Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World.  Rachel Burr.  New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press.  2006. x + 247pp.

Reviewed by: Kathleen Barlow, Associate Professor, Central Washington University

This book is about the experiences and perspectives of disadvantaged children living in the complex circumstances of post-war Vietnam in the late 1990’s.  Burr did field research on children who live away from their families in the context of the new global economy and  the post-war Communist regime.  These children cope with extreme poverty in a complex society guided by multiple social and religious traditions through periods of tumultuous political and economic change. Substantial numbers of children live in urban areas, work on the streets and opportunistically seek ways to improve their lives.  Their activities, such as shining shoes or selling postcards, defy institutional frameworks and/or ideologies of acceptable childhood. They maintain fragile webs of support based on attenuated family ties, shifting peer groups, institutional staff at orphanages or reform schools, NGO workers, and others.

Anthropologist Burr is especially well qualified to study these children because of her experience as a practicing social worker in Britain and expertise in the socioeconomic aspects of social work institutions. In Vietnam she worked from the dual perspectives, those of the children and of the agencies that deal with them.  She tried “to make sense of the reasons for the disparities that occurred in the gap between the two worlds:  the world in which children fought to make a living, often without any understanding that anyone was on their side, and the other world, in which agencies thought they were on the children’s side but often had a limited understanding of the children’s real problems (p. 21).” 

The children’s needs and strategies for surviving, occur in a larger context of efforts to improve their lives that produce poor or at best mixed results. General poverty affects many, destabilizing families. Programs addressed to children often are misguided by the mandate of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), a document formulated on a Western industrialized concept of childhood and child rights. Aid agencies try to implement the UNCRC, but it does not fit with local values or circumstances in its conception of childhood, children’s role in the family and the meaning of child work.  This discussion was opened up in the mid-1990s in volumes edited by Scheper-Hughes and Sargent, and especially Stephens. Burr provides a thoroughgoing picture of the causes and consequences of these global-local intersections and cross-purposes in Vietnam.  She identifies successful efforts to help children by people who really understood local and individual circumstances.  When NGO administrators and workers focused on implementing the UNCRC regardless of local circumstances, their efforts were far less effective, at times even detrimental.

Her goals of understanding the children’s lives led to many questions about categories, stereotypes and well-meant but misguided efforts to help. She critiques labels such as “street children,” or “girl child,” the dangers of imported Western individualism in a collectivist family milieu, and categorical  rejections of “child work”  without regard for the widespread poverty inflicted by global capitalism. 

For psychological anthropologists, the discussions of how children cope on city streets, in institutionalized settings, and in the context of disrupted family lives are the most compelling chapters, and they come at the end.  The last four chapters are most informative about the complex and varied situations of individual children, the challenges they face, and their resilience and resourcefulness, as well as their pain.  These accounts are respectful of each child in terms of how he or she copes, and of the resistance , hesitancy, or trust expressed in sharing personal feelings.

As the picture of framing issues and institutional contexts builds up, Burr’s account gradually incorporates more and more accounts of interactions with and among children, and the insights gained from long-term participant observation.  It also moves from the streets of Hanoi where she began her research to orphanages, reform schools, and NGO programs that are also part of so-called “street” children’s experience.  Vietnam still places restrictions on the movements of its own population and foreigners, and Burr was no exception.  Her ethnography, though conditioned by these restrictions, is impressive for the range of places to which she gained entrée. 

Children find themselves in the city and working on the streets for many reasons.  These include inadequate support for families in poverty, a government-imposed two-child policy, and lack of educational opportunity and/or opportunities to work in their home villages. Many children still have ties to family. Some go back to visit in their villages and some parents continue to try to help when they can.  The children often take pride in the value of working and have goals for education or vocational training that will help them maintain their independence.  While conditions in a reform school or orphanage seem difficult, even bleak, Burr points out instances of positive change and children’s efforts to find help and support.

The lives these children lead make them vulnerable to discrimination, hardship, and degraded self-esteem.   They are stigmatized by the larger society.  Burr describes the efforts of boys at a reform school to overcome these challenges through forms of leader-follower relations, solidarity, and the positive influences of a particularly astute NGO worker who taught classes there.  Girls in an orphanage reflected wider gender patterns and values for women in their willingness to care for younger children and acceptance that brothers often had a better chance of being kept within the family. 

This book would be most useful for courses on culture and childhood, including the politics of childhood in cross-cultural perspective.  Burr takes up some of the ways in which children adjust psychologically to their experiences on the margins of urban life and of family, such as peer group interactions and the symbolism of their tattoos.  The main thrust of the argument is to explain the social and cultural context in which disadvantaged children in Vietnamese society try to sustain themselves, and how such factors as global inequalities and misguided human rights agendas perpetuate the conditions that the children face day to day.