Article

Journal of Family History

2015, Vol. 40(2) 172-194
ª 2015 The Author(s)
The Conceptualization and Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Representations of Adolescence DOI: 10.1177/0363199015573401
jfh.sagepub.com
in Vietnamese Media during the
‘‘Reform Era’’ of Vietnam
(1986–1995)
Huong Nguyen1

Abstract
The purpose of this article is to explore the conceptualization and representations of adolescence in
the Vietnamese media during the Reform era (1986–1995). Analyzing newspapers targeting ado-
lescents, I argue that the Reform era marked a departure from the conceptualization and repre-
sentation of Vietnamese adolescents as miniature communists, which dominated the media in pre-
Reform decades. It also marked the emergence and convergence of Vietnamese adolescence into a
global adolescent sensibility, which emphasizes identity search and mood swings. Factors con-
tributing to these conceptual changes include the adoption of a market economy, a new high school
system, and family planning policies.

Keywords
Vietnamese adolescence, youth, modernization, reform, Vietnam

Introduction
Even a casual observer of today’s Vietnamese society notices the striking external similarities
between Vietnamese adolescents, particularly urban ones, and their counterparts in South Korea,
Japan, Europe, or America. On the streets, at schools, and at home, twelve- to eighteen-year-old
Vietnamese boys and girls mostly wear popular imported clothes and accessories, listen to foreign
music, watch foreign movies, and worship teen idols who are similar to their Western counterparts.
Such an adoption of a global adolescent ‘‘uniform’’ runs parallel with a convergence into a global
adolescent sensibility, which emphasizes the need to express one’s individuality and become van-
guards of consumerism and containers of social problems. Accounting for 24.5 percent of the total
Vietnamese population,1 fourteen- to twenty-five-year-old young people in Vietnam are now often
described as ‘‘indifferent’’ to communist political causes, which their parents and grandparents held

1
College of Social Work, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Corresponding Author:
Huong Nguyen, College of Social Work, University of South Carolina, 1731 College Street, Room 205, Columbia, SC
29208, USA.
Email: hnguyen@mailbox.sc.edu
Nguyen 173

dear.2 Along with this shift, young people in Vietnam are increasingly contributing to drug addic-
tion, HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy, abortion, and other social problems. For example, at the turn
of the twenty-first century, fourteen- to twenty-five-year-old people accounted for 50 percent of the
new HIV infections, 40 percent of the people living with HIV/AIDS, 40 percent of all single women
who have had abortions, and 70 percent of all Vietnamese drug addicts.3
Yet, only a few decades ago, when the Vietnam War ended, Vietnamese adolescents were known
as symbolizing heroism, patriotism, and the promise of a new independent socialist Vietnam.
Nguyen4 has documented that between the end of the Vietnam War and the time Vietnam launched
its political and economic Reform (Doi Moi), Vietnamese adolescents, known then as thieu nien
(lacking in age/young in age), were ubiquitously conceptualized and represented in the media as
miniature adult communists while the age of adolescence embodied a political stage rather than a
biopsychosocial one. In other words, the age range of thieu nien (between ten and fifteen years old)
signified in-between years (between childhood and adulthood) in traditional Western conceptualiza-
tion; in Vietnam, however, this positioning was erected along a political hierarchy in which thieu
nien was seen as the preparation time for an individual to become a mature communist adult who
would have by then thoroughly internalized and devoted himself to communist ideologies. A model
thieu nien was, thus, often portrayed as a superkid whose profile read like a collection of superior
human characteristics. Stories for and about thieu nien in newspapers often mixed highly abstract
political jargon seen in newspapers for adults—and arguably comprehensible only to adults’ devel-
oped mind (e.g., ‘‘communism,’’ ‘‘socialism,’’ ‘‘Ho Chi Minh ideologies,’’ and ‘‘capitalism’’)—with
fairy tales, thus giving the idea that thieu nien could/should be politically and cognitively mature like
adults but also psychologically and physically childlike. In addition, unlike the Western conceptua-
lization of adolescence, the Vietnamese thieu nien was not associated with problem behavior, mood
swings, or sexual maturation; rather, they were often responsible, serious, committed comrades in
small bodies, and impressionable minds.
What happened during the transitional Reform era (1986–1995) that possibly led to a conceptual
metamorphosis in the conceptualization of Vietnamese adolescence from primarily embodying
Vietnamese political ideologies to embodying a global/Westernized adolescent sensibility? This
question has never been examined but is meaningful in many ways. Answering this overarching
question will help us understand not only what happened to Vietnamese adolescents and Vietnamese
society but also, more broadly, what happened to youth identities in societies going through funda-
mental changes similar to those in Vietnam. The answer will shed light onto whether—or how
much—the conceptualization and representation of adolescence is grounded in universal biopsycho-
logical characteristics versus sociocultural forces. It provides us with insights and a more nuanced
understanding about the interactions among the state, its citizens, and global forces in shaping iden-
tity and behaviors of society members, especially when those members are at an impressionable age.
Finally, with Vietnam being one of the only few existing communist countries with a monopoly over
the media, and the Reform era presenting a unique transitional time in Vietnam, this study provides
an opportunity to better understand totalitarian media versus market-oriented media as an influential
form of social control.
Although there is not yet a study examining the metamorphosis that must have happened to the
concept of adolescence in Vietnam during the Reform era, dominant international adolescent
research suggests that similar metamorphoses have been observed in societies going through similar
transitions from agricultural to industrial. Modernization, particularly the development of a market
economy and freedom of the media, has been associated with the establishment of what is now
accepted as a somewhat universal conceptualization of adolescence.5 This long history started with
G. Stanley Hall, who ‘‘invented’’ the concept of adolescence when he argued in 1904 that even
though young people existed before the twentieth century, they were not recognized as a distinct
social group nor were their developmental characteristics considered unique and fundamentally
174 Journal of Family History 40(2)

different from children and adults until the turn of the twentieth century—when modern society was
born.6 In the book Adolescence in which he coined the term, Hall specifically reckoned that the birth
of adolescence in the United States in the early twentieth century was the result of three concrete
modernization factors, namely, (1) urbanization and industrialization that created massive migra-
tions of young people from rural areas to urban areas, where their rebelliousness led to their being
called ‘‘the dangerous class’’; (2) education reform that created the high school system for the first
time in history, laying the groundwork for a subculture to form; and (3) the influence of Romantic
European literature, where youths were portrayed as being raged with romance, self-struggle, and
courage, such as Rousseau’s influential novel Emile or Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Since 1904, Hall’s central discoveries—(1) the conceptualization of adolescence as a transitional
period between childhood and adulthood, characterized with ‘‘storm and stress’’ (the tendency to
have emotional disruptions, challenge authorities, and involve in reckless, antisocial behaviors) and
(2) the integral link between the emergence of adolescence and the modernity—have been explored
in many cultures outside the United States. Early on, Margaret Mead had documented in 1928 that,
unlike American adolescents described by Hall, Samoan adolescents did not manifest storm and
stress due to the ‘‘general casualness’’ of Samoan tribe-like, not-yet-modern society, which empha-
sizes collectivism, family life, and the segregation of boys and girls.7 Following Mead’s tradition,
scholars have found that culture as well as specific historical times in a society plays an important
role in intensifying, weakening, narrowing, or broadening those universal conceptual dimensions of
adolescence proposed by Hall. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Jeffrey Arnett argued that ado-
lescents in cultures with broad socialization (defined as cultures that encourage individualism, inde-
pendence, and self-expression) tend to show greater variance in their reckless behaviors, compared
to those in cultures with narrow socialization (defined as cultures that hold obedience and confor-
mity as the highest values and discourage deviation from these cultural expectations). He concluded
that ‘‘storm and stress tends to be lower in traditional cultures than in the West but [is] likely to
increase as globalization increases individualism.’’8
In recent decades, with globalization becoming a sweeping force of social change, there exists a
somewhat global adolescent sensibility, in which adolescents become the focal point of consumer-
ism, popular culture, social movements, and social networking, given their developmental charac-
teristics.9 In this perspective, adolescence is defined as a universal, distinct developmental stage
between childhood and adulthood that covers the ages between ten and eighteen.10 Its distinctiveness
as a developmental stage is manifested in that adolescence represents a unique structural reorgani-
zation of an individual. Biologically, adolescence is marked with physical metamorphosis, espe-
cially in sexuality; psychologically, it is characterized with role and identity development; and
cognitively, adolescence is the starting point of abstract thinking, which sets teenagers apart from
children.11 Thus, adolescence was a psychosocial stage associated with identity crisis (i.e., trying
to answer the question ‘‘Who am I?’’) and problem behaviors. Individuals navigating through ado-
lescence are, as Hall asserted, more likely to question and contradict their parents and authority, dis-
play mood swings, and involve in reckless, antisocial behaviors.
Is the transformation of Vietnamese adolescence in recent decades also a case of adolescence
emerging out of modernization, given that the Reform era (1986–1995) marked one of the most
important political and economic transformations in modern Vietnamese history—one that pro-
pelled Vietnam from a mostly agricultural and closed society to an open one with a market econ-
omy? In this study, I examined this overarching issue by asking the following two questions:

1. How was adolescence conceptualized and represented in Vietnamese media during the
Reform era (1986–1995)?
2. What political, economic, and social factors ran parallel and possibly influenced the concep-
tualization and representation of Vietnamese adolescence in the media during the Reform era?
Nguyen 175

In answering the first question regarding conceptualization and representation of adolescence in

Vietnam, I focused mostly on the following two issues: (1) whether or not adolescence was consid-
ered and represented as a developmental stage between childhood and adulthood and, if yes, what
were considered social markers of that stage and (2) whether or not adolescence was associated with
problem behavior and storm and stress similar to the global adolescent sensibility.

Background: Vietnam during the Reform Era (1986–1995)

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975 after three decades, more than 60 percent of the Vietnamese
people were living in poverty. However, with a sense of victory from the war, the Vietnam Commu-
nist Party (VCP) declared that Vietnam would follow the direct route to socialism without any tran-
sitional capitalist stage, which normally happened to help countries accumulate capital.12 Although
81 percent of the Vietnamese population was then living in rural areas and its industry was nonexis-
tent, the Five-year Plan of 1976–1980 anticipated average annual growth rates for industry to be 16
percent to 18 percent; agriculture, 8 to 10 percent; and national income, 14 percent. Parallel to imple-
menting a centrally planned economy, the VCP also employed a totalitarian approach to other
aspects of sociocultural life, especially the media. The Party declared that only government-
owned-and-censored media were allowed to operate and must ‘‘thoroughly understand the goals and
policies of the Party, constantly connect to the revolutionary realities, clarify the Party’s stand on
topical issues, educate the public on patriotism, socialism, international communism, and provide
the public with useful food for thought.’’13 In other words, the media were merely an educational
and propaganda tool of Vietnam’s communist government. The 1980 Revised Constitution legalized
the principles governing the media as follows:

Article 44: Vietnamese literature and arts are built on the principles and theories of Marxist-Leninism
and follow the artistic vision of the Vietnam Communist Party.

Article 45: All activities related to information, media, publishing, library, broadcast, television, and
motion pictures are developed based on the political, philosophical and artistic vision, in order to direct
the public’s opinion, educate them on political, cultural, and scientific issues, and encourage the whole
society to work hard for the socialist cause.14

At the end of the 1976–1980 Five-year Plan, however, the communist economic strategy proved to
be a failure. Between 1976 and 1980, actual rate of national income growth was 0.4 percent instead
of the expected 14 percent, while industry and agriculture growth rates stood at 0.6 percent and 1.9
percent, respectively. By the mid-1980s, the situation in Vietnam became ‘‘disastrous.’’15 Seventy-
five percent of the population was living below the poverty line and, on average, each individual
only received 300 kilograms of grain per year, a subsistence level. ‘‘Reform or die’’ (Doi moi hay
la chet) became literal to Vietnam, especially when the Soviet Union, the major economic supporter
of Vietnam since the 1950s, was also visibly collapsing while the United States and its allies were
still placing economic sanctions and embargos against Vietnam.16
The Reform period, known in Vietnam as Doi Moi and sometimes ‘‘transition period’’ (thoi ky
qua do), officially started at the Sixth National Congress of the VCP in 1986.17 At this Congress,
the VCP declared the adoption of ‘‘the market economy with a socialist orientation’’ (kinh te thi
truong theo dinh huong xa hoi chu nghia) in which nonpublic sectors were encouraged to expand
while the centrally planned economy was step by step abandoned. Although real economic reforms
were difficult and even moving backward at times between 1986 and 1989, the Vietnamese govern-
ment was keen on forging ahead. In the media, the key word of the discourse was ‘‘doi moi tu duy’’
(thoughts/ideology reform) and Nguyen Van Linh, the General Secretary of the VCP, himself even
held a regular front-page column labeled ‘‘Talk and Act’’ (Noi va Lam) on The People Newspaper,
176 Journal of Family History 40(2)

where he discussed necessary reforms in the thoughts of the government as well as the society. His
message, viewed by society as representing the Communist Party’s standpoint, was clear: tangible
and pragmatic political and economic changes toward modernization (i.e., toward capitalist eco-
nomic principles and Westernization) were the surviving path for Vietnam.
The years between 1990 and 1995 saw further structural reform in the political, economic,
and social scenes of Vietnam after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Responding to these
structural changes, VCP revised the Constitution once again in 1992, declaring that Vietnam
would continue a market economy with a socialist orientation. The revised Constitution also
revealed a significant easing-out of the VCP’s political grip and the state’s involvement in
other aspects of Vietnamese societal life. Most importantly, the revised Constitution allowed
the media to ‘‘reflect the realities of life in Vietnam’’ and operate like financially independent
organizations.18 For the first time, private companies and individuals were allowed to collabo-
rate with the government to start and operate newspapers, television channels, and publishing
companies, even though the government still reserved the exclusive right to own and censor all
forms of mass media.
Between 1991 and 1996, Vietnam averaged an annual growth rate of approximately 8 percent,
among the highest in the world. More than satisfying its own food needs, Vietnam became the
third largest rice-exporting country in the world, behind only Thailand and the United States. It
was estimated that during these important ten years of transition, the poverty rate in Vietnam had
reduced from about 75 percent to 55 percent.19 With the normalization of the relationship with the
United States in July and the admission of Vietnam into the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations that same month, the year 1995 was seen as a high point in the history of modern Vietnam,
somewhat ending the transition phase of the country and marking the full participation of Vietnam
in the global community.

Conceptual Framework
Since this study focused on conceptualization and presentation of adolescence, I used Michel
Foucault’s theory on discourse, power, and knowledge as a theoretical framework.20 According
to Foucault, discourse is a group of statements that creates knowledge and power, is embedded
in the power structure of a society, and is exercised through the authority institutions that pro-
duce and diffuse the discourse. In simpler terms, Foucault argued that we built our knowledge/
conceptualization about a subject matter from internalizing certain key statements publicly
articulated by institutions that had authority in speaking about that subject matter, with or with-
out realizing that the statements chosen to be diffused to us were decided based on the power
struggle among different interest groups within the power system. Discourse, therefore, is not
only a memorandum of realities but also a means to construct realities.
Applying Foucault to the situation in Vietnam, I propose that through studying the discourse
about adolescence, which is constructed and diffused primarily through the mass media, I will
learn not only the conceptualization of adolescence but also the presentations of adolescence, plus
the relationships among the state, the civil society, and the actual adolescents (Figure 1). This the-
oretical framework is suitable to this study in the context of 1986–1995 Vietnam, where the gov-
ernment owned and controlled all means of production and distribution of the media, turning the
media into a direct, influential, and totalitarian mechanism through which Vietnamese people
received information, construct/reconstructed realities, and developed social norms and regula-
tions. This mechanism was executed through a nationwide network of print, radio, and television,
which broadcast unanimous government-approved contents, available free of charge in all house-
holds as well as in public locations.
Nguyen 177

Discourse about Conceptualization of

adolescence adolescence

Adolescents as consumers of
the discourse

Figure 1. Conceptual framework.

Method
Materials and Procedures
Materials. Data for this study are mass media archives, especially newspaper archives. Since news-
papers, 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 com-
mon 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 Newspa-
per) and Hoa Hoc Tro (School-Flowers Newspaper). Both newspapers are the largest circu-
lated among Vietnamese youths.
 Two newspapers targeting a general adult audience: Nhan Dan (The People), the official
voice of the Vietnam Communist Party, published daily and circulated widely and Tien
Phong (The Vanguards), one of the most widely circulated general-interest newspapers in
Vietnam, the official voice of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth League.

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 con-
ceptualization 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 target-
ing 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 orig-
inally 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 pro-
grams, and daily national radio programs for children and adolescents. Vietnam’s national radio pro-
gram (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 addi-
tion, 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
178 Journal of Family History 40(2)

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 conceptua-
lization and representation of adolescence in Vietnam at any given historical moment was con-
tingent 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 con-
ceptualization of adolescence should be examined along the phases marked by these Con-
gresses. 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.

Data Analysis
After data were collected, I coded the data from Thieu Nien and Hoa Hoc Tro in four steps. First, I
read background documents to develop a general picture of the political, economic, and social con-
dition at the examined phase. I also read the issues from Thieu Nien and Hoa Hoc Tro to get a general
sense of salient themes. Second, I developed a coding schema based on these salient themes and ref-
erence to the conceptualization of adolescence from the Western world (Table 1). Third, I started
coding newspaper articles based on the coding schema. The coding process primarily entailed close
critical reading of the articles, noting the explicit language as well as implicit meanings of the arti-
cles and paying close attention to the conceptual domains that I aimed to explore (i.e., adolescence as
a developmental stage, problem behaviors, and storm and stress).
After the first steps, I developed horizontal and vertical meta-themes regarding conceptua-
lization and representation of adolescence from 1986 and 1995, taking into consideration the
larger context of Vietnam. The vertical meta-themes were built by comparing the conceptuali-
zation and representation of adolescence that I constructed from Thieu Nien and Hoa Hoc Tro
with that of other newspapers within each historical phase marked by two consecutive con-
gresses. The horizontal meta-themes compared and contrasted the conceptualization and repre-
sentation over three phases to detect continuities and discontinuities in the conceptualization
and presentation. This final step also compared and contrasted the conceptualization of Vietna-
mese adolescence with that of a global adolescent sensibility and connected it with possible
similarities and differences in the overall historical contexts that might have influenced such
conceptualization.
Nguyen 179

Table 1. Coding Schema.

Results of Coding (The List Is

Codes Coding Guidance Suggestive)

Conceptualization of Is it a distinct developmental stage in the Categories: a developmental stage

adolescence life span?
What are markers for this stage?
How are adolescents Who are defined and described as
portrayed? Prototypes for ‘‘ideal’’ adolescents? Good
ideal, good, and bad adolescents? Bad adolescents?
adolescents?
Adolescence and problem Is adolescence associated with
behaviors problem behavior? How are
adolescents’ problems explained?
What are the interventions and/or
solutions to the problems?
Adolescence and ‘‘storm and Is adolescence associated with ‘‘storm Coding categories: hormones,
stress’’ and stress’’ (i.e., mood swings)?
What is explained as root causes of
their mood swings? Gender
differences, if any, in mood swings?
between childhood and adulthood
versus a political stage.
Categories: age range, puberty
versus marriage, end of school,
employment, or other social rites of
passage?
Categories: revolutionary
contributions, school performance,
social sacrifice, economic success,
general good deeds, and so on.
Categories: obedient, friendly,
revolutionary, radical, independent,
talented, intelligent, rebellious, and
so on
Categories: developmentally driven,
socially driven, and so on.
Categories: Family, school, social
change, evils, adolescents
themselves, the government, and so
on.
Categories: correctional services,
school education, social pressure,
self-improvement, and so on.
environmental factors (family,
school, peers, etc.)
Coding categories: boys versus girls?
Confucian influences? Globalization
influences?

Results
A Reformed Society and the Birth of Vietnamese Adolescence
Analysis of data showed that the Reform era was the first time that adolescence was conceptualized
categorically as a developmental stage in between childhood and adulthood instead of a political
stage as was the case in before the Reform era. Young people aged roughly twelve to eighteen in
Vietnam was, for the first time, recognized as a distinct social group different from children and
adults. Before that, as Nguyen22 pointed out, Vietnamese youths did not have a ‘‘transition stage’’
between childhood and adulthood; rather, most of them variably transitioned directly from child-
hood into adulthood due to the fact that the majority of them started working early on the farm, got
married in the early teens, and did not go to high school or college. By the end of the Reform era,
however, most youths, especially those in urban areas, had the experience of in-between years to
spend on extended education (high school or college), vocational training (for careers outside the
farms), or self-exploration. There were several factors leading to the birth of Vietnamese adoles-
cence during the Reform era, but the most important ones had to do with (1) education reform, par-
ticularly the development of high school, (2) population and family planning policies, and (3) the
180 Journal of Family History 40(2)

birth of new newspapers for adolescents, all of which were in turn rooted in larger political, eco-
nomic, and social reforms aimed at modernizing Vietnam.

Education reforms. One of the most important events contributing to the birth of Vietnamese adoles-
cence 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 work-
force 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 sys-
tem 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 four-
teen 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 dis-
course 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 expan-
sion 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 dic-
tated 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 plan-
ning 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 Con-
cerned 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
Nguyen 181

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 pun-
ished 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 hap-
pened 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 adoles-
cence 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 ubi-
quitous 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 devel-
opment 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 adoles-
cents, 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
182 Journal of Family History 40(2)

suddenly rains and suddenly shines. We are caught by someone’s glance, we suddenly miss and are sud-
denly 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 peo-
ple 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.

Conceptualization and Representation of Adolescence in the Media

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.

Don’t know since when I start to comb my hair more often. Oh look, I even have a mirror and a comb in
my backpack to school.
Don’t know since when I start to like to write poems. And I get sentimental just by looking at a bird
passing outside the window.
Don’t know since when I stop playing freely and carelessly. Toward the boys, I only give them a straight
face.
Don’t know since when I start to get closer to mother. I like to sit and talk to her, like two best friends.
Oh, the day has come. I am no longer little. Bubbling inside me are many dreams and wishes as I enter the
dreamy age.32

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
Nguyen 183

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 devel-
opment, 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 West-
ern 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 ado-
lescence 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 devel-
opment 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
184 Journal of Family History 40(2)

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 beha-
viors 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 grow-
ing 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 illus-
trate 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 iden-
tity 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
Nguyen 185

separating from family (e.g., moving out, starting work, and sharing financial responsibilities), Viet-
namese 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 multi-
generational family bonds that were typical of Vietnamese families and to learn to establish or bal-
ance 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 crys-
tallized 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. Adoles-
cent 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). Ado-
lescent 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 col-
umn 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 psychol-
ogist, 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 rec-
ommendations 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
186 Journal of Family History 40(2)

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 adoles-
cents 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:

Poem: Sunshine and raindrop

It seems that hidden in the sunshine is the boy’s mischief.
It seems that hidden in the raindrops are the afternoons echoed with the sounds of the balm-crickets.
It seems that hidden in the sunshine are the girls’ graceful laughs.
It seems that hidden in the raindrops are the lingering goodbye notes.
The sunshine and the rain will be young forever. And the red flamboyant flowers will be carefree forever.
Dear friends, don’t hold grudges to each other. Don’t make the sunshine and the rain sad.37

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 ado-
lescence 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 frus-
tration, 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 chil-
dren’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), see-
ing 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
Nguyen 187

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 propa-
ganda 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 adoles-
cence as an age likely to be involved in problem behaviors due to biological and psychosocial trans-
formations; 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 eco-
nomic 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 ado-
lescents 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:
188 Journal of Family History 40(2)

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 asso-
ciated with hormonal and biological fluxes, and partially as a matter of personal conduct and mor-
ality. 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 adoles-
cents 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 unan-
imous 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

Nguyen 189

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 con-
sequences 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 citi-
zen; (2) girls should not marry early so that they won’t have children too early, thus not con-
tributing 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 Viet-
namese 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 unprece-
dented dimensions: success in terms of money and fame and success in terms of academic per-
formance. 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 examina-
tions. 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, con-
sumerism, 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, how-
ever, Hoa Hoc Tro often ‘‘cleaned up’’ scandalous details in the lives of entertainment stars and por-
trayed 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 thou-
sands 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.
190 Journal of Family History 40(2)

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 Confu-
cian 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 pro-
file of a student’’ (Guong mat hoc tro), or ‘‘People you want to know’’ (Nguoi em muon biet).

Conclusion
This study set out to examine the conceptualization and representation of adolescence in Vietnamese
media in the decade following the launching of the Reform program (1986–1995)—the starting
point of modernization and globalization in Vietnam. In doing so, this study also tests if adolescence
emerged in Vietnam together with modernization as was the case of adolescence in many societies;
and if so, what were the similarities and dissimilarities between the case of Vietnamese adolescence
and adolescence elsewhere.
Analysis of historical data showed that overall, in the decade following the launch of Reform,
conceptualization and representation of adolescence in Vietnamese media changed significantly
from the periods before, starting with the launch of Hoa Hoc Tro Newspaper, the dominant main-
stream newspaper for the coming of age-group. Different from pre-Reform periods, the conceptua-
lization of post-Reform adolescence, labeled as tuoi moi lon, no longer featured political maturity as
the single most important conceptual dimension. Instead of erecting a collective superior thieu nien
who was a miniature communist, the media about tuoi moi lon in Hoa Hoc Tro built up the normal
youths who tried to navigate through physical changes and mood swings.
In a somewhat similar manner to the emergence of adolescence in the Western world, during the
Reform era, adolescence was conceptualized and represented for the first time as a distinct stage of
development that came between childhood and adulthood, characterized with puberty, mood swings,
Nguyen 191

and identity quest. Vietnamese media thus labeled this age as ‘‘the weird age,’’ ‘‘flower age,’’
‘‘moon age,’’ and inundated their audience with modular scripts and stories depicting adolescents
navigating through ‘‘sudden’’ changes in their physical bodies, thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors.
And somewhat similar to the beginning of the depiction of adolescence in the Western world, the
dawn of adolescence in Vietnam was painted in romantic colors—most notably with the idea that
youth was a precious time, the last innocence that needed to be treasured before one entered com-
plicated adulthood. Mood swings, which were termed storm and stress in Western conceptualization,
were mostly represented in Vietnamese media as romantic sentimentalities captured by the phrase
‘‘rain and sunshine,’’ which reflects Vietnam’s changeable tropical weather. Vietnamese adolescents
during the Reform era were mostly depicted as good-natured young people who were navigating
through physical, psychological, and behavioral transformations to become socially responsible
adults.
These last two observations suggested culturally unique variations in the conceptualization and
representation of adolescence in the Vietnamese media during the Reform era, compared to the glo-
bal concept. There are other variations worth taking note of as well. For one, the appreciation and
romanticizing of adolescence in Vietnam came from a different source than that of the Western
world: it came from the mourning and nostalgia of a nation that suddenly woke up to the loss of its
own youth to past wars and unrealistic communist ideologies. It also derived from a new-found
insight about the monetary value of youthfulness when Vietnamese society was introduced to the
market economy, where even abstract concepts could be measured in monetary terms. These social
factors contributed to a phenomenon I labeled as the ‘‘double-pricing of adolescence that came with
the bittersweet romanticizing of adolescence in Vietnam. But more importantly, true to Vietnamese
culture, Vietnamese media portrayed adolescence as a time to transition to adulthood through recon-
structing familial relationships, which essentially means to become closer and more responsible (i.e.,
to sacrifice) to family rather than separating oneself from family. To the larger society, becoming an
adult in Vietnam often also means being able to comprehend and embrace social norms rather than
being critical of them.
In light of the above-mentioned romanticizing, Vietnamese adolescence was not strongly associ-
ated with problem behaviors although the link existed. One of the more frequently mentioned ‘‘prob-
lem behaviors’’ was the act of getting married early, which coincided with the nationwide program
for family planning. Directly related to this agenda, sexual maturation during adolescence was men-
tioned and strongly discouraged as a matter of preserving innocence, complying with the govern-
ment’s family planning policy as well as with social norms in Vietnam where women were
supposed to remain virgins until marriage. And while problem behavior and sexual maturation were
marginalized, adolescence was portrayed as a time when an individual started to recognize his social
and familial responsibility, particularly through becoming closer to his family—a phenomenon that
was different from Western adolescents who sought to strike out on their own during adolescence.
Examining the Vietnamese media, it’s clear that the Reform era saw an initial yet clear pattern of
convergence of Vietnamese adolescence into a global sensibility with some lingering legacy from
previous decades. On one hand, Western psychological, medical, and social jargon associated with
adolescent puberty and sexual/reproductive health became prominent. In addition, model adoles-
cents now included many Western teen idols, which was unprecedented. On the other hand, the Viet-
namese government and its totalitarian legacy still exerted visible influence by the fact that they
continued to use the media as tools of propaganda and education; thus, they continued to incorporate
national family planning messages as well as sociocultural norms into newspaper contents.
Findings from this study contribute to a rich literature on the history, anthropology, and sociology
of adolescence in the world. Much like the cases elsewhere, Vietnamese adolescence indeed
emerged and took on canonical dimensions of the Western concept of adolescence, with some cul-
tural modifications. The case of Vietnam reminds us not only that cultures and times matter
192 Journal of Family History 40(2)

tremendously in the construction of human identity, behaviors, and norms but also that an organic
relationship exists between social change and young people in a society. Although the study did not
directly present evidence of how modernization, particularly economic factors, influenced the emer-
gence and conceptualization of Vietnamese adolescence, this underlying force can be felt clearly and
is something worth examining in future studies.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
This study is partially funded by the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration’s Disserta-
tion Fellowship.

Notes
1. UNICEF Vietnam, The Survey Assessment of Vietnamese Youth (Hanoi, Vietnam: UNICEF Vietnam,
2005).
2. D. Marr and S. Rosen, ‘‘Vietnamese and Chinese Youth in the 1990s,’’ The China Journal 40 (1998): 145–
172, doi:10.2307/2667457.
3. Committee for Population, Family and Children of Vietnam, Adolescents and Youth in Vietnam (Hanoi,
Vietnam: Center for Population Studies and Information, 2003).
4. H. Nguyen, ‘‘When Development Means Political Maturation: Adolescents as Miniature Communists in
Post-war and Pre-reform Vietnam, 1975-1986,’’ The History of the Family 17, no. 2 (2012): 256–78.
5. J. Arnett, ‘‘Learning to Stand Alone: The Contemporary American Transition to Adulthood in Cultural and
Historical Context,’’ Human Development 41 (1998): 295–315; A. Honwana and F. De Boeck, eds.,
Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa (Oxford, UK: James Currey, 2005);
Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790—Present (New York: Basic Books,
1977); M. Liechty, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Post-war Britain (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976); K. Hurrelmann, ed., International
Handbook of Adolescence (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976); C. Worthman and J. Whiting, ‘‘Social
Change in Adolescent Sexual Behavior, Mate Selection, and Premarital Pregnancy Rates in a Kikuyu Com-
munity,’’ Ethos 15 (1987): 145–65.
6. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (New York: Arno Press, 1969); Kett, Rites of Passage, 1977; John Demos and
Virginia Demos, ‘‘Adolescence in Historical Perspective,’’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 31, no. 4
(2012): 632–38.
7. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
8. J. J. Arnett, ‘‘Adolescent Storm and Stress, Reconsidered,’’ The American Psychologist 54, no. 5 (May
1999): 317–26, accessed October 10, 2012, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10354802.
9. There is a large literature on this issue; to name a few: Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business
Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997); Hall and Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals, 1976; Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, eds.,
Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2008); Honwana and Boeck, Makers and Breakers, 2005; Lietchy, Suitably Modern,
2003; Mary Bucholtz, ‘‘Youth and Cultural Practice,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 31, no. 1 (October
2002): 525–52, accessed October 10, 2012, http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.
anthro.31.040402.085443; Brian Weiss, Street Dreams and Hip Hop Barbershops: Global Fantasy in
Urban Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Cindy Katz, Growing up Global: Eco-
nomic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Nguyen 193

10. Hall, Adolescence, 1969; Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968); Demos and
Demos, ‘‘Adolescence in Historical Perspective,’’ 2012; Kett, Rites of Passage, 1977; Jeffrey Jensen
Arnett, ‘‘Conceptions of the Transition to Adulthood: Perspectives from Adolescence through Midlife,’’
Journal of Adult Development 8, no. 2 (2001): 133–43.
11. Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis, 1968; Jean Piaget, Science of Education and the Psychology of the
Child (New York: Orion Press, 1970).
12. Vietnam Communist Party, Tuyen ngon doc lap nam 1945 va cac hien phap Vietnam [The Declaration of
Independence in 1945 and Vietnam’s Constitutions] (Hanoi, Vietnam: National Political Publishing House
Hanoi, 2005); Vietnam Communist Party, Van kien Dai hoi Dang thoi ky doi moi [Party Documents at the
National Congresses Since Doi Moi] (Hanoi, Vietnam: National Political Publishing House Hanoi, 2005).
13. Nhan Dan Newspaper, January 5, 1975, p. 3.
14. Vietnam Communist Party, Tuyen ngon doc lap nam 1945 va cac hien phap Vietnam, 84.
15. David Dollar and Jennie Litvack, ‘‘Macroeconomic Reform and Poverty Reduction in Vietnam,’’ in House-
hold Welfare and Vietnam’s Transition, ed. David Dollar, Paul Glewwe, and Jennie Litvack (Washington,
DC: The World Bank Publications, 1998), 1–29, 9.
16. Van Luong Hy, ed., Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society (Singapore: Institute of South-
east Asian Studies, 2003).
17. Vietnam Communist Party, Van Kien Dai Hoi Dang Thoi Ky Doi Moi [Vietnam Communist Party’s Doc-
uments Since Doi Moi] (Hanoi, Vietnam: National Political Publishing House, n.d.); Hy, Postwar Vietnam,
2003.
18. Vietnam Communist Party, Van Kien Dai Hoi Dang Thoi Ky Doi Moi, n.d.
19. Dollar and Litvack, ‘‘Macroeconomic Reform and Poverty Reduction in Vietnam,’’ 2.
20. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Interviews, 1972-1977 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
21. Hong Chuong, 120 Nam Bao Chi Viet Nam [120 Years of Vietnam Printed Press] (Ho Chi Minh City, Viet-
nam: Ho Chi Minh Publishing House, 1985).
22. Nguyen, ‘‘When Development Means Political Maturation,’’ 2012.
23. Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training, Quy dinh ve muc tieu va ke hoach dao tao cua truong PTTH
[Regulations on the Education Goals and Plan for the High School] (Hanoi, Vietnam: Education Publishing
House, 1987), 7.
24. Paul Glewwe and H. Jacoby, ‘‘School Enrollment and Completion in Vietnam: An Investigation of Recent
Trends,’’ in Household Welfare and Vietnam’s Transition, ed. David Dollar, Paul Glewwe, and Jennie Lit-
vack (Washington, DC: The World Bank Publications, 1998), 204–5, 201–35.
25. Vu Quy Nhan, ‘‘Family Planning Program in Vietnam,’’ Vietnam Social Sciences 1 (1994): 3–20.
26. J. Banister, Vietnam Population Dynamics and Prospects (Washington, DC: Center for International
Research, 1993).
27. Vietnam’s Congress, Law on Protection of People’s Health, 1989, accessed September 1, 2009, www.
unescap.org.
28. Annika Johansson et al., ‘‘Husbands’ Involvement in Abortion in Vietnam,’’ Studies in Family Planning
29, no. 4 (December 1998): 400–13.
29. Nguyen Thi Nhu Ngoc et al., ‘‘Safety, Efficacy and Acceptability of Mifepristone-Misoprostol Medical
Aboration in Vietnam,’’ International Family Planning Perspectives 25, no. 1 (1999): 10–14.
30. Hoa Hoc Tro, October 15, 1991, Issue 1, p. 2.
31. Hoa Hoc Tro, November 1991, Issue 2, p. 17.
32. Hoa Hoc Tro, ‘‘Khong biet tu bao gio,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, October 15, 1991, Issue 1, p. 4.
33. Nguyen, ‘‘When Development Means Political Maturation,’’ 2012.
34. Vo Thi Xuan Ha, ‘‘Giac mo con buom trang,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, October 15, 1991, Issue 1, p. 7.
35. Nguyen, ‘‘When Development Means Political Maturation,’’ 2012.
194 Journal of Family History 40(2)

36. Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training, Quy dinh ve muc tieu va ke hoach dao tao cua truong PTTH,
1987.
37. Le Binh, ‘‘Tia nang hat mua,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, November 1991, Issue 2, p. 9.
38. Demos and Demos, ‘‘Adolescence in Historical Perspective,’’ 2012; Kett, Rites of Passage, 1977.
39. Tran Duc Cham, Thanh, thieu nien lam trai phap luat [Adolescent and Youth Violatint the Law] (Hanoi,
Vietnam: Education Publishing House, 2002), 51–52.
40. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Dam tang hoa trang,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, November 1991, Issue 2, p. 15.
41. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Tan trong khoi trang,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, December 1991, Issue 3, p. 14.
42. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Bat hoa trong gia dinh,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, July 15, 1992, Issue 16, p. 13.
43. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Vui buon mot mua thi,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, July 30, 1992, Issue 17, p. 7.
44. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Tu nhung la thu khan,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, July 30, 1992, Issue 17, p. 13.
45. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Vi dang,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, October 15, 1991, Issue 1, p. 16.
46. Ibid.
47. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Lai loi ru buon,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, December 1991, Issue 3, p. 5.
48. Hoa Hoc Tro Reporter, ‘‘Ban nhac NKOTB,’’ Hoa Hoc Tro, November 1991, Issue 2, p. 14.

Author Biography
Huong Nguyen, PhD, MSW, MA, is an assistant professor of social work at the University of South
Carolina. Her earlier research on the history of and discourse about Vietnamese adolescence and
sexuality has appeared in Journal of the History of the Family, Journal of Adolescence, Journal
of Sex Research, and Culture, Health, & Sexuality. Her more current research on the development
of social work in Vietnam has been published on British Journal of Social Work and Journal of Reli-
gion and Spirituality in Social Work. She is currently researching models to integrate social work
into mental health care in Vietnam and developing Buddhism-based therapies for people with men-
tal health problems.