To be a Vietnamese teenage girl

         I was completely silent during our last class discussion because I felt like an outsider looking in. Having watched American movies and television since the beginning of my middle school years, I understood completely when my classmates talked about how adolescents in the U.S are expected to be angsty, experimenting, dramatic, and overall “just being teenagers”. Yet, at the same time, I have never experienced this for myself. Now I don’t smoke, but if I did and if my mother were to find out, odds are she would go completely crazy, cry, and just be shocked out of her mind. In the same situation, however, even if some of your parents might get upset, they will still be understanding because that is how people at our age are supposed to act, right?

Well, I don’t know. I cannot answer this question because I am not an American teen. I do not relate to the saying “teenagers are angsty”, because in Vietnam, adolescents my age are not supposed to be angsty. In fact, we are not supposed to be worried about anything apart from to study, study, study. This is mostly according to our parents, and parts of the Vietnamese media, but definitely not the American media Vietnamese teens are exposed to. Therefore, in this essay I would like to connect the reality of how adolescents are raised in their families and in the offline society in Vietnam to the mediation of the Vietnamese media and then to the American media, to form an understanding of why people my age in Vietnam behave the way that they behave.

Obedient, hard-working students, and innocent kids are keywords for what the traditional society of Vietnam and the Vietnamese parents expect from their adolescent children. These uniform characteristics have been implanted into us since the day we were born, and even in this decade, the Vietnamese media is still sending these messages to us. To give you an example, the K-Pop fan base in Vietnam was totally trashed in the year of 2012 because there was a flood of scandalous articles on how disrespectful these fans are towards their parents. And no, these articles weren’t on the news sites that only my parents would read, they were mostly on teens’ news sites. As a result, teens who were fans of K-Pop were bashed by teens who were not because there was the assumption that these teens are reckless and disobedient to their parents. It is important for me to explain this because it will explain the difference between Vietnamese and American media.

Take a look at what most Vietnamese teens watch for example. When I was in middle school I didn’t watch Pretty Little Liars or 90210. Instead, I watched the same Korean drama series that my grandmother, my 20 year old cousin, and my 18 year old maid watched – Lovers In Paris, Boys Over Flowers, or Secret Garden. This is because of 2 reasons: first of all, the closest thing we had to Western television was the Disney channel, so that meant no 90210, and no Gossip Girl; secondly, from the cultural standpoint, it’s no surprise I found that Korean drama was much more relatable. So despite the fact that I watched kids cartoons at a much younger age, about after the age of 10-ish, I didn’t find that any media was classified to be for my age anymore; I simply watched what everyone was watching.

Significantly, characters in Korean drama do not hook up, do not have open relationships, and they do not fear commitments. They meet, they fall heavenly in love, and that’s it. So naturally, because we are all mediated by the media, my perception of love at the age from 12 to 16 was just the same. In 8th grade, I was in love with this guy who ended up being my boyfriend for 3 years. And no, this was not because we were best friends or soul mates or anything. This was largely because we were told by the media familiar to us that being in a long, committed, and loyal relationship was cool.

Moving on to when I turned 17, and went away from home to study at an American boarding school for the first time, everything I thought I understood about relationships changed. That was also when I thought all of my accumulated knowledge about love and relationship in the American teen culture was going to come into practice. From the way I saw it, relationships among American teens must move a lot faster compared to what I know of in Vietnam. I knew that people hooked up, but because I was still so influenced by the media I was exposed to in Vietnam, I thought that it eventually will lead to some committed long term relationships. So as a result, not a lot of great decisions were made and a lot of confusion was in line during my first year here.

But let’s go back to Vietnam. I can see that American movies’ promotions of drinking and partying have strongly impacted the Vietnamese youth when all my friends at the age of under 17 started going to nightclubs every weekends (nightclubs in Vietnam don’t card people). This I have made several interesting observations of. Firstly, Vietnamese teens wear fancy cocktail dresses to these parties because: one, most teenage Vietnamese celebrities come from rich families that allow them to show off their fancy fashion collections on social media; two, appearing classy but still sexy is also a mediated notion coming the traditional belief that girls are not supposed to be too sexually provocative.

Now, Korean dramas like Boys Over Flowers or Lovers in Paris promote this idea that the perfect match is made between a beautiful girl and a talented guy – in terms of having a talent to create wealth. This belief is strongly similar to those of the Vietnamese older generations as well. Sadly, some of the most famous women in Vietnamese show business right now are also famous for marrying millionaires: Ho Ngoc Ha and Cuong Dola (Cuong Dollars), Tang Thanh Ha and Louis Nguyen, or Midu and Phan Thanh to name a few couples. All of this has more or less influenced a lot of public-schooled teenage girls to try and land rich private-schooled boys at nightclubs and shisha lounges. In my sophomore year, two male friends of mine both had a crush on this girl they met at a lounge. They knew that she was interested in them for their money, so they both tried to spend as much money on her as they could to compete with each other. The guy that she ended up dating was also studying abroad in a British boarding school. They chose to be in a long-distant relationship, and he sent her money every month. During the time, she was also secretly hanging out with the guy she didn’t choose back in Vietnam.  

Teenagers in Vietnam spend an insane amount of time on social media. You can consistently expect 10 selfies, 10 statuses, and at least a check-in at a foodie place from the most popular girl in school every single day. On the weekends, you can expect a flood of photos like these:

However, the same girls will also post pictures like these:

These are photographs of high school girls in the public school uniforms that were created to represent female prudence and innocence. Why? Because according to traditional standards, Vietnamese media, Korean media, and American media, rich high school boys want to be in a relationship with high school girls who are beautiful, classy, who can do a few shots but also can appear sweet and innocent.

All of what I have said above is what I have personally experienced and observed from my friends who are aged between 14 and 18.  This is how a mixture of Vietnamese traditions, Vietnamese and Korean media, and American media has influenced the Vietnamese coming-of-age girls.