The modern Vietnamese woman

A woman sells flowers around Hanoi to support her family.
Other women sell fruit or other sundries and
sometimes don't see their families for days. 

In many ways it seems that gender equality in Vietnam is far behind the equality our mothers and grandmothers worked hard to create in the Western world. Women are still expected to defer to men, and in particular most men don't even know how to cook or take care of the home, as domesticity is the wife's domain. There are certain exceptions, of course. But in our apartment, the three lovely Vietnamese teaching assistants were the picture of girls trained in being a "woman." Indeed, at times I wondered whether this domestic training came at the price of the girls' academic and professional interests. Sometimes the combination of their household work with their volunteer work filled their days so completely that they couldn't join the rest of us in exploring the city or participating in the ever-important "cultural exchange." (Whatever that means!)

I learned a great deal from my Vietnamese sisters about cooking, though naturally the cooking was secondary to the cultural lessons I will treasure. I have been impressed day in and day out by the initiative taken by my friends to provide for our household, and occasionally for the one to five guests we receive at mealtimes, since our apartment is also part office.

After my firsthand observations of gender roles in Vietnam, I had a fair amount of background knowledge when I visited the Vietnam Women's Museum in Hanoi. Normally, I much prefer social and cultural museums to art museums, and this was no exception. I wandered around the three stories of the museum and learned so much about marriage rituals and the role of women revolutionaries during war periods in Vietnam. The floor dedicated to fashion through the ages didn't hold my interest, but the photo here made a lasting impression on me. It shows a woman reunited with her son after seven years' absence; he had been sentenced to death.

This photo, strategically left until the last portion of the revolutionary women exhibit, moved me to tears in an instant. I realized that the Vietnamese culture of women as caretakers comes from a very genuine place of caring and devotion, qualities that we sometimes neglect as independent American women who have been raised to take what we want and prove we're just as good as men.

It's humbling to think that perhaps the Vietnamese caretaker mother has just as much power as the breadwinning American mother, in a completely different sense of the word.