game to her, just like those innocent games with the girls during childhood.

All these things had pushed her to the unfortunate event on a July evening of 1990. ⁴⁵

In the rest of the story, T was said to meet her boyfriend one day and the boyfriend, together with two of his friends, had trapped her in a house and raped her. At the end of the story, the author wrote:

I want to say to the readers of Hoa Hoc Tro about “the blue bird” that is singing in your chest. Yes, in the souls of 15-year-old youths resides a blue bird that keeps singing. The bird always wants to escape and fly high with all the wishes and desires. But the bird is still young and inexperienced. You must control the wishes and desires and nourish the dreams since if you taste bitterness for just one moment in your early life, you will kill the bird and its innocent song. ⁴⁶

The author of this story portrayed both the rape crime committed by the boys and the careless behaviors of the girl as problem behaviors. He hinted toward a disapproval of love at age fifteen and strongly objected to sex at that age; however, the word “sex” was never mentioned directly, only cultural symbols and references like “the bitter fruit” and “the game of love.” Note that when discussing sex in this case, the author contrasted it with words like “innocent love”; and he also equated love at a young age with friendship. In a way, the girl was thought to be both the victim and also a principal leading to her own unfortunate event since she did not know how to control her desires nor let her love “ripen through friendship.” And while puberty was seen as resulting from inevitable biological changes that the girl could not control, she was thought to be responsible for controlling her manners and behaviors. This last fact suggested that during the Reform era, Vietnamese society partially saw adolescents’ problem behaviors as inherently associated with hormonal and biological fluxes, and partially as a matter of personal conduct and morality. Here, traditional Vietnamese concepts of self-control and self-discipline within the context of a collectivist society were already applied, signaling that Vietnamese society expected adolescents to be socially responsible.

Related to risky sexual behaviors, another behavior that was portrayed in the media during the Reform era as particularly problematic to adolescents was the custom to marry before legal age or even as a child (tao hon). Newspapers for adolescents as well as for adults were unanimous in painting this custom with negative terms like “the sad lullaby” (loi ru buon), “losing the school age” (danh mat tuoi hoc tro), “the lost childhood” (danh mat tuoi tho), “the lost innocence” (danh mat su ngay tho), “bittersweet happiness” (hanh phuc ngam ngui), “quitting the games to follow the husband” (theo chong bo cuoc choi), or “lost prime age of a woman” or “lost maidenhood” (thoi thieu nu qua mau). They also described underage marriage as an old-fashioned, primitive norm of the old society that a reformed Vietnam should abandon. Here is an example story:

Story: The sad lullaby again.

One morning, I was feeling very happy coming to school because I had completed all my homework and prepared for the class. I was happily climbing the staircases, singing along the way, when I overheard the conversation between a few girls who were standing along the balcony.

“She is in Class B.”

“She is only as tall as me. How come … ?”

It must be someone in Class B having committed a mistake. Or perhaps a naughty game of a girl. What had happened in Class B?

When I asked the girls in my class, I was told that Dung, a student in Class 9B, next to my class, was about to get married. A friend who lived in the same village with Dung said that the wedding was already set for the fast approaching December 28. I was stunned. Another girl “quitting the games to follow her husband.” That’s the end of it all. How sad that her prime time as a woman will pass by very fast and in a few years, she will be singing the sad lullaby: “Pity your maidenhood that has passed you by.”

This is a true story at my school. ⁴⁷

In the previous story, it is unclear why the girl had to marry early—whether the marriage was arranged for her by her parents, or if she got pregnant and had to marry, or whether she married early in order to run away from home. However, the message was still clear, that is, the consequences of the act of getting married early would fall on her. Indeed, within the overall well-orchestrated discourse about underage marriage, the media particularly aimed their messages to adolescent girls, framing the issue through the lens of empowerment. In most stories, girls were advised to stand up against their parents’ and community’s old customs and to “take charge of their own life and happiness.” Governmental propagandist documents during the Reform era repeated on a daily basis the same messages: (1) girls should not marry early so that they can focus on education and establish a solid foundation for life as an independent and educated citizen; (2) girls should not marry early so that they won’t have children too early, thus not contributing to the issue of overpopulation; and (3) girls should not marry early because to do so would repeat outdated feudal rituals that contradict the model of the nuclear family in the socialist Vietnam. Underage marriage was portrayed as tragic not only to the individual but also to the family and society as a whole.

A new ideal adolescent

In the context of new conceptual changes regarding adolescence, the Vietnamese media replaced the communist adolescents of the pre-Reform era with a new adolescent model: the successful adolescent. The idea of success focused on the following two unprecedented dimensions: success in terms of money and fame and success in terms of academic performance. For the first dimension, the role models presented in the media were primarily foreign entertainment stars who became famous at a young age; for the second dimension, the role models were high school students who ranked high in international and national examinations. However, for both prototypes, the underlying message was the same and unprecedented: personal success in the career was arguably the most important goal for an individual’s life. This message was very much in sync with overall messages about political and economic reforms, which emphasized essentially an embrace of Western ideas such as individualism, consumerism, democracy, and free market.

In the first three issues of Hoa Hoc Tro, the idols included a famous Taiwanese singer, a fifteen-year-old vice president of a toy company, two famous poets, the American boy band New Kids On The Block (NKOTB), a chess champion, a Thai beauty, an Italian singer, two model students, Albert Einstein, and the American singer Sanyo—all of whom were portrayed as “successful” people in terms of the money they made or social recognition they received. In introducing these models, however, Hoa Hoc Tro often “cleaned up” scandalous details in the lives of entertainment stars and portrayed them as clean, innocent, friendly, and successful adolescents. The idea here was to make readers of the newspaper identify themselves with their models and see success as not only desirable but also attainable. One example is the brief introduction of the boy band NKOTB in the column “At our same age”:

Four years ago, they were indeed five kids of school age, therefore their band was named “New Kids On The Block.” Even now, they are still very young; all five are between 17 and 21 and still close to each other like the five kids of yesterday.

The band started to become famous last year with their fourth album “Step by step.” By now they have performed with many stars in thousands of shows in the United States and around the world. “The new kids on the block” are now so popular that each week, they receive thousands of letters and tens of thousands of phone calls. Toys, sleeping bags, pillows, books, and dolls with the brand name NKOTB sell like hot cakes during their tours. So far, 15 million copies of their three albums have been sold around the world.

Last year, NKOTB made 115 million dollars, becoming the richest artists in the world. Standing behind them is the famous comedian Bill Cosby with 113 million dollars. Even Madonna and Michael Jackson were pushed down to the third and fourth in the ranking of the richest artists.

NKOTB are very active in activities to prevent drug addiction, especially addiction among adolescents. To recognize their contribution, the Governor of Massachusetts named a day as “the day of the New Kids On The Block.” ⁴⁸

In the above-mentioned piece, two important messages clearly emerged. The first message was that the success of NKOTB was measured by the correlation between age and the amount of money they made: they were “still very young” but they were already “the richest artists in the world.” It was also measured in terms of social fame, which was the opposite of socialist ideologies or the Confucian culture of Vietnam where individuals were encouraged to value humility, austerity, sacrifice, and even an evasion of personal fame. By emphasizing personal fame as a valid goal and symbol of personal achievement, Hoa Hoc Tro was shifting the idea of glory from being associated with revolutionary and heroic activities to being associated with personal efforts to follow one’s dream and showcase one’s talent, signaling a significant divergence from pre-Reform discourse.

Yet, something uniquely Vietnamese about the conceptualization of adolescence must remain: the value of innocence and good manners, in accordance with Vietnamese culture. Besides Western movie and music stars, the Vietnamese media erected a new kind of role model for adolescents: high school students who studied well and topped the required national entrance exam into college (called thu khoa, a very prestigious title). This tendency captured a tradition that has been held for centuries in Vietnam: celebration of individuals who do well in education, whom in the past would have been honored with homecoming parades and titles from the kings. In the story above, unlike what was presented in previous decades, portrayals of adolescents during the Reform era were much friendlier, individualized, and even funny instead of the solemn image of the superior collective thieu nien. Again, it fed into a central message and tactic: adolescents who consumed the media should be able to identify with these teenagers as their friends or classmates. The columns where the idols were introduced, therefore, had various names like “At our same age” (Cung tuoi chung minh), “A profile of a student” (Guong mat hoc tro), or “People you want to know” (Nguoi em muon biet).