Using a qualitative research method, I explore the experiences of 15 Vietnamese women living in a community in the Maritime provinces of Canada. The data collection involved tape-recorded face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Field and observation notes were recorded during these times. I then provided an analysis of the mothers’ lives to clarify their experiences of exploitation under patriarchy and the simultaneity of oppression by the complex arrangements of class, culture, race, and gender. This multifaceted authority was part of the complex whole that defined their lives. Their lives were committed to struggle and the insistence upon a different and better world to liberate their children from poverty and racial oppression.
The boat was too small for three hundred people. I sat at the bottom of the boat with both legs curled up because there was no room for my legs. We could not stretch our arms. We could not walk on the boat to use the bathroom so we ’did it’ right where we were. People above me urinated and defecated on my head, so my whole body was covered with human waste. Before the journey I had brought with me some gold, money and jewelry hid in my waist-belt. I covered my face with engine oil because I heard about sea pirates... We were robbed four times by them. They searched for gold and food. I was untouched because I was so smelly and dirty. When we boarded the boat my husband wanted my space and gave me a better spot but I did not want it because I wanted my husband and my children to be more comfortable. Fortunately, my worst spot saved my life. I, therefore, still had the gold and jewelry. That’s how we were able to buy food, medicine and goods to sell in the camps. That was how my children lived; they didn’t die of hunger and sickness.
This was the reality for the Vietnamese refugee mothers more than twenty years ago. What has happened to these women and what are their stories and those of the next generation? These are the questions I will discuss in this paper.
In this paper I explored the experiences of 15 Vietnamese women living in a community in the Maritime provinces of Canada. These women came from Vietnam, after the American war, escaped the Communist regime, and arrived in Canada in the 1980s. The purpose of study was to focus on how their experiences at home, at work, and in the community were entangled with relations of class, culture, race, and gender. One of the most striking issues that emerged from my research had to deal with the many ways that the Vietnamese mothers participated in the academic lives of their children. Despite adversities, these women demonstrated great personal courage and strength. A major source of compensation for these Vietnamese women was that despite the hardships and suffering they had personally endured, their children were receiving an education and were excelling scholastically.
In the following sections, I shall provide an analysis of the mothers’ lives to clarify their experiences of exploitation under patriarchy and the simultaneity of oppression by the complex arrangements of class, culture, race, and gender. This multifaceted authority is part of the complex whole that defines their lives. Their lives are committed to struggle and the insistence upon a different and better world to liberate their children from poverty and racial oppression. For Freire (1976), liberation takes place in the transformative action of human beings in the world, under specific historical and social circumstances.
In his early work with Brazilian peasants, Paulo Freire developed a theory of education based on the dialogical interaction which focuses on those who were deemed hopelessly ignorant or incapable of learning as a result of their economic deprivation and lack of access to the educational systems of the wealthy.
Freire’s overriding goal of empowerment for oppressed Brazilian peasants entailed distinct but closely related steps including the validation of the “voices” of the people who are traditionally deprived of legitimate participation in political as well as civil society. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire wrote “Dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution. This is what makes it a revolution, as distinguished from a military coup.” (p. 122)
In Freire’s view, since humanization is a ‘dialogical’ process, denying someone else’s humanization is also denying one’s own. Dehumanizating another one is also dehumanizing oneself, although in a different way and with different implications and consequences. For Freire, working on the problem of their own material condition, those who are oppressed can come to a self-consciousness or critical consciousness which can ultimately transform their condition—what Freire calls conscientizaçao (p.19). That is, by working on that which is the subject of one’s domination, one not only sees the need for transformation, but enacts in the subject of oppression the need for self-reflection, which causes the subject to enter into the dialectic with its object. Giroux (2001) reminds us that not only does libratory theory utilize the dialectic in its approaches to teaching, but by nature it is itself dynamic, thus continually inventing and reinventing itself.
Aronowitz (2003, p. 229) calls for “class alliance” which he refers to “social formations which, because of their economic, political, and cultural exclusion from power, organize into movements that seek to change the conditions of life.” Freire argues that the work of those committed to liberation lies in bringing the ideals of socialism and democracy together (Freire, 1996, p. 188), and he is adamant that “the universal solidarity of the working class is far from being achieved, but it is essential and we must struggle for it (Freire & Faundez, 1989, P. 59). Freire states:
I don’t believe in self-liberation. Liberation is a social actÃÂ even when you individually feel yourself most free, if this feeling is not a social feeling, if you are not able to use your recent freedom to help others to be free by transforming the totality of society, then you are exercising only an individualist attitude towards empowerment of freedom. (Freire & Shor, 1987, p. 109).
In exploring Freire’s philosophy including the elements of Paulo Freire’s ontology, epistemology, and ethic, Roberts writes (2003) that Freire’s moral philosophy is “built on a dialectical conception of reality and an epistemology in which theory and practice are dynamically related. In Freire’s view, according to Roberts, “knowledge is always evolving” and “human beings are always in a state of becoming.” Freire (1973) sees humanization as an ontological and historical vocation of human beings. “Humans pursue their vocation of becoming more fully human when they engage in authentic praxis, through dialogue with others, in a critical conscious way.” (p. 175).
This study explored the experiences of 15 women of color; more specifically, the women who emigrated to Canada from South East Asia. Immigrant women, in general, have been underrepresented, misrepresented, or ignored in the literature. Through extensive in-depth interviews, I seek to provide an account of how immigrant Vietnamese women understand and negotiate gender, race, and class relations in their homes, in the work place, and in the community.
These 15 women who were interviewed for this study all grew up in Vietnam. Even though they resided in different neighborhoods in Canada, they share a common heritage in and identity with Vietnamese communities in there. The women shared one basic characteristic: all were mothers, aged 30-60, with children living at home, except for one woman whose children lived with her ex-husband. The women differed, however, with regards to the stage of the life they were in, income, and marital history. The women were Vietnamese refugees and came to Canada at different times after the Vietnam War (a.k.a. the. American War in Vietnam). The families had annual incomes $15,000 to $30,000.
I participated in the cultural festivities, making my observations there. Participant observation broadened the range of situations in which the occurrences of sexism could be witnessed. At the festivity, it was pleasant to act both as a participant and as an observer. During the time of observation, I noticed peoples’ different ways of participating in the group.
I interviewed the women during the evenings, mornings, and weekends, primarily in their homes. Most of the interviews lasted between two to three hours. The data collection involved tape-recorded face-to-face interviews, and field and observation notes were recorded during these times. These semi-structured interviews consisted of open-ended questions designed to explore a few general topics. They were designed not only to gain information from the participants’ own words but also to gain insight on how participants interpreted their world. Being Vietnamese myself enabled me to engage comfortably with the participants. I asked their permission to record the interviews by tape recorder so that I could engage in the informal conversations while maintaining eye contact without interruptions.
After each interview, I transcribed the tape and translated it into English. Throughout this paper, extensive and lengthy quotes from the women were used. In addition, some excerpts of the participants were included to give texture to the analytic conclusions and to provide samples of the kind of evidence upon which those conclusions are based. Furthermore, as is in common qualitative studies, rich detail about the participants, the process, and the analysis also invites readers to determine transferability of results in the data (Creswell, 2002; Mertens, 1998; Patton, 1990; Taylor & Bogdan, 1998). Interpretations also included my observations at churches, temples, and social gatherings within the Vietnamese community.
While writing this paper I provided some specific information about the individuals interviewed, to indicate characteristics that might facilitate interpreting interview excerpts. I assigned fictitious names to the participants and sometimes I included excerpts with more specific information. I indulged in the reverie that I “know” the participants in a specific and collective way.
From their stories, I saw the daily prejudice and racism, and the passive way in which the women incorporated it into their speech and accepted it in their everyday lives. The racism they experienced became habitual life experience. The need to survive took precedence over resistance of racism. The Vietnamese women internalized societal limitations. The survival need surfaced in the workplace and in the communities. The pictures of internalized limitations were compounded by the Vietnamese’s limited employment opportunities. Trang, for example, asserted that she has to work “double hard... be twice as good to get half as much.” She felt that she had to work harder because she was different, or more specifically, because of her color. She also expressed that as a woman in a male dominated profession she also had to work harder than men to gain respect from the male doctors. She was not only fighting for her gender but also for her race and her status as well. These women experienced a double burden (Ng. 1982) having two shifts of work: One in the labor force and one at home. The women found themselves even more dependent on their husbands as a result of the absence of access to language training skills. Only men and single women were allowed to take language courses. Each year more than 50,000 women immigrate to Canada and many of them are married at the time of their arrival, and therefore classified by Canadian immigration officials as dependents. Because they are dependent immigrants, they do not receive financial support from government agencies for language training (Employment and Immigration, Canada, 1988). This means that these women could find only low paying jobs in service industries and in the sewing factory. They were admitted to Canada by the Canadian immigration policy as dependent by virtue of being female and being mothers and wives. Lack of knowledge of English led the women toward employment in factories. At the factory, little opportunity exists to learn English or other job skills: “We work constantly with the machines,” Hong revealed: “I went to MISA (Metropolitan Immigrant Settlement Association) and asked them for help to obtain training so I could do office work, but they said I should learn more English. But I have to work; my husband does not make enough money. At night, I have to stay at home with the children because my husband works in the evening. And at home I have to cook, clean, and help my children with their school work. I stay up to 12 a.m. every night.”
At the factory they were exploited, working constantly without a break in a sub-standard building. Hoa Tran typified these women’s experience: “We worked in a big room with no windows. In the summer it was too hot and in the winter the building was too cold. Yet we never got paid enough for what we worked for. Our pay checks were always short; that was, we worked for 50 hours a week but we got pay for only 40 hours...we never dared complain because we were afraid to get fired.” Once in these job ghettos, they have little opportunity to leave. In addition, they are motivated to stay because there are more immigrant women with whom they can communicate, and they support and protect each other from a racist world. Thuy said: “Until now I couldn’t speak English well because we never had an opportunity to talk in English. At the factory, we only talked very little. I don’t like sewing but I don’t know what else to do.”
In the work place, if they have to work with whites, they have to be on guard constantly. Trang experienced harassment by her colleagues either criticizing or devaluating her in the eyes of authorities. Subsequent negative evaluations can jeopardize a woman’s career. But Trang is a very ambitious woman; she always wants to do her best. Therefore, petty harassment from her white colleagues actually motivated her to work harder and kept her trying to learn more to improve her career. She was also working toward her Master’s degree. Trang claimed: “If they know that their prejudice motivates me to be even more successful and progress in my career, they will realize they are not very smart in destroying me...I have to do well in a way I interpret their behavior as the ammunition and incentive for me to work hard and to be more successful than they are.”
The following illustrations selected from a range of experiences of racism of the participants are structured by the properties and constraints of the situation. Whether it concerns a small or a large shop, race and class concepts surfaced in which colored people are criminalized in any situation, and assumed not to have money to pay. From the moment they enter to the moment they leave the shop, people of color are put under strict surveillance, even while they are browsing. Hoa Tran described this as follows:
I noticed when I go to the Bay the sales people there always followed me and looked at me suspiciously. I felt uncomfortable but I just ignored them. I usually dressed nicely because if I dressed casually they would not want to serve but look at me vigilantly. When I looked around, the sales people were very eager to serve the white Canadians. I felt hurt; well I just ignored it.
Nhan reported: Even though I owned a shop in this mall I was still watched closely when I went up to the Woolco department store to buy something. The clerks followed me, and looked over my shoulder. I ignored them, then I didn’t care anymore because in my opinion they were just wasting their time in following me.
Other women reported that the shop personnel in boutiques are more likely to look suspiciously at them because it is presumed that Asian women do not have money to spend anyway. In some stores, some of the women were harassed by the clerks because they could not speak English even though they paid for their goods and never questioned if they were overcharged. Casual browsing became a nuisance when the women were “being followed constantly”. Whether it concerns a small or a large shop, race and class concepts surfaced in which colored people are criminalized in any situation, and assumed not to have money to pay. From the moment they enter to the moment they leave the shop, people of color are put under strict surveillance, even while they are browsing.
Other stories show how the class factor has an important role to play in the experience of and reaction to racism. Thoa, for instance, shared her experience: “We were turned down for an apartment many times. They told us that the apartment was taken when we got there to see it. Then we asked a Canadian to call for us, and the apartment was still available.”
Chau experienced harassment and brutal treatment in her own home by the local police and the whites. She was attacked by a local woman who, according to Chau, was trying to “rip her off”, yet accusing Chau of assault. Chau’s trauma demonstrated that prejudice and discrimination is still strong. Here is her story:
The woman from the bank...she always gave me a hard time but always brought her business to me and never wanted to pay full price. One day she asked me if I could send her blouse to the dry cleaner because there were some stains on the collar. I told her that I would try for her but I did not know because I don’t do dry cleaning. So I sent it to the drycleaner...when the shirt was sent back. She arrived at the shop and I hung the blouse outside the counter so the woman could take it. She put her money on the counter while she was looking at the blouse and screamed ’oh my God.’ You ruined my blouse now the collar is more blurred with different colors. she screamed very loudly and I panicked. I reached over the counter and patted her on the shoulder to try to calm her. I was telling her, ’don’t worry I will send your blouse back to the dry cleaners and get them to fix it, don’t worry. Unfortunately her friends heard her screaming and ran to her to see what was going on. She screamed and hit me. Then she yelled: “help!” I panicked and didn’t understand why she was saying that I was hitting her. I was trying to calm her, and to reassure her that her blouse will be fixed. But she ran off with her friends and did not listen to what I was saying.
The next day her husband came to my shop. He approached me, pointed his fist to my face and pushed me against the wall. He was very big I was very scared. I explained to him that I never wanted to hit your wife and he threatened me and said something but I didn’t understand. Three weeks afterward a police woman called me on the phone and said that she would come to my house at about 9:00 p.m. My husband and I waited nervously for her to come but she didn’t show up or call. Two weeks later she showed up at my house in the evening to investigate the incident. I told her the whole thing and told her the last thing in this world I wanted to do was to hit anybody. I never wanted any trouble like this, I have two sons to raise; I would never do things like that. I also told her about the woman’s husband and what he did to me but the police woman ignored that and told me to get a lawyer which she knew that I could not afford and she summoned me to go for finger prints. I was devastated because I didn’t do anything to deserve this kind of treatment. The next day I went to the police station with the summons and had my picture and finger prints taken. I was very depressed that I was only trying to help my customer and now I had got into trouble. I asked my customers who were also lawyers and they told me that police should not be involved because police didn’t witness the incident. I had to obtain a lawyer which was very expensive even though I could not afford it. I was acquitted by the judge. But I am still very upset because of the way the police woman treated me. Then I found out that the police woman’s father is the president of the bank that the accuser works for, and I think the police woman favor the accuser and also because I am colored with limited English; I don’t know the law here, that is why they treated me that harshly.
Chau showed me the summons in which she was charged under section 266 B in the Criminal Code. I called the police station and was informed that there is no need for finger prints and a picture to be taken for this section. So I took Chau to the police station and complained. A sergeant talked to us and finally admitted that the police woman made a mistake to request Chau to go through this procedure, and also that the police woman should not have been involved because it was a minor incident. Furthermore, she did not witness the incident and there was no medical record which meant no physical evidence from the accuser. He apologized to Chau and promised that he would have a meeting with the police woman, and also the officer who took Chau’s picture and finger prints. He also said that he would talk to the police woman’s supervisor to find out if she has a pattern of treating minorities more harshly and he would call me in two weeks and let me know the outcome of the investigation. However, he never called. I took Chau to see the director of MISA. The director talked to the police chief and he denied any wrong doing on the part of the police woman.
This incident suggests that the color line has in fact been constant, and that it has expressed itself in discriminatory acts, except when extraordinary circumstances have temporarily blurred it. When, after a period of acceptability, ethnic groups again experience prejudice, it is not necessary to look for special reasons for the rise of that prejudice. The reasons have always been there in the inherent color line.
The analysis and evidence this section has provided has tended to refute the erroneous views that race is a biological question and that racial conflicts arise from cultural misunderstandings. The prejudice and discrimination of racial groups is by no means an historical accident, but is rooted in the social, economic development of Canadian society. Another aspect of racial prejudice is the psychological and social impact institutional prejudice produces among minority members. To the extent that members of the dominant and subordinate groups have unequal access to rights and privileges, such inequality is institutionalized and rationalized by the theory supporting the inherent superiority and inferiority of racial groups. Thus, it is fair to say that racism is a basic feature of our society.
The Vietnamese share a common cultural heritage since the Chinese ruled Viet Nam for a thousand years and imposed a rigid Confucian hierarchy that left indelible marks on Vietnamese history and culture (Chu, 1985). Confucian ideology was a way of life and a system of beliefs that defined women as beasts of burden and objects of contempt. In practice, the Confucian notion of man’s inborn superiority: “Men are to be respected, women despised,” laid the basis for the sexual division of labor.
Many of the women married young and had children during their teenage years. For some, marriage seemed the only escape from poverty, and many of the women were forced to get married or felt that they had no choice because of family pressures. Most lacked formal education beyond some years in high school. Many experienced great brutality from men, including severe beatings from their husbands. Several of the men refused to do housework or to help with the children, making their wives’ lives more unbearable. All of the mothers worked long, long hours. Yet the dream of liberation, the need for ritual, the desire for academic achievement for their children, the drive to nurture the human spirit continually rekindles the patterns of mothering that promotes academic success for these women’s children.
These mothers devoted themselves deeply to their families in all aspects, from economy to emotion. To these women, their family life was valuable and important and had to be protected and nurtured ’by women, who alone had the ability to create an emotionally supportive environment for others in the midst of oppression and domination. Their lives were difficult since most of them worked outside the home for long hours. The home was viewed as belonging to women: as their special domain, not as property, but as a place where the warmth and comfort of shelter are provided for its members, the place where its members’ bodies and souls are fed and nurtured. Confucianism dictates that women are also responsible for teaching their children dignity, morality and integrity: “an untaught child is not a person.” This creates a triple-day job for the women. Hoa Tran discussed her work at home: “As soon as I get home from work, I go right into the kitchen and start cooking.ÃÂ while I am cooking with my hands, my mouth, and my eyes are with the boys ... do your spelling...do your math..”
The women discussed the ways in which their husbands attempted to control them. Hong’s husband was also critical about Hong’s social life. Hong said “... he called me a whore when I dressed nicely ... and did not like it if I went out with other women .... I told him don’t tell me what to do ... I can go anywhere if I want to ... he did not want me to talk to you ....” To these men, I, too, was a threat to their marriage since I had left my own marriage. For Hong, recognizing herself as a person with authentic needs and her own views, and socializing with her friends – including participating in my research – were acts of independence, a first step of the liberation that Freire (1993) calls “praxis’“and views as the way to emerge from an oppressive situation.
I also noticed that Thoa’s husband was very controlling of her. He had warned Thoa not to talk “too much,” and told her not to tell me about the arguments between them. Thoa’s husband allowed her to meet me; but he had instructed Thoa as to what to say. Furthermore, he did not let Thoa attend social gatherings with other women very often, and most of the time Thoa obeyed his orders. Thoa’s relationship with her husband can be described as “prescription” in that her behavior is prescribed and guided by her husband (Freire, 1993). This view, according to Friere, reflects the hierarchical male-female, dominant-subordinate relationship. As he suggests: “The oppressor’s consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, productions, the creations of people, people themselves...” (p.40). As Xuan shared: “well, I have to listen and obey my husband ... I want harmony ... for my children to concentrate on their studying. I never talk back to him ... just say yes to him ... my sister said I am stupid ... but I am comfortable with my marriage so why would I change it?” This reflects Freire’s view that achieving freedom is painful: “Liberation is thus a childbirth ... the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor and no longer oppressed ....” (p.31)
It was apparent from the way the women talked about their domestic rows, that the threat and reality of physical violence from men was commonplace. Nhan had taken the courageous step of leaving her husband because her husband tried to control her and decide how Nhan should spend her time. Nhan was fortunate in having her parents, who recognized her problem and helped her find a place to live, away from her husband. Le Anh had left her husband and sought legal advice. However, le Anh went back to her husband for the sake of her children.
Le Anh, as well as Hong, did not want her daughter to have a life, job, and marriage like they have had. Both women tried very hard to communicate with their daughters and wanted to provide all the opportunities they could for them. Hong expressed the following sentiment, which was typical of most of the other women in the study:
My daughter does not understand me, she thinks I am hard on her, but she doesn’t understand that I want her to study hard to have a good education and become independent ... you know, my father didn’t allow me to go to college because I was a daughter, a girl; females should not have higher education. That is how I ended up in this dead-end job ... I have no future and now I am old ... I want to go to school but I have to work for my children ... I get really mad when they don’t want to study ....
These mothers’ desire was to come to Canada so that their daughters could escape the female’s powerless role that Vietnamese women inherited. All of the women who had daughters saw the opportunity for their daughters to look at the many chances in life, to take advantage of these, to be strong, and to not become dependent on men.
All the mothers spoke with great warmth and affection about their children. They gained prestige and power through their children. To them, education was the most important issue for their children. However, at the same time, the Confucian patriarchs consider women unworthy of an education. For centuries, only a few women attended school. Female children had no opportunity to rise above their inferior status. In that time period the Vietnamese followed the Chinese system of education, which barred women from learning. Until contemporary times, the Vietnamese considered education wasted on women. Only in wealthy families, with rare exceptions, did daughters succeed in getting an education. Living in this new cultural context, and having more opportunities than they had in their homeland, the women of this study strongly encouraged their daughters to achieve a higher education. With a higher education their daughters can achieve equality with men. These are the hopes and dreams that carry across oceans and generations. Therefore, education, for these women, took on an even greater importance and was the cornerstone for their daughters’ emancipation from female oppression. They believed that only when women have reached the same ’cultural level’ as men, can they be emancipated. This concept of attaining a new cultural level for their daughters emphasizes educational achievement along with political consciousness. Every woman I talked to pointed to the same need: to increase women’s competence.
Perhaps the most universal theme in these women’s statements is that they are working so their children – daughters and sons – will not have to go into laborer’s work. A typical comment was: “I tell my daughter all the time: get a good education, stay in school. I want you to get a good job, not like me. That’s what I always tell my daughter: make sure you’re not stuck.” In a similar vein, Hong told me: “I don’t want my daughter to follow in my footsteps as far as working is concerned.” The parents emphasize the ethics of hard work and the importance of the learning process. Ngo explained: “I told my children that they have abilities and opportunities to study. Therefore, they must try to study. We will do anything and everything to support their education no matter how long it takes.” When they succeeded in helping their children to do better than themselves, these women considered the hardship in this society worthwhile.
These women workers thus have to grapple with yet another contradiction. They must confront, acknowledge, and convey the undesirable nature of the work they do to their children, as an object lesson and an admonition. At the same time they have to maintain their children’s respect, and their own sense of personal worth and dignity. They successfully manage that contradiction, and they refute their white employers’ and neighbors’ belief that “you are your work.”
From the women’s stories, I contend that these are stories of heroism, resistance and liberation. The women’s resistance is informed by the logic of survival. For the women, survival has meant both physical sustenance and an emotionally connected relationship for themselves and their children. Xuan, for example, while still in Vietnam, with incalculable strength, endurance, wit, and audacity, rescued her children and saved as many members of her family as she could. Rebellion, defined from her point of view, was to protect the integrity of her family and to save her children’s lives. The actions she took were based on the context of relationships and on standards of responsibility and caring versus those of right and justice. Xuan proceeded from concern for the survival of her children, focused on goodness and on the principle of understanding non-violence as her guide to the resolution of the moral conflict she was facing with the Communist government (Gilligan, 1982). Xuan reported:
When my husband was taken away and was sent to the re-education camp, I was left with eight children; the youngest was one month old, and the oldest was 10 years old, I was alone, the government confiscated our property and money. They also took away the food allowance because they wanted to punish us because my husband was a major. There were many times when my children went to bed with empty stomachs. I was usually very quiet and compliant, but then I fought very hard. I complained to the higher officers, I sat at the office with my children. Every day I went to the office to complain with eight kids who ran around their office. That really worked. Finally they gave us back the food allowance. I also opened a sidewalk restaurant in front of my house. I sold rice noodle soup and dessert. Again the government gave me a hard time. They watched my house every day, which made difficulties for my business because customers did not want to come to eat where the secret police observed them. I screamed at them. You know, they could have put me in jail. But I didn’t care; my children’s survival came first. Then they gave up surveillance. From then on the business boomed. I got up at 3:00 a.m. every morning and stayed up until midnight almost every night. I was able to save money. I secretly sent my two eldest sons to escape with my sister. I also sent money to my husband ....
Xuan knew that her own survival and that of her children depended upon her. Raised to be dependent on a male provider, socialized to defer to judgment and authority, she was faced with a tremendous challenge. What she understood in particular was that while women were deeply oppressed, they were not passive, compliant, victims. The women strove on.
From these stories, I can see the particularity of women’s labors, in the ways in which the women bore this terrible responsibility for feeding and clothing their families under “impossible” conditions. “Failure” led to almost certain death. Minh and most other women told me:
We planned to escape, but we carried out the daily routine normally. We didn’t even tell our friends, relatives, parents, or even our children. If the government had known that we were trying to escape they would have put us in jail. Now, sometimes we still talk about that; we try not to forget.
The life stories from the journeys and the refugee camps may be seen as examples of women’s audacity and heroism, and such heroism has not been acknowledged. While showing great courage, these are also the stories of ordinary women performing their everyday tasks under siege. The very routine nature of their work, carried out with a stubborn, inexorable strength was the bedrock that gave meaning to life and served as the underpinning that made all else possible. For the women, camp life presented an astonishing array of contradictions and irony, and their resistance strategies and consciousness reflected this. They set about making life bearable. In the refugee camps, the women used blankets, for example, to erect ‘partitions” in the barracks, creating at least a modicum of private space. Scraps of lumber and metal used in the construction of the camps were salvaged to make shelves, chairs, tables, and other amenities of a home. Thoa told: “I went to the woods, picked up some wood and I made tables and chairs from it. I went down to the beach to gather lumber and so we built our ’house’. I picked up canvas bags which were washed to the shore and I made blankets and clothes from them.” Minh described her plight:
There were too many people and no sanitation. People died of diarrhea because we used the river for cooking and drinking; we also used the same river for bathing and washing. We were allowed to go outside the camps to buy food and I bought food and brought it back to the camp and cooked and sold it to the refugees. I made a little bit of money and bought medicine for my children. I bought canned food and sold it at the camps. So my family was a little bit better off than other refugees. I grew vegetables and flowers so we had fresh vegetable and flowers every day. I had a little garden. Sometimes I went to the village to get my hair done.
In this context, concerns such as gardens and home improvements were part of each woman’s struggle for normalcy. They were part of a struggle to provide for their families and protect their children from the worst and most degrading features in the refugee camps.
The irony was that the struggle for normalcy, inexorably pressed toward assimilation and eroded cultural and family bonds. The struggle for independence and co-partnership in marriage must be balanced against the tensions that may finally break it. When there are children involved, the balancing is harder. Chau Truong’s rebellion at this point is overt and stated; Xuan’s is not. Xuan is aware of the unfairness of her inequality, but for her children’s future her strategy here is to accommodate herself to her husband’s wishes. For Xuan, in weighing the balance of things, this seems the best strategy for maintaining the quality of her daily life and that of her children, at the present time. For Nhan, weighing the balance of things, the break-up of her marriage will improve the quality of her children’s lives. The women weigh choices such as these every day. Weighed individually and in contrast to the greater power exercised by men in general in society, the women’s choices are limited.
The point of rebellion is not contained in the act of opposition or compliance, but in the conscious process (Freire, 1993) of mothering the Vietnamese-Canadian children of the next generation and in the estimation of what is necessary to sustain or improve their quality of life. It is this estimate, repeated over time and circumstances, and enforced by the mothers, that eventually changes the grounds of choice from which their children in future generations will negotiate the complex balance of their lives and those of their children (the mothers in my study believe with higher education their children will have more options). Central to Freire’s pedagogy (1993) is the practice of conscientization; that is coming to a consciousness of oppression and a commitment to end that oppression. Conscientization is based on this common experience of oppression, of which the oppressed will come to knowledge. Basic to the Freirean method of conscientization, is the belief in the ability of all people to be knowers. In Freirean pedagogy, it is through the interrogation of their own experiences that the oppressed will come to an understanding of their own power as knowers and creators of the world; this knowledge will contribute to the transformation of their world. For example, Hong explained:
I was very depressed because my husband was trying to control me. I wanted to leave my husband, but I didn’t because my children would have been devastated. They would not have a father ... but by myself I was worried that I could not make enough money to support my children ÃÂ I have no parents here to stay with. With my limited English I had no choice. I hope my daughter will not have a job and a marriage like mine ... she will not have to slave for her husband ....
Other women expressed a similar wish that their daughters would not have a life like their’s. What was apparent in these stories as well was that employment provided only the beginning potential for women’s independence. However, much is weighed heavily in the balancing of these choices: the need for an emotional connection, the genuine feelings of affection, the socially ingrained and deeply felt responsibility for the success of a marriage (Hancock, 1989), women’s internalized oppression (especially the feeling that one is being selfish or trivial or unreasonable), fears of impoverishment (especially as a head of a household, on women’s wages), of racism, of the burden of childrearing, of failing to provide children with a “normal” family life. Thuy expressed her sentiment: “The happiness of the family is dependent on the woman. I try to accommodate each of my sons. I never complain. My husband has never heard me complain either, because he works hard and he does not stay home often; he stays home for three weeks then goes again. I try to give my children the best atmosphere possible. So my children can concentrate on their school work.”
The women also wanted to protect their daughters from both the hardships and the dangers of low wage jobs and subsequent dependence on men. They all expressed their hopes for their daughters: “I hope they may be able to escape life as a dependent wife, a slave for their husbands.” Through their struggles they provide adequate conditions for their children’s survival and growth; through their wrestling with difficult circumstances they sustain and maintain serenity for their families.
From my observations, I found that the mothers are very resourceful, strong, competent, and inventive. They see and know in distinct and important ways. They spend frugally, yet their children do not feel the lack of material things. They know how to invest money for their children’s university in a safe way and how to earn money in arduous work. Most of the mothers I talked to are the only person at home to decide where and how the money should be spent and invested, through their continuous learning of what values to abandon and to adjust, how to raise the children to be normal in the two cultures, and what kind of family values should be maintained. Yet, they also internalize their sense of nothingness when they are without a man, and are sometimes weak and deferential, petty and competitive.
Many of the mothers displayed many of their attributes and handicaps depending on context (Lindsay, 1989). These paradoxes come from the imbalance of power between women and men, from racial hierarchies, and from their class status. The mothers try to ameliorate the imbalance. They often strive to do this in their daily lives, by trying to circumnavigate the powers of gender and race and class, to build decent relationships, to live well,and to invest their daily existence with meaning. Nevertheless, there is an absence of anger in their voice. Every day these mothers create their own identity, carve their own way through problems in a racist and sexist world, and set their own standards of values and self-worth.
Through my interviews, I was able to see the ways in which the mothers sought to sustain the web of Vietnamese culture. There is no psychological mechanism to overcome the fears of selection, betrayal, and annihilation, even decades after the war is over. These fears are communicated to the next generation. The mothers, within the orbit of their responsibilities and their will to survive, endeavor to sustain the culture and its rituals, to preserve the life cycles, to make things as normal as possible. For the mothers, the struggle for normalcy was a strategy of recalcitrance from oppression, which was marked by the struggle to improve their children’s daily lives. Their descriptions of their daily activities provide the emergent themes of creating an environment that is conducive to learning. The traditional Vietnamese view education as a source of prestige, which has made parents eager to have their children successful in this educational system. Education is associated with an intrinsically higher purpose and, consequently, the learned individual is admired and esteemed by community members regardless of material status or wealth. These mothers instilled the fundamentals of Vietnamese culture by the expectations they voiced and the rules they established for their children. They focused on improving the quality of daily life for their children and monitoring their children’s learning activities. Hong told me:
Every night, I keep them inside. I lock all the doors and windows. I check them to make sure they are warm, make sure their windows are closed, and make sure they don’t have nightmares. I remind them to go to bed on time so that they will not be tired. They [the children] study very hard. They often ask my advice and tell me about their friends, their conflicts, and their struggles as teenagers.
They restricted their children’s activities, to protect their children from negative peer influences that might affect their children’s academic achievements. “We want them [the children] to associate with kids who study hard.” In preventing children from falling prey to the lure of bad friends, as they grow older, the mothers are vigilant about keeping the kids inside the house after school to do homework, and discouraged or even prohibited them from dating, which they thought might distract their children’s learning. Some of them did not allow their children to date until they completed their university education, because they saw dating as disruptive to their study habits and educational plans.
Here in this new environment, these mothers emphasize education to both their sons and daughters. They further their goals for high quality education by making strategic choices that they believe will best benefit their children. The strategies they employ in their daily lives are relative to their conditions.
Several times a year, the Vietnamese Association in metro Halifax celebrates cultural festivities. Cultural celebrations thus generate a strong feeling of togetherness for the Vietnamese community. The structure of friendship of the women involved in the preparations for the festivities is very widespread across all age groups. The women volunteer their time to cook and prepare for the festivities. They make the Vietnamese traditional food and desserts and sell them at the festival. The money they make is put into the society. From my observations, these mothers participated in these activities under both social and competitive grounds with each other. They compared each other’s children’s achievements as a sort of competition. The Vietnamese parents competed with each other about whose children won more scholarships, whose children were best with computers or mathematics, whose children went to medical school, and whose children dropped out of school.
Since the parents invested their lives, hopes, and dreams in their children being successful in Canada, the children were their escalators to the upper parts of the social ladder. Their children felt a great obligation to fulfill their parents’ wishes. These children were working extremely hard as well. They were expected to be the top in school, in music, and in sports. Some children I talked to told me that they often carry a great feeling of guilt if they do not do well. It is apparent that those who fulfill their obligation toward their parents’ wishes will have better lives, achieving a more comparable status to the white Canadians than their parents have had. However, those who could not succeed academically gave their parents both a great feeling of pain and a sense of embarrassment in the Vietnamese community.
In their efforts to resist the incursions and assaults on the quality of their daily lives, the women have bonded together in love and friendship. Xuan and le Anh, for example, go to the temple every Sunday to help the monks clean up, while their husbands fix and build the temple. They meet other Vietnamese families at the temple, exchange food, and work together. The women focus on improving the quality of daily life and on strengthening the connections between people in family, at work, in the community, and in the Buddhist temple (Belenky, Clinchy, Golberger, & Tarule 1986). In the context of a society in which the quality of daily life is continually undermined and in which connections between people are continually threatened, such strategies, which form the vitality of life, are strategies of defiance. In this context, nurturing acculturation, education, and cultural pride become a form of involvement; especially, of parenting practices that support their children’s academic development for success. The Vietnamese families provided and structured their home environment to be conducive to learning and held high academic and moral expectations for their children. They gave their children unconditional love and used storytelling to transmit educational, cultural, and moral values.
These mothers narratives provide evidence of a different way of understanding these issues, and of thinking about direct parental involvement and parenting practices. The children’s academic performance records attest that they have internalized their mothers’ messages about the importance of academic achievement.
At the end of the interview, Xuan told me: “Tan, ... keep fighting for our rights, women’s rights, and minority rights ....” Fighting against discrimination is an ethical imperative (Freire, 1997a, p. 87). In Paulo Freire’s sense of the “oppressed” (1973), persons so disabled by their race and class that they can scarcely chart their paths through the world have to be aroused to a consciousness of how their reality is constructed and have to be challenged to “name” their lived worlds and, through the naming, to transform those worlds (p. 78).
The women have endured the relentless incursions of poverty, racism, and persecution by men. Le Anh was profoundly right when she concluded that: “Vietnamese women’s strength lies not so much to counter the tactic of power of corporations and institutions, but in their ability to survive poverty, humiliation, and isolation from the rest of the world. There is no room for weakness in this life. We have to work hard to extricate our children from poverty and oppression.”
The women celebrate cultural traditions and part of their vision of the future is bound up with their commitment to their children. They want their daughters to have opportunities to pursue education as a means to a life which would be more autonomous, and they struggle to make sense of their lives and to ensure a future for their children. They also speak about the importance of pleasing others and the self-imposed discipline they adopt as protection against selfishness. The women have preserved their cultural identity against the invasions and the demands of the mainstream white society, and passed this on to their children. They are also effective in highlighting many diverse, courageous, and ingenious forms of rebellion. The strategies used by the women in their daily lives have informed their actions in more traditional forms of rebellion. Extended families and the families of friends form a wide base of female support in the women’s lives. Although they gossip and compete with each other, the women also provide each other with mutual aid, and work together and cooperate among themselves to enrich their lives and to make it easier for them to achieve their ends. Trang thought that “most of this rebellious activity was not deliberate on the part of the women.” That is, it is designed to improve the quality of daily living for themselves and their families, rather than to engage in a form of oppositional politics against their husbands. In order to maintain the family harmony that, they believed, is critical to children’s academic socialization the women give the appearance of compliance with male authority, while providing support for each other in doing things of which their husbands might not approve. For Freire solidarity is a reflection of our needs, as humans, to be with others (Freire, 1999, p. 72)
In Canada, these women found themselves in an intensely complex situation. In many ways, the life here improved their status as women and their economic independence from men. They then attempted to balance the need for cultural cohesion and family bonding, against the loosening of patriarchal conventions. Loyalty for the women was a triple-edged sword: to the Vietnamese culture, that was important for their children’s Vietnamese ethnic identity, to the Canadian norms, and to themselves as women.
As the women struggle to improve their quality of life and strengthen interpersonal connections by extending their cultural bonds, they tend to undermine their own autonomy as woman because their culture has assumed patriarchal relations. Conversely, if they upset the safety of the family and cultural boat to enhance their position as women, they undermine the traditional bonds of racial and cultural security which, they believed, are crucial for their children’s social and emotional development, and academic socialization. Balancing these contradictions is an integral part of the women’s strategies in everyday life in Canada.
Each woman told her own story. Each appears as an individual, making discrete choices in her set of personal circumstances. Compiled in this way, the personal stories map a political reality. I can see the ways in which women were forced to marry through economic necessity, or family and social pressure. There is also such a sense of joy in many of these stories as these women were finally able to talk openly about their lives. I personally was familiar with almost every experience and every feeling, which these women related. I was filled with pride at our history of resistance, our heritage of survival, and our courage.
At the end of the interviews, they pledged that some day their children will have a good education and will have good jobs to emancipate their families and themselves from poverty and oppression. The pledges stands against the experiences they encountered because of their race and class. The pledges stand against the memory of the struggles in their own home because of their sex.
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