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The complexity of morality: Being a

‘good child’ in Vietnam?
a
Rachel Burr
a
Sussex University, UK
Published online: 27 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Rachel Burr (2014) The complexity of morality: Being a ‘good child’ in
Vietnam?, Journal of Moral Education, 43:2, 156-168, DOI: 10.1080/03057240.2014.893421

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2014.893421

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 Journal of Moral Education, 2014
Vol. 43, No. 2, 156–168, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2014.893421

The complexity of morality: Being a

‘good child’ in Vietnam?
Rachel Burr
Sussex University, UK
Downloaded by [Georgian Court University] at 18:21 01 December 2014

In this article I examine what it means to be a good child in Vietnam. Throughout the country
ancestral worship is widely practiced. This traditionally places emphasis on the need for a boy
child to continue the practice of worship into the next generation. Because of this, while the
high value placed on the boy child has been tempered by the influence of communist rule and
modernity, the eldest boy still often holds preferential status. Under such circumstances the
good child is one who accepts his or her position within the hierarchical structure of the family
and is also willing to subjugate his or her individual needs to the greater collective good. This
might manifest itself in a child’s ‘choice’ to work on the streets so that their earnings can be sent
home to support other siblings through their schooling. Or it might show itself in the practice of
children accepting and apparently supporting that fact that they have been sent to an orphanage
or ‘hidden’ so that a parent can try for more male children. It would be naive though to con-
clude from this that boys and girls are automatically raised within separate moral frameworks.
Instead this article proposes that at the local level what it means to be a good child is even more
complex because the notion of the good, moral and filial child is shaped as much by family cir-
cumstances and expectation as it is by the mores and values of the wider society.
Keywords: good child, Vietnam, anthropology

Introduction: the Vietnamese context

The aim of this article is to highlight the tension that exists for children growing
up in a society where the state has gone out of its way to marginalise traditional
beliefs and practices. Traditional practices still hold sway despite the state machine
suppressing such beliefs, first by embracing Communist rhetoric and more recently
by supporting organisations within the international community in their support of
a child rights discourse. My work shows that traditional beliefs continue to hold
sway and that localised Vietnamese resilience has remained strong. The article also

Rachel Burr, School of Social Work and Education, Sussex University; Rachel Burr is currently
a teaching fellow working in the School of Social Work and Education at Sussex University
where she teaches on the subjects of international child rights, youth justice and child
development.
I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to Dr Anne-Meike Fechter for inviting me to contribute to
this special issue.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rachel Burr, School of
Education and Social Work, Brighton, UK. Email: r.burr@sussex.ac.uk
© 2014 Journal of Moral Education Ltd
 The complexity of morality 157

challenges the validity of the view that there is an apparent shift away from the
values introduced under communism towards a fledging free-market economy and
shows that while Vietnam continues to operate under one-party rule in which the
state apparatus holds sway the general population will continue to covertly
embrace family led rather than state established value systems.
In this article I draw upon my fieldwork experiences gained primarily in Hanoi.
I spent most of my time there doing participatory observation among children: I
lived with children in a Vietnamese household, went out onto the streets to spend
time among the children who worked there and spent time among children in an
orphanage and among those who were serving time in a detention centre for work-
ing illegally. The moral codes by which these children lived were complex. Dung
Hue Doan has suggested that there are two different systems of morality existing
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in Vietnamese society—traditional morality and socialist morality (2006, p. 451). I

found something similar during the time I spent among children in Hanoi where
the choices they made created a tension between what was expected of them as
children living under a one-party authoritarian state where, for example, they were
legally obliged to live in their province of birth, what might be expected of them as
filial children (filial piety or respect for elders being one of the prime tenets of
Confucianism), and what they expected of themselves and each other as children
who were often more immediately dependent upon their peers than the adults who
surrounded them.
Outside Vietnam there is a tendency to assume that it is on a similar socio-eco-
nomic trajectory to that of China. In fact Vietnam’s recent history and experience
as a nation-state is quite different. For example adoption of communism was taken
for more pragmatic and less idealistic reasons: thus Ho Chi Minh only approached
the Soviet Union for help towards independence from France after having been
rejected by the USA. This alliance was further strengthened in the aftermath of
China’s attempt to invade Vietnam after the end of the America/Vietnam war.
This pragmatic response of the Vietnamese to political change and rhetoric is
reflected in current responses to their state machine. From the Vietnamese per-
spective there is little evidence to suggest that socialism is the thing of the past that
Westerners would believe it to be. Indeed, the economist Melanie Beresford made
a similar point about the continuing influence of the Communist party in Vietnam
when she wrote that ‘few non-Vietnamese observers appear to think that socialism
is any longer relevant to the Vietnamese case…within Vietnam however the debate
seems much more complicated’ (2008, p. 222). Like me she has also observed that
‘the Communist party wishes to retain its ability to influence long-term structural
change’ (2008, p. 226). At the conclusion of her article she also predicts that Viet-
nam will continue to develop with the Communist party at the helm and with their
encouragement of foreign investors combining with the domestic non-state sector
but with cronyism as the leading force. This final point is one that resonates with
my work, primarily because the current climate in Vietnam where the state acts as
if traditional pre-Communist practices have long been banished has resulted in
such practices being robustly supported within the private domain of the family.
 158 R. Burr

It is in this quite complex setting where Confucianism and Communism are

uneasy bedfellows that I examine what it means to be a ‘good’ child and make the
point that children, like other members of most societies, are often simultaneously
considered good by one sector of their community and deviant by another because
different value systems co-exist alongside each other. In common with other simi-
lar regimes, the communist government of Vietnam set out to marginalise pre-
existing belief systems. Pham Duy Nghia explains that traditional practices in Viet-
nam were suppressed once the Communists were in charge: ‘Once in power.…
Confucianism was essentially destroyed’ (2005, p. 83). I disagree with this final
point and instead suggest that a state led ban on traditional practices has created a
society in which a number of conflicting expectations of people co-exist and create
tensions. And despite Pham’s assertion above that Communism destroyed Confu-
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cianism in Vietnam, it was clear from my own observations that although the
Communist government endeavoured to eradicate traditional practices, the most
dominant notion of goodness is still bound by the traditional Confucian practice
of filial piety and collective endeavour. This is not a post socialist society: it is an
example of the usual Vietnamese skill, demonstrated over many years of colonial
and post colonial rule, at surviving and adapting under these pressures to continue
to thrive under their own (often unstated) terms and beliefs. Although there is still
one-party rule under a communist banner, a largely foreign owned industrial pri-
vate sector is nonetheless actively encouraged by the party, on their own terms.
In this context, as with any other, being a good child cannot be investigated
without a consideration of the cultural world in which each child is situated. My
work draws upon the experiences of Vietnamese children and young people to
show the impact for them of living in a society in which small communities and
the family unit embrace traditional values while the state makes a formal pretence
that such ideas and values are a thing of the past. The anthropologist Ruth
Benedict notes that ‘The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the
concept of the good. It is that which society has approved’ (1939, p. 266). In
other words from her position as a cultural relativist it can be conceivably argued
that the good child can only be recognised via a thorough and proper understand-
ing of the child within the values embedded in its immediate community. Yet as
Howell has pointed out what it means to be ‘good’ means a multitude of things
‘Values are continually changing and adapting through actual choices and
practices, while, at the same time, they continue to inform and shape choices and
practices’ (Howell, 1997, p. 4).
Contemporary Vietnam is a country in flux as its populace attempts to make
sense of conflicting messages from an evolving value system. On the one hand it is
still a one party state in which being a member of the communist party garners
significant status and where particular cultural and societal demands are placed
upon its citizens. On the other it is a country that has re-established relations with
the West and in doing so at least superficially embraced western influenced ideas
through the media and internationally led agendas, such as those of the United
Nations.
 The complexity of morality 159

However, for the purpose of this article the most significant of the communist
party rules is lack of freedom to live freely where one chooses, as Brennan et al.
point out ‘The Vietnamese Government implements a household registration
system which limits the movement of migrants to the cities. Most migrants, more
than 90%, are classified as temporary and hence restricted in accessing public ser-
vices such as education and health care’ (Brennan et al., 2012, p. 3). This policy
largely prevents families in rural areas from enjoying the same level of opportunity
as their counterparts born, and legally established, in urban areas. It has a direct
impact on the manner in which rural-urban migration takes place and influences
the pattern of migration to the city. This limitation on internal movement partly
explains why such a significant number of the children I knew had travelled alone
to the city on a short term basis to earn money to send home to family in the
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countryside (the majority of whose members could not leave because to do so

would result in a loss of access to necessary services).

The historical context of Confucianism

China’s various colonial rules over Vietnam from as long ago as the first century
AD is key to understanding some of the influences that continue to shape the coun-
try’s belief systems. Hirschman and Loi have gathered evidence showing that the
Vietnamese adapted the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucious and
amalgamated it into their existing social practice (1994). Although it was officially
illegal to do so most Vietnamese people adhered to their traditional beliefs during
the transition from the colonial period and while many of the Vietnamese tradi-
tions relating to filial piety and gendered relations were suppressed under the strict
communism of the 1970s and 1980s there is increasing recognition that values
relating to filial piety and collectivist identities never really went away (Burr 2006).
Pham Duy Nghi argues similarly that ‘the Confucian tradition may have changed
in appearance but the substance is still important in modern Vietnamese life’.
(2005, p. 84). Likewise Helle Rydstrom (2006) points out that in Northern Viet-
nam it is not state ideology that dictates the ‘good’ i.e. (conforming) behaviour of
(young people), but their concern about not hurting the feelings of their parents
and making them lose face within the community (Heintz, 2009, p. 16). This is a
classic example of filial piety in practice.
Today these beliefs and traditions continue to form an integral and important
part of Vietnamese society and some knowledge of their importance is essential to
gain any sort of understanding of the people’s behaviour and attitudes.
It could also be argued that Vietnam’s longstanding practice of ancestral wor-
ship has contributed to the continuing existence of the one party state. From the
Confucian perspective relationships within the family are always hierarchical. The
person in the position of superiority should guide, love and care for inferiors, while
those who are inferior should always obey their superiors. Confucius taught that
order and peace within each family are prerequisites to a well-run country.
 160 R. Burr

Because of this, particular weight has been attached to teachings about family life.
And many of the idealised principles of communism chime with these long held
beliefs, allowing it to flourish.

The importance of Confucius to understanding ‘goodness’

While the teachings of Confucius became more influential, from the fifteenth
century the dominant Vietnamese belief system was an amalgamation of four main
influences: Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Christianity. Over the centuries
these beliefs have fused with popular Chinese beliefs and ancient Vietnamese
animism to form what is collectively known as Tam Giao (‘triple religion’). If
asked their religion the Vietnamese people are most likely to say Buddhist or Cath-
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olic, but when it comes to family or civic duties they are most likely to follow Con-
fucianism while turning to Taoist conceptions in their understanding of the
cosmos. Perhaps because of this, individual children I knew in Hanoi found it dif-
ficult to pinpoint what their spiritual beliefs were. On the face of it ancestral wor-
ship is central to the Vietnamese belief system. It is commonplace for each
household to retain a table positioned high up in the corner of a central room on
which fresh water and fruit, and other appealing items are left as offerings, most
commonly to deceased members of the patriarchal family.
This practice of ancestral worship stems from Confucian philosophy but in
practice has been incorporated into a number of different co-existing religious
practices. One child I spent time with told me that he was Buddhist and that his
ancestral worship table was very important to him. In one of the orphanages where
I did fieldwork an ancestral worship table had been introduced for the children
who wished to remember and honour family members whom had died and who
they had been particularly close to, perhaps to a deceased mother, father or grand-
parent. This was an unusual step for the orphanage to have taken, particularly
because ancestral tables are always placed in the family home and to place them
elsewhere might mean that the ancestors could become confused or lost or perhaps
torn between the original family table and the one that had been set up in the
orphanage. My friend Hoa had spent a considerable amount of time persuading
other members of staff in the orphanage to break with tradition and introduce an
ancestral worship table and she now felt that it was the introduction of the table
which had brought the most significant comfort to some of the children particu-
larly because it created an environment in which a personal loss could be worked
through in both a traditional and very familiar way.
The Confucian family works within a hierarchy with particular value attached to
the men of the household. In terms of accepted ‘goodness’ the wife obeys her
husband, the son and daughter obey their parents, younger siblings obey older
ones. This understanding of the other places great emphasis on the collective good
of the family. Confucianism holds that the firstborn boy has higher status than any
boys who follow. The eldest boy is sometimes given a particular name to signify
 The complexity of morality 161

his importance and the name ‘Son’ or ‘Mountain’ was one that I frequently came
across as a signifier of prestige bestowed on the eldest boy of a family. It is also
the eldest son who traditionally continues to live with his parents after marriage
and who will be expected to take over the practice of maintaining the family ances-
tral worship table after they die. So the ‘good’ and ‘filial’ eldest boy is one who
accepts this level of responsibility and does not stray far from home once he is an
adult. While this is purported to be a position of privilege some of the second born
boys who I spoke to about filial duty spoke with relief about not being the first
born. Their more lowly position within the family allowed them greater freedom
and less responsibility and the terms under which they were considered ‘good’
were therefore less onerous.
Thus from a traditional perspective being good is as much about accepting one’s
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position within the family hierarchy as it is about generally obeying one’s parents
and elders so that a collective identity and goodness is maintained and the family
does not lose ‘face’ or honour. In contrast within wider society and from a govern-
ment perspective a good child might simply refer to any child who has achieved
the status of being a communist and young pioneer and class representative of the
party.

What it means to be a good child

In these circumstances tension is likely to exist in relation to what it means to be a
good Vietnamese child. Among some of the children who were part of my ethnog-
raphy a ‘filial and obedient child’ would be recognised as ‘good’ by immediate
family even when being filial required that a child gave up school, illegally moved
to the city and earned money on the streets. The same group of children would be
treated as deviant by the city police because, as state workers, they were expected
to uphold central government policy: that no one could leave their birthplace with-
out the required approval at commune level. This meant that working children
were being forcibly returned home or locked up in a re-education centre to stop
them working for a living (Burr, 2006).
Children I worked amongst were either working for a living or placed in a
detention centre after being arrested and this type of childhood did not sit easily
with the global child rights model. Most importantly it meant that child rights
advocates who came into contact with the children I knew and worked with did
not recognise the value or ‘goodness’ in what they were doing.
For children being good, or being considered good, is often key to garnering
approval from adults and sometimes envy or annoyance from friends. So the question
of being good (however that might manifest itself) is ever present in the lives of most
children and so a notion of ‘goodness’ is often associated with behaving in an accept-
able manner as defined by wider society. The children who were forcibly returned
home to their provincial commune returned to Hanoi with even more determination
to hide from the authorities and because a child rights non-governmental
 162 R. Burr

organisation (NGO) had been involved in their ‘repatriation’ they also told me that
they were going out of their way to avoid the aid workers who were doing outreach
work on the streets. They had lost confidence in their position on the streets and only
garnered status from their parents’ belief in them. With the best of intentions the
NGO had intervened in these children’s lives and left them with less self-worth than
they had previously felt. Repatriation to their province of origin had not removed the
children’s need to work but it had tarnished the status that they previously gained
from working independently for a living.
In this context there existed at least two contradictory notions of the ‘good’
child. The first one represented a highly political understanding of the ‘good’ com-
munist child. The second was reflected in that of the responsible and hardworking
child, who was willing to work to contribute to the household income, or to sup-
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port themselves. This idea of the ‘good’ and responsible child is one that is found
across the Southern hemisphere, in countries where the standard of living is such
that it is essential that all members of the household work. However it is a per-
spective on the position of children that clashes with the expectations of interna-
tional non-profit organisations, which work with children under the umbrella of
child rights. So the child is at once good and deviant when they are found working
on the streets.

Goodness among children in a re-education centre

One of the fieldwork sites in which I spent two years during my time in Hanoi,
was a children’s re-education centre. North Vietnam’s government introduced leg-
islation in 1961 providing for detention without trial for the purpose of political
re-education. The majority of children living in the detention centre had been
arrested as a result of illegally working on the streets and then been placed in the
government run re-education centre ostensibly to learn how to be ‘good members
of the communist party’.
As Lifton reported from China, ‘…in dealing with the criminals there shall be
regularly adopted measures of corrective study… to wipe out criminal thoughts
and establish a new moral code’ (1961, p. 17). My findings mirror what Lifton
also found in China at the height of Communism. The very term ‘re-educated’
was loaded with particular and highly political expectation, implying as it is did
that these children were in need of correction and indoctrination into the com-
munist belief system. So from the perspective of the guards who ran the prison
these children could only be considered ‘good’ members of the state once they
accepted that working for a living as illegal workers was wrong. They also needed
to accept their rightful position in society and return to the villages where they had
been born rather than live in the city without the government permits, which per-
mitted them to do so.
Yet both the children and some of their guards recognised how unrealistic this
understanding and expectation of the children was. Like myself they recognised
 The complexity of morality 163

the need for the children to continue working on leaving the detention centre
when their two-year sentences had come to an end. Their collusion in and recog-
nition of more complex levels of need among these children manifested itself in
their support of a training programme, which on request of the young people,
would provide them with the skills to work as air-conditioning engineers and as
motorbike mechanics. Thus they were complicit in their recognition that these
young people needed to work in order to support their families and for their own
survival.
I spent two years with the boys in the detention centre visiting them twice a
week. From their perspective the most satisfying achievement while living there
was that at their request they were able to embark on a skilled training programme
set up by an NGO to provide continuing apprenticeships for the children once
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they left the detention centre. As Trieu, who was 11-years-old, told me ‘now I can
run a motorbike mechanic’s business from outside my grandma’s home and we
will never be hungry again’. He had cried with relief on learning that he had an
apprenticeship because as he went on to explain ‘I can now work legally, I can
have a profession’.
From his grandmother’s perspective, Trieu was a highly responsible and very
good and honourable filial boy who had always been thus. He had only been in
the re-education centre because of his illegal work cleaning shoes for passers-by on
the streets, and he had been locked up because he and his grandmother had not
had the connections, or money for a bribe, to keep him from entering prison. The
filial values that he and his grandmother held dear were those of Confucius that
the needs of the family are of more importance than the needs of the individual.
Trieu might have chosen to move away and fend for himself without sharing his
earnings with his grandmother, but looking after and honouring her was central to
his identity. In that environment and culture this was a form of good behaviour
that I found repeatedly among the majority of children and young people that I
came to know well. Trieu’s level of responsibility was further enhanced by him
being the only grandson. His mother had died and his father had left the area. His
status as the only male was something that he referred to in our discussions. It
added to the sense of duty that he already felt.
Once I realised how significant the first-born male child was, despite 20 years of
Communism and apparent equality between the sexes, I became interested in find-
ing out how many first-born sons were represented among the detention centre
children or among the populations of the other institutions where I was doing
fieldwork. Not surprisingly the boys who were the eldest were most likely to be
found among the group who sported a ‘t’ tattoo: the symbol of the group who
informally ran the prison. Both the leaders of this group referred with pride to the
work that they had been caught doing prior to being placed in the detention cen-
tre. As Thanh explained ‘my father died, I had no choice but to work to support
my mum, and when we had no work I stole…but what else could I do, no one
was going to help a widow.’ In a country without a welfare state and in which
 164 R. Burr

unattached women were particularly vulnerable Thanh’s mother had been proud
of what her son had been doing to support her.
This tension between the state and family expectation of the child who subju-
gates his needs to the greater good was repeatedly visible. The traditional values of
subservience and fitting in within a hierarchy have remained consistent despite the
influences of communism. They are even used to challenge the government’s cen-
tral policy on family size as highlighted by my findings in a state run orphanage.

The treatment of girls and gender equality

While boys dominated the re-education centre the orphanage where I did field-
work consisted of two-thirds girls and one-third boys. While sitting in the com-
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pound I would watch as older girls looked after and mothered the younger
children. Within Vietnam a person is considered an orphan if they have only one
parent and so because most of the children at the orphanage had only one living
parent they referred to themselves in this way.
This notion of the orphan as incomplete finds its origins in traditional values,
but in their case the background to why they, as girls were most likely to be in an
orphanage, was also directly shaped by the two-child policy that the government
introduced in the 1960s and then relaxed in 2003. These girls were usually the
eldest or second born girl and victims both of the two-child policy and the tradi-
tionally informed pressure on women to produce a son. In some cases the girls
were the result of a first marriage that had either ended in divorce or death of a
parent.
Yet among the group of girls who shared this information with me none out-
wardly showed any sign of bitterness and this might have been in part to preserve
loss of face and honour, but there was more to it than that. Instead as Hoa
explained they had sympathy with the lack of choices that their mothers had avail-
able to them. Hoa told me that she went home to see her mother every other
weekend and that her mother’s second marriage had enabled her wider family to
lead a less impoverished life. She was acting as the good filial daughter who had
absorbed both traditional tensions that existed for women who found themselves
alone and also contemporary government policy, which further hindered their
chances of having and raising all of their children. Their acceptance of their cir-
cumstances seemed genuine and pragmatic, made all the stronger by the ‘mother’
of the orphanage who praised the girls for their filial loyalty and spoke quite openly
about the sacrifice that these girls had made for their mothers or fathers. So in this
world being good was once more rendered visible by the acceptance of familial
duty and the everyday reminder repeated by the ‘mother’ of the home that these
girls had done the right thing. Hoa, who was a young girl living as an orphan at
the orphanage, despite having a mother whom she visited, was technically an
orphan because her father was dead. The woman who ran the orphanage was
referred to as ‘mother’ by the children who lived there. It was also another
 The complexity of morality 165

example of Vietnamese people seemingly bending the laws of the state so that long
standing traditions about family structure were upheld, children maintained famil-
ial ties and in these cases mothers were not forced to abandon their older children
for the sake of their immediate futures.
Strict Confucian philosophy dictates that upon marrying, a woman will honour
her husband’s family above her own ‘to be happy after death, the dead person
should have children (preferably one father should have one son) to comply with
funeral rites and to practice the cult of the parents’ (Nguyen, 1987, p. 121). But
in the context of contemporary Vietnam if no son has been born the eldest daugh-
ter is also able to bring her ancestors to the table to ensure that they do not
become lost spirits. This worshipping of the past three generations prevents the
wandering of lost souls.
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Whilst I clearly encountered circumstances in which the boy child was more rev-
ered than the girl child, and while some of the girls were ‘hidden’ away in the
orphanage because their mother’s felt under pressure to have a son, it was also
true that some members of Vietnamese society were more willing to adapt tradi-
tional values to their particular circumstances. So in some instances little distinc-
tion was made between the status of boys and girls. During my stay in Hanoi I
became friends with a woman who was a similar age to me and who tended her
family ancestral table alongside her mother.
Luong found similar levels of familial-based equality among the sexes in the
northern villages where he did fieldwork: ‘the affinal ties in the village were by no
means insignificant…at the wedding of any of her children, ancestral offerings
were made not only to her husband’s family but also to the ancestors of her own
father and mother’ (1992, p. 61).
The willingness to show a virtue or respect for one’s parents, elders and ances-
tors is central to any notion of the good child whether that be with high status
attached to being the first born son, or as a second son or daughter. This caused
difficulties for Hoa who was a 16-year-old girl I had first struck up conversation
with on the street because she was doing far better at school than her older male
cousin. It caused Hoa enormous upset that none of her grandparents recognised
her achievements; she felt very strongly that they did not feel they could do so
because this would place her male cousin in a poor light. Instead she was expected
to be submissive specifically because of her gender. In this instance being a girl
meant remaining passive and humble.

Morality and goodness and the influence of international aid agencies

International NGOs, which supported United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child (UNCRC), also reacted to these children in a particular way. I inter-
viewed and spent time with NGO workers and during one such meeting with the
director of an international NGO focused on child rights. I learnt that they were
working with the local police on child repatriation or forced migration programme
 166 R. Burr

because they believed that it was better that a child live with their family rather
than out on the streets. But this ‘repatriation’ programme ignored the complex
reasons outlined above for children moving away in the first place and little
seemed to have been done in the way of addressing the cultural tradition of work-
ing on the streets for a few years or in other cases the abuses that had led to chil-
dren finding the streets a preferable location. The NGO wished both to protect
the child and reunite each child back into its family. Meanwhile the police were
expected to uphold a different and more simplistic understanding of the children
as criminals who had illegally moved to the city without the authority and approval
to do so.
When two of the boys I knew who worked near the main lake cleaning shoes
disappeared but did not reappear in the re-education centre which I visited I rea-
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lised that they had been part of the repatriation or forcible return home pro-
gramme. Two weeks later they were back on the streets, underfed, exhausted and
full of anger and frustration explaining that their families needed them to keep on
working and that neither could face working in the fields. From their perspective
working on the streets was infinitely preferable because they earned money to send
home and also to support attending evening classes in the city. None of this was
recognised by the NGO that was complicit in their enforced repatriation.

Conclusion
This brings us back to the question of what is meant by morality and goodness. I
have shown in this article that the Vietnamese ideals are framed by two opposing
political and religious belief sets, which in many respects seem quite different from
those found in the West. But we all live under such apparent anomalistic rules;
and Vietnam is just an extreme example of this dichotomy. Should individuals or
society determine morality and how can we as researchers (or outsiders) examine
other peoples’ morality without resorting to our own normative judgments as a
frame of reference? (Heintz, 2009).
This very question is echoed by Haidt when he suggests that there are essen-
tially five moral frameworks each of which can be associated with either conserva-
tive or liberal political systems. For the purpose of my argument application of his
model suggests that the Communist party operates within a moral framework of
authority/subversion in which those lower down the societal hierarchy (in this case
children who are also non-party members) are made to behave ‘properly’ by being
locked up or physically removed from the streets.
Meanwhile members of the international aid community are most likely to align
themselves with a liberal ‘care/harm’ framework, which Haidt suggests evolved in
response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children (Haidt, 2012,
p. 20). However, while this desire to care for and rescue children might be at the
forefront of aid agency thinking, application of the UNCRC based rights can cre-
ate an unintentional shift in morality. In some instances where a desire to protect
children is combined with a rigid belief in universalistic ideals the shift has been
 The complexity of morality 167

towards an authoritarian/subversion model of intervention. This is exactly what

happened when the aforementioned child rights international aid agency went into
partnership with the Vietnamese government to forcibly repatriate working chil-
dren off the streets. Fundamentally confused outcomes, such as these, exist when
child rights activists introduce an international child rights agenda without being
adequately aware of internal tensions that already exist between the state and a
general population, which embraces alternative belief systems.
Such fundamentally confused outcomes exist because an international child
rights perspective supports a global model of childhood and recognises value in
supporting a universal value system, which is given priority over cultural norms on
the ground. A central theme of Sitharaman Kakarala (1996) is that universalist
arguments are generally against tradition and strongly favour modernity. Universal-
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ists have often ignored the diversity of social and cultural formations in the South,
and this in turn has provoked the elites of the South to create other forms of
human rights agendas that often clash with the tenets of the West, thus introduc-
ing further ambiguities and opportunities for misunderstanding (1996).
Within this global understanding a good childhood will be one in which a child
has the right to participate in and make autonomous choices. This understanding
of childhood has been well documented and problematised, partly because of the
tension that exists between a well-meaning desire to protect children while expect-
ing that they will take advantage of full participatory rights as outlined in the
UNCRC (Gillis 1996; Prout & James, 2003; Jenks, 2005). The emphasis here has
been on young people as becoming, and as incomplete, as Schlegel and Barry
(1991) point out and as such is grounded in developmental psychology and each
person as separate and autonomous individuals. This Western informed under-
standing of children and young people is dominated by a question about ‘how
society affects the individual’. This individualised notion of selfhood is central to
the global rights movement. It is ‘I’ who has rights.
While filial piety represents only one aspect of the Vietnamese belief system, it
is nevertheless a very significant one and one which results in some very particular
and culturally bound sets of behaviour which create an environment in which the
good and morally bound child accepts his or her position within the family for the
greater good of the collective. It is important to recognise that such anomalies exist
and co-exist alongside conflicting doctrines: Vietnam thrives on pragmatism.
Morality is relative.
As for the children of Vietnam, within their world there were sacrifices to be
made and a time-honoured goodness to be achieved both of which eclipsed
expectations enforced by the state or an international human rights agenda.

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