On a hot October day in 1987 one of the authors (Salemink) had the rare opportunity, as a Vietnamese language student at what was then Hanoi University, to join a group of Australian diplomats on a trip to Chùa Hương, the famous Perfume Pagoda in Mỹ Đức district, some 50 km from Hanoi city. In 1987 Vietnam had just embarked on the road to economic reforms known as Đổi Mới (Renovation), but had barely started to open up, as having contact with foreigners was suspect, and most religious activity was banned as superstitious and/or counterrevolutionary. In this context, any trip out of the city was a rare treat. The trip to Chùa Hương brought the group in a bus to Bến Đục village, where we boarded small boats rowed by young women to follow the Yến stream through fairytale landscape to the foot of the limestone mountain range known as Hương Sơn. Near the landing place was a renovated wooden temple, from where a steep, narrow and ill-maintained path led up the mountain to the Hương Tích cave. There were only few other visitors, and the mountain path was mostly used by local farmers transporting forest produce and by goats. The spacious cave at the end of the path housed statues of the Buddha and Quan Âm, the female bodhisattva better known by the Chinese name Guanyin, and was filled with the smoke of incense. The incense sticks were lit by women who came there as pilgrims, to venerate Quan Âm, even though it was not the time of the Chùa Hương festival, which begins in the week after Vietnamese New Year. When asked about their reasons for the pilgrimage, they answered that they came to pray for hạnh phúc, usually translated as happiness. One of the women patiently explained to Salemink—a novice student of Vietnamese at the time—that hạnh phúc denoted having children; in other words, the women had come to pray to Quan Âm, requesting the deity to gift them a child [cầu con or cầu tự].
In spite of the suppression of things religious at the time, they spent considerable efforts and resources to come to Chùa Hương to make their dream of having offspring come true; without that, they could not become truly happy. Thirty years have gone by since then, and Chùa Hương is one of the major tourist and pilgrimage destinations of northern Vietnam. Receiving millions of mostly Vietnamese visitors every year, Chùa Hương is still a pilgrimage destination for people wishing for a child; many Vietnamese websites are dedicated to this phenomenon and to the temples with a “fertile” reputation, while on internet forums questions of experience and efficacy are discussed online.1 Apparently, for many Vietnamese, having offspring is indispensable for finding happiness, as partly brought out in the various connotations of the term hạnh phúc. How does this square with Vietnam’s ranking in the various global happiness indexes, which do not usually measure offspring?
Introduction
In July 2016 global media like Forbes reported that Vietnam scored fifth on the “Happy Planet Index,” which measures happiness and well-being by looking at “factors such as life expectancy, wellbeing, inequality and ecological footprint.”2 When this rank was floated on the Vietnam Studies Group mailing list on July 26, 2016, a number of scholars questioned the findings, criteria and measurements, with one scholar musing that “if anyone has been to Vietnam recently you might wonder if this index is measuring the right things (e.g., no measurement of dissatisfaction with governance, transparency, corruption, etc).”3 A recent UNU-WIDER working paper titled The Happy Farmer positively correlated subjective well-being in Vietnam to on-farm self-employment, in comparison with self-employment in other sectors and with wage labor (Markussen et al. 2014). The still large—but decreasing—percentage of small farmers in Vietnam might then explain for the relative happiness of Vietnam’s rural population, especially given other positive well-being indicators such as high life expectancy, high literacy and numeracy, and a low GINI coefficient (i.e., relative low inequality). But the most authoritative World Happiness Report (under the auspices of the United Nations) ranks Vietnam’s happiness as only 75th out of 158 countries (Helliwell et al. 2015: 27), suggesting that the results of measurements depend on what is being measured, and how—which seems to confirm misgivings about happiness rankings quoted above. This discrepancy is brought out in a recent study examining among the elderly in rural Vietnam, which showed that individuals living in communes with high inequality tend to self-report as being less happy (Tran, Nguyen and Vu 2017).
Such misgivings do not yet put a halt on the present “happiness turn” (cf. Ahmed 2010: 3), the booming global happiness and well-being industry as well as happiness measurement industry (cf. Davies 2015; Walker and Kavedžija 2015), from which an anthropology of happiness is conspicuously absent (Thin 2008). The idea of the pursuit of happiness—a phrase that already appeared in the 1776 US Declaration of Independence—was in the same year theorized as the prime principle of government by Jeremy Bentham as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” (Bentham 1891: 93; see also Jiménez 2008). In September 1945, President Hồ Chí Minh began Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence by quoting the American one: “We hold truths that all men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” (Porter 1979: 29). The reference to happiness would figure prominently ever since in Socialist Vietnam’s official logo, printed on all official letterheads: Independence—Freedom—Happiness [Độc Lập—Tự Do—Hạnh Phúc]. In other words, happiness, in the vernacular rendering of hạnh phúc, was and continues to be an official policy goal in Vietnam.
While the pursuit of happiness was thought to be a political principle by political philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, a political goal in the American and Vietnamese Declarations of Independence and a policy measurement in contemporary UN discourse, happiness is usually thought of as a measurable individual property in the present-day “happiness industry” (cf. Walker and Kavedžija 2015: 6). But as already indicated in the opening vignette, hạnh phúc has a more complex meaning and family orientation, in line with supposedly more “collectivistic cultures” that situate the imagination, experience and practice of happiness in kin relations (ibid.: 6, 14). In the latest World Happiness Report 2016, Luca Stanca asked whether children make us happy, where and why? Somewhat counterintuitively, he found on the basis of a sample of 105 countries that on a global average parenthood—i.e., having children—is negatively correlated with a subjective experience of happiness and well-being. One of the exceptions to that rule is Vietnam, for “the five countries displaying the largest life-satisfaction premia to parenthood are Montenegro (5.12), China (4.85), Kyrgyzstan (4.64), Taiwan (3.70), and Vietnam (3.13)” (Stanca 2016: 96). In other words, the desire for a child expressed by Vietnamese women making the pilgrimage to Chùa Hương in the anecdotal opening vignette is corroborated by the massive statistical dataset used by Stanca. Hence, in order to say something sensible about the imagination, experience and practice of happiness in Vietnam, it is imperative to unearth its vernacular meanings. In the next section we propose to unpack the multifold meanings of hạnh phúc in Vietnam, and its many kindred terms that might be rendered as happiness in English.
The Various Meanings of Hạnh Phúc
Hạnh phúc is a compound word of Sino-Viet origin. Hạnh [幸] means pleasure, but with the connotation of good behavior, bringing it close to the European notion of virtue which in the Aristotelian conception constitutes a component of happiness. Phúc [福] is often translated as happiness, but has the heavenly connotation of bliss, thus conveying the idea that happiness and good behavior are linguistically connected. Phúc is part of the triad phúc—lộc—thọ [Han Chinese: 福祿壽; Pinyin: Fu Lu Shou; in English usually rendered as “happiness—wealth—longevity”] which in both China and Vietnam are often personified in the form of three Taoist deities, and which in conjunction denote a good life. The English translation of the three words leaves to be desired, however, since not just phúc has a more complex meaning than simply happiness, but lộc also has a more complex, nonsecular meaning as heavenly blessing; for instance, objects that have been used in ritual sacrifice and that have been touched by heaven are usually called đồ lộc—objects that have been imbued with heavenly blessing and that therefore bring luck.
Hạnh phúc is often used as a wish to someone, in conjunction with other terms like mạnh khỏe [good health], may mắn [good luck], thành công [success] and vui vẻ [pleasure, merriment], for example, at the end of a letter; or, alternatively, for lunar New Year [Tết nguyên đán] wishes. These terms are often used in conjunction, but they are not interchangeable. By looking at these kindred terms, it can be deduced what hạnh phúc is not. It is not fun; it is not luck; it is not success; it is not physical health—although all these qualities may contribute to hạnh phúc. Hạnh phúc is not short term, and hence denotes a longer-term, more stable state of affairs. It is not wholly attributable to external circumstances, and hence must have to do with one’s own conduct—indeed, the particle hạnh denotes virtuous conduct, which is at once individual and relational as virtuous conduct must be displayed by a person but can only be virtuous in relation to other persons or beings.
Vietnamese happiness researchers, however, classify hạnh phúc into different types and scales, by connecting the term with another, qualifying term. In contemporary happiness research in Vietnam, hạnh phúc is classified into two types: hạnh phúc vật chất [physical happiness] and hạnh phúc tinh thần [spiritual happiness], which constitute objects of happiness. In addition, in different contexts the term hạnh phúc is also associated with different subjects of happiness. We can classify these subjects at three levels: individual, group and social/communal levels. At the individual level, Vietnamese may use the terms hạnh phúc cá nhân [individual happiness], hạnh phúc lứa đôi [conjugal happiness] or hạnh phúc tuổi già [old age happiness]. At the group level, Vietnamese people often refer to hạnh phúc gia đình [family happiness]. At the communal or social level, hạnh phúc cộng đồng/xã hội [community resp. society happiness] and hạnh phúc dân tộc/quốc gia [happiness of nation] are popular terms. In neo-Confucian thought, these levels are hierarchically connected. Especially in traditional Vietnamese society, individuals were respected if they sacrificed their individual happiness for the happiness of their families. For example, the purpose of marriage was to perpetuate the patrilineage rather than to ensure individual happiness in terms of romantic love. However, women who did not move out and marry in order to take care of their parents or look after their young siblings were respected and considered exemplary, that is, very filial [chí hiếu] (Đào Duy Anh 2000 [1938]: 132–33), because of the perception that they sacrificed their individual happiness for the happiness of the family.
The relation between hạnh phúc of family and hạnh phúc of nation is also hierarchical: in neo-Confucian ideology, loyalty to the emperor was paramount, but in the present the subject of sovereignty has shifted from the emperor to the nation, as brought out in the official logo of independent Vietnam. Phan Ngọc offered as evidence that before the August Revolution in 1945 tens of thousands of people left their families to join the Revolution; during the wars against French and Americans, millions of people placed the interest of the nation beyond the interest of their families in order to create better conditions to ensure the real happiness of their families [“phải đặt quyền lợi Tổ quốc lên trên quyền lợi gia đình để có điều kiện đảm bảo hạnh phúc thực sự cho gia đình”] (Phan Ngọc 1998: 56). Recently, when one journalist questioned the fact that many children of leading cadres hold high-ranking Party/Government positions as well, a leading official of Hồ Chí Minh city said: “If the children of leading cadres become mature and fully developed, and the Communist Party and organizations have confidence in them, and entrust them with positions of great responsibility, then that is the happiness of the nation and the Party” (Thu Hằng 2015).4 In one way, this statement seems to reflect the hierarchy between the happiness of families (of high-ranking cadres) and the happiness of the nation. Yet, this official’s perception of happiness is not consistent with a widely shared perception of happiness that places the interest of the nation before the interest of families to the point of sacrificing the hạnh phúc of the family.
When measuring happiness, Vietnamese researchers identify a wide variety of indicators to measure hạnh phúc in their questionnaires. In a study on value orientation during the period 2001–5, Phạm Minh Hạc and Thái Duy Tuyên (2011: 330) asked respondents to select five out of eight options, including health, work, wealth, leisure, status and family relations, as elements of a happy life. In this project, respondents were also asked to evaluate their family happiness on a scale of five from not happy to very happy (ibid. 2011: 365). Another project sought to measure hạnh phúc with reference to indicators of life satisfaction, using 22 indicators to measure hạnh phúc such as job, income, education level, spiritual life, education of children, children’s job, housing, house conveniences, marriage, neighborly relations, etc. Questions touched on work and income, material conditions, environment and six questions referred to children (Hoàng Bá Thịnh et al. 2012: 4). Thus, this project used many indicators to measure life satisfaction—one component/dimension of hạnh phúc. However, the measurement mainly focuses on individuals as the legitimate subjects of happiness, thus ignoring the levels of family and nation. This shortcoming led to a demand for measuring hạnh phúc at all three levels in the future. In order to remedy this the Institute for Family and Gender Studies (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences) is currently implementing the project titled “Independent national level project: Happiness of Vietnamese people: concept, reality, and indicators to measure.” The ambition of this project is to enlarge the understanding of the perception and reality of hạnh phúc in Vietnam today (Hương Trầm 2016).
This classification by Vietnamese researchers largely follows international conventions of happiness research which—as reported by Davies (2015), Helliwell et al. (2015), and Walker and Kavedžija (2015)—emphasize measurability and utility and hence rely on quantitative data, rather than ethnographically investigating vernacular imaginations, experiences and practices of happiness and human flourishing (Jiménez 2008; Robbins 2013; Thin 2008; Walker and Kavedžija 2015). The opening vignette suggested that many Vietnamese associate hạnh phúc with having offspring. But let’s move from the etic categories employed in transnational happiness research that seeks to compare countries based on large-scale quantitative data to the emic categories that people use when thinking or speaking in their vernacular language. We would question to what extent it would be conceivable that a Vietnamese person would say that an individual, a couple, old people or a family enjoy hạnh phúc in the absence of offspring. In other words, to what extent are hạnh phúc cá nhân [individual happiness], hạnh phúc lứa đôi [couple happiness], hạnh phúc tuổi già [happiness of old people] or hạnh phúc gia đình [happiness of family] conceivable in experiential practice in the absence of offspring? We turn next to Charles Stafford’s (2015) essay on happiness in rural China, which shares with Vietnam a historical legacy of the politico-religious ideologies of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism.
In his essay based on research in rural areas of Taiwan and various parts of mainland China, Stafford speaks of a “a general Chinese ethos in which individuals are presumed to be morally committed to, and prepared to work hard for, long-term projects of advancing family prosperity, regardless of shortterm (or even long-term) personal cost” (2015: 30). This emphasis on family prosperity is motivated by memories of deprivation and a consequent desire for material security, which is anchored in families:
Whatever else they might want out of life (spiritual fulfillment, etc.), they certainly want security: both security of income, and the security of living in strong families and communities that will provide support when difficulties arise. (ibid.: 34)
This emphasis on collectivist rather than individualist security is shored up by the practice of filial piety, which itself is buttressed by a neo-Confucian ideology. But this does not preclude the possibility of a more individualist focus on happiness that ruptures the idea of intergenerational solidarity through filial piety:
The younger generations appear to be losing—or even actively resisting—the motivation for work and, perhaps, the general belief in progress. […] In terms of China’s cultural tradition, they may also come across as strikingly individualistic in orientation, that is, as focused on their own happiness, pleasure, or utility rather than on family goals and family progress. The affective forecasting they care about, one might say, is of the purely personal kind rather than being intergenerational. […] [S]ome of the complex motivations behind the (individualistic and seemingly unfilial) actions of the young people […] are motivated not just by a desire to be happy, but also by a growing sense that personal happiness and success is something they actually deserve. (ibid.: 38)
If there is any similarity between discourses and practices of filial piety in China and Vietnam, and associated vernacular imaginations, experiences and practices of happiness, then hạnh phúc denotes a specific, relational and kinship-related form of happiness, with all its neo-Confucian (and folk Buddhist) connotations of intergenerational continuity within kin groups (primarily patrilineal). It is those dimensions of hạnh phúc which we explore in the next section.
Hạnh Phúc as Intergenerational Notion in the Chain of Being
Much contemporary theorizing about happiness harks back to Aristotle and Epicurus, who both suggested that happiness required balance and—for Aristotle—the cultivation of virtue. In Axial Age Asia, Confucius, Mencius and the Buddha proposed other ways toward happiness. For the latter, life consists of inevitable suffering, and the path to happiness is to abstain from desires and attachments by following a balanced middle path in eight aspects—both mental and ethical. In other words, the Buddha also pleaded for a balanced life and for cultivation of virtues. In China, Confucius argued that human fulfillment was also rooted in the cultivation of virtues, but these were always relational, that is, oriented toward maintaining proper human, social and political relations, for instance between kin, or between subjects and rulers. His follower Mencius suggested that happiness—or feelings of satisfaction—is the result of doing the right thing. Like Aristotle and the Buddha, Mencius made a connection between the cultivation and enactment of virtue on one hand, and the achievement of happiness on the other, but Mencius joined Confucius in emphasizing the relational aspect of such happiness.
To what extent Confucian and Mencian ideas have exerted a direct cultural influence in modern China and Vietnam is up for debate, but many authors have pointed out the historical dominance of collectivist and familial imaginations, experiences and practices of happiness in those countries (Stafford 2015; Walker and Kavedžija 2015). Although Stafford draws attention to the divergence from a focus on family happiness among more individualist, younger generations of Chinese, it is a divergence from a cultural ideal that is still highly normative. In Vietnam these Confucian-inspired cultural ideals and norms are deeply intertwined with notions, experiences and practices of happiness that can be summed up in two forms of ethical practice: filial piety [hiếu] and ancestor worship [thờ cúng tổ tiên or nhớ ơn ông bà]. Filial piety refers to the respect that children owe their parents, grandparents, and further seniors and ancestors, in particular within the same (patrilineal) kin group. Filial piety is generational, hierarchical and also highly gendered in Vietnam. The patrilineal descent system largely excluded girls and women from the intergenerational chain of descent: Girls left the patrilineage of birth to join their groom’s patrilineage, where they never really assumed an autonomous position other than as wife and mother. The relation between spouses was—and often still is—both kin-derived and hierarchical: husbands refer to themselves as anh [older brother], and wives refer to themselves as em [younger sister] in this relationship, regardless of age difference (see Bélanger 2002; Nguyê͂n Tuấn Anh 2010; Rydstrøm 2003; Werner 2009).
Given the importance of the patrilineal kin ideology, colonial-era historian Đào Duy Anh explained that individuals have to ensure the perpetuation of the patrilineage by producing male offspring (Đào Duy Anh 2000[1938]), as girls leave the patrilineage upon marriage, resulting in a preference for sons (Haughton and Haughton 1995). In the context of an official population policy that from 1993 sought to reduce the population growth by a state-enforced two-child policy, this preference for sons quickly resulted in a male bias enabled by selective reproductive technologies (Bélanger 2002; Bélanger 2015; Guilmoto 2012). Statistically, this has led to a sex ratio imbalance at birth of almost 115 boys to 100 girls, producing a future “deficit” of millions of women in comparison with men, and—as prophesied in alarmist media reports—a future where millions of men cannot find wives.5 The decision to select boys and deselect girls (e.g., by abortion) is obviously not based on considerations of individual happiness of the baby boy or girl, but on that of the family, which seeks to ensure its continuity. An even starker example of the sacrifice of individual happiness for the sake of the family is brought out in Nguyê͂n Thu Hương’s (2011) sometimes heart-rending ethnography of female rape victims and survivors in Vietnam, whose experience may be silenced; who may face sanctions from their own families for their predicament; and/or whose interests may be sacrificed for maintaining good relations between families or kin groups. Sometimes the sacrifice is voluntary, for instance in the case of the many transnational brides from Vietnam, who marry Korean, Taiwanese or Chinese men in an act of sacrifice of personal happiness for the sake of hạnh phúc as a family affair, that is, as an act of filial piety; but these personal acts of filial piety add up to change the demographic compositions of the countries involved in the region (Bélanger and Wang 2012; Bélanger and Tran 2011). In other words, the strength of the cultural norm of filial piety is clearly brought out in a number of cultural practices and demographic statistics.
This is not to say that (young) people forego individual happiness by blindly following such cultural norms. Stafford (2015) showed how in present-day China and Taiwan the younger generation tends to privilege their personal happiness over the family interests, sometimes in defiance of expectations of filial piety. In Vietnam there are also numerous studies about changing and more individualistic lifestyles among younger generations. One example is the rapid emergence of a LGBT movement in Vietnam, and the increasing societal acceptance of non-heteronormative sexualities; but especially within the kin group non-heteronormative sexualities are less accepted, as they are seen to disrupt the family continuity and hence constitute an act of filial impiety (Horton 2014; Newton 2012; Oosterhoff et al. 2014). Nguyê͂n Tuấn Anh and Lê Thị Mai Trang show that many parents feel very unhappy with their lesbian daughters and often try to force them into a hetero-marriage (Nguyê͂n and Lê 2014: 476), while construing their children’s resistance as filial impiety and thus as a pursuit of their personal happiness in defiance of the hạnh phúc of the larger patrilineage. The following anecdote illustrates this tension. For a long time, a Vietnamese acquaintance of Salemink hid her lesbianism from much of the outside world, until she rather suddenly got married, which pleased her parents greatly. She remained married for two weeks, divorced her husband and went to live together with her female partner. This brief anecdote shows the difficult entanglement of personal happiness and familial hạnh phúc, as mediated through notions of filial (im)piety. In the next section we will return to forms of divergence from this cultural norm in Vietnam, but now we wish to turn to another aspect of familial happiness, namely care for the children and care for parents.
One important aspect of hạnh phúc for Vietnamese is the success of their children, especially in education. Many Vietnamese parents try their best to invest in their children’s education, with varying consequences. On the negative side, many parents send their children to extra classes because they fear that their children would fall behind. The movement of attending extra classes is widespread, leading to stress among children and heavy financial burdens on many parents. In addition, the profit generated by extra classes entice teachers to give only cursory attention to the teaching during regular classes (Nguyê͂n Tuấn Anh 2010: 156). In order to deal with this situation, the Ministry of Education and Training issued a circular in 2012 to limit the negative impact of extra classes (Bộ Giáo dục và Đào tạo 2012). In 2014, the Ministry issued one more circular to regulate extra classes in primary schools (Bộ Giáo dục và Đào tạo 2014). In practice, however, extra classes are still a big problem in Vietnamese education (Ngọc Hùng 2016). On the positive side, not only families but also patrilineages in rural areas set aside money for so-called Patrilineage Study Encouragement Funds to contribute to the education of children in the patrilineage. The Patrilineage Study Encouragement Funds come from the contributions of relatives—both members and nonmembers of the patrilineage. In addition, the patrilineages also have nonfinancial study encouragement measures, such as formal recognition to high achievers by registering their names in the patrilineage annals, or through ritual reward and commendation for educational achievement of pupils in patrilineage halls, thereby promoting children’s education (Nguyê͂n Tuấn Anh 2010: 160–75). To some extent, one way of Vietnamese to pursue hạnh phúc is to invest in children’s education.
Within the framework of hạnh phúc as familial happiness, care for offspring by investing in education goes hand in hand with care for parents. A person is unfortunate if his/her children do not take care of them, and children with a good education are more likely to take care of their parents in later life—at least financially. Concerning this matter, scholar Phan Ngọc writes:
Each Vietnamese person has to look after his/her parents when they are alive, worship and protect their graves after they die. These activities affirm that a person is a member of a family, of a patrilineage. (Phan Ngọc 1998: 103)
Many older people today in Vietnam depend on their children spiritually and economically. Results from the “Nation-wide Survey on the Family in Vietnam 2006” indicated that 51.5 percent of the elderly wish to live with their children and grandchildren for mutual support between family members, or because of their family’s traditions or for the sense of happiness when living in an extended family; 67.7 percent of the elderly wished to live with their son (Bộ Văn hóa et al. 2008: 38–39). According to “The Vietnam Ageing Survey in 2011,” the main supporters of the elderly were their spouse, their daughters, their daughters-in-law and their sons (Hội Liên hiệp Phụ nữ Việt Nam 2012: 99). This survey also revealed that the main income sources of the elderly included children’s financial support (32%), their work (29%) and other sources (savings, support from their spouse/sisters and brothers/friends/neighbors, 14%) (ibid. 2012: 78–79). Thus, from perception to practice, taking care of parents spiritually and economically is very important for Vietnamese; it is an integral dimension of their hạnh phúc.
But intergenerational care goes beyond this life, and extends into former and future lives. Hạnh phúc is also related to transcendent notions of care for souls that have gone on. Ancestor worship [literally thờ cúng tổ tiên but more colloquially termed nhớ ơn ông bà—remembering the debt to the grandparents] is not just a mental practice of remembrance or a spiritual practice of praying, but usually takes on material forms as well. The care given to graves and bones and the sacrifice of food at the ancestor altar in the home and of effigies at temples are expected to satisfy dead ancestors. The ancestors might reciprocate with lộc (heavenly blessing—see above), which for instance imbues the sacrificial food consumed by the living after the ritual. As Kate Jellema (2007) explains, ancestor worship is seen as an act of filial piety, namely of repaying the debt to parents, grandparents and further ancestors for the gift of life and upbringing, in line with the neo-Confucian saying Uống nước nhớ nguồn [When drinking water, remember the source]. Ancestor worship within the patrilineage involves not only the immediate (grand)parents but goes back a number of generations—five to six generations is the number often given. This debt does not exclude the female line of descendance, but that worship is not institutionalized within the family and wider patrilineage, and does not extend as far back into the past. Special care is given to the often anonymous Bà cô—the unmarried “aunt” without her own offspring to take care of her. She is believed to be sad about that state without hạnh phúc, and in her grief potentially dangerous to next generations in the patrilineage if they do not take care of her in the afterlife.
In other words, to the extent that the subject of hạnh phúc is collective rather than individual—namely the kin group of family and patrilineage—and that it is realized through the virtue of hiếu [filial piety], the pursuit of hạnh phúc cannot be unequivocally interpreted as a secular pursuit. Hạnh phúc obtains its meaning as a moment in a chain of connected generations of kin-related people—dead and alive, in past, present and future, under a sacred canopy. In Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad (2003) argues that happiness is a secular pursuit, as religious ideologies like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism interpret this immanent life as one of inevitable suffering—through sickness, pain and death—which should be embraced in order to achieve true happiness in the afterlife. In contrast with Asad, the medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (2010) distinguished between beatitudo, which is the perfect happiness in the presence of God in Heaven on the one hand; and felicitas—the imperfect happiness that humans can hope for in this world if they emulate, and hence come close to, God in this world. Felicitas is thus connected to Heaven and foreshadows an afterlife of potential beatitudo. The pursuit of hạnh phúc in Vietnam seems to tread a middle ground between Asad’s secular and Aquinas’s religious theories about the conditions for happiness. Hạnh phúc is not wholly oriented toward the other world [thế giới khác or thế giới Âm] and the afterlife, as Aquinas’s notion of felicitas, for the subjects of hạnh phúc are the living, and its object is this life, in this world. Yet, hạnh phúc is not a wholly secular endeavor enabled by secular sensibilities through secular ideologies: it is part of the vision of life that situates persons and their happiness in collectives made up of kin groups, which themselves are temporally stretched out in a chain of being connecting past, present and future, and encompassing the dead, the living and the not-yet-living. Above we have hinted a number of times at the possibility of ruptures in this chain. The next section will deal with a number of different types of such ruptures, and the various visions of hạnh phúc and other modalities of happiness involved.
When Hạnh Phúc Is Missing
In a study published in 2002, Danièle Bélanger and Khuất Thu Hồng describe the plight of women who—for a wide variety of reasons—have remained single and—usually—childless in Vietnam. That plight was not enviable, as such women were excluded from normative forms of kin-based sociality, from inheritance and from a respectable place in a longer, nonsecular chain of being where their graves and souls would be cared for by descendants. Kin relations and others often blamed such women themselves for their fate by being stubborn or picky. Whatever the individual reasons for singlehood, such plight was not seldom in postwar Vietnam, where the sex ratio was heavily skewed because of much higher war-time male mortality; in other words, there simply were not sufficient men available (Bélanger and Khuất Thu Hồng 2002). One such single woman is the school teacher Thúy, described by Kate Jellema (2007: 469–78). Thúy compensates for her singlehood and childlessness by creating a highly personal and elaborate cult of her parents, for whom she built an expensive and conspicuous grave resembling the Hồ Chí Minh mausoleum.
As is clear from a variety of studies, having a child out of wedlock, or even having pre- or extramarital sex, was severely frowned upon, and such girls and women risked to be socially ostracized, at least until relatively recently (Gammeltoft 2002; Nguyen Phuong An 2003; Nguyê͂n Thu Hương 2011; Rydstrøm. 2003; Earl 2014). Yet, in their study on female singlehood, Bélanger and Khuất Thu Hồng make the observation that childlessness is far worse than single motherhood:
Childlessness, more than singlehood, worried these aging single women because children—not siblings or other family—are primarily responsible for the elderly. The four single mothers in our sample […] lived much more independently and counted on their child (or children) to take care of them when needed. […] Single women with children do not necessarily have an easy life, but they have more independence and social recognition than childless, never-married women. Ultimately, motherhood excuses singlehood, confers the right to autonomy, and gives women the social space and status that single, childless women must struggle to attain. (Bélanger and Khuất Thu Hồng 2002: 109)
In other words, for those women the unhappiness of childlessness trumps the breach of morality and the ostracism by kin and community.
In the context of skewed postwar sex ratios, “asking for a child” [xin con] became morally and politically acceptable for aging, childless, unmarried women. They would have sex with a befriended man, with a stranger or anonymously in a hospital setting, with the sole purpose of conceiving a child, and without a love relationship. Harriet Phinney (2005: 219–21) explains how this was made legally and morally possible by the conjunction of two political events, namely the (more liberal) 1986 Law of Marriage and the Family, and the simultaneous state campaign for promoting the idea of the “happy family” with the slogan Dân số ổn định, xã hội phồn vinh, gia đình hạnh phúc [A stable population, a prosperous society, and a happy family]. The Happy Family campaign was primarily targeting women who were made responsible for the happiness of their families in the domestic spheres, after their mobilization for production and defense during the war and collectivist periods. The connection of single motherhood with happiness was situated in the widespread idea that hạnh phúc would be impossible without children.
This complex of ideas about the happiness of having offspring and the care for living and dead forebears in this world [cõi Dương] and the other world [cõi Âm] is also manifested in a very different way than the practice of “asking for a child,” namely abortion. Vietnam has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. In Haunting Images, Tine Gammeltoft (2014) describes the suffering of women and their families who opt for an abortion. Motivations may vary from outright refusal to have a—or another—child, to sex selection, to the prevention of the birth of a child with serious disability, oftentimes as a result of Agent Orange. But whatever the motivations, the decisions presented themselves as painful moral dilemmas for the women and their families, with myriad implications. Invoking Sino-Vietnamese cosmological notions about the intertwining of the three main religious creeds—Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism—in the “triple religion” [tam giáo], Gammeltoft places children and childbirth in Confucian ideas about family continuity and filial piety; in Daoist ideas about birth as the encounter of “Father Heaven” and “Mother Earth”; and in Buddhist ideas about karma and reincarnation (ibid.: 141–45). Abortion is cosmologically and ethically complex, as it combines birth and death in one, creating child-spirits that are potentially dangerous and which—unlike other dead family members—may not be worshipped in the family home but must be placated outside the house. Oftentimes, the parents do not wish to bury it, or are pressured by family elders to leave it to the hospital to dispose of the body for fear that this unhappy soul would be seduced to return as a ghost and stay with its family (ibid.: 210–23).
The pain of the fateful decision of abortion is justified by state agencies, medical staff, family and parents themselves in terms of a limitation of suffering: for the future child itself, for the family and wider kin group, and for the nation at large. By limiting this generalized suffering, the decision to abort is presented as an act of love and care intended to enhance happiness, in particular for the family and wider kin group which would have had to muster the time, effort and resources to care for a child gravely disabled as a consequence of Agent Orange or other causes. But the decision brings the pain of loss with it, especially for the mother but also for the father; that pain is palpable in Gammeltoft’s Haunting Images (2014), which refer to the ultrasound images of fetuses as well as to the fetuses put to death through abortion, who have no graves and no place at the family altar. However, there is a sizeable commemoration activity in virtual space, on the website Nghĩa Trang online [online cemetery],6 which is the topic of an article by Anthony Heathcote (2014). In this online and off-line internet ethnography, Heathcote follows the highly personalized worship and conversations of mothers with their aborted fetuses, which usually have no resting place or altar where incense or votive paper objects can be burned, or other sacrificial objects offered. Messages to the dead fetus usually contain not only assurances of love and regret, but also information about everyday activities of the mother, turning the fetus into a “silent listener” (Heathcote 2014: 39). The fetus is asked to empathize with the mother and her family, to understand the reason for the abortion, and thus to offer its blessing [lộc] to the living, as if in an act of spectral filial piety. The pain of the rupture in the family continuity and the interruption of intergenerational care are compensated for by virtual care, where in this world [cõi Dương] and the other world [cõi Âm] they are mediated by virtual reality.
These are examples of painful ruptures in the familial chain that upholds hạnh phúc in Vietnam, but filial ties may be ruptured in many different, historically contingent ways. One obviously rupturing set of events in Vietnam’s recent history is the series of wars that ravaged it—World War II, and the First, Second and Third Indochina Wars (with France and the United States, respectively, Cambodia and China)—since 1942. These wars, and especially the wars with France and the United States, resulted in a staggering 300,000 Vietnamese missing in action. These were mostly young people having died violent deaths far away from home, who were left unburied or who were buried without proper indication and ritual. In these conditions, their souls could not travel to the other world and missed the comfort of the worship and the sacrifices of the loved ones they left behind; they would turn into wandering ghosts who were grieving their fate, not finding rest and potentially harming the living. For many aging Vietnamese the existence of a missing relative constitutes unfinished business and a threat to their family’s happiness. Around 2000 stories began to circulate about the successful search and reburial of remains of missing soldiers through a variety of different means of communication with the other world, mostly involving possession by the soul of dead persons of different types of mediums or calling of the soul of the dead person. The success stories of how the remains were found and reburied with the proper ritual provoked a veritable grave searching industry, which has been the topic of a growing scholarship (Endres 2008; Kwon 2008; Salemink 2015; Salemink and Phan Đăng Nhật 2007; Sorrentino 2013, 2018). These actions by living (and left-behind) relatives are motivated by feelings of love, responsibility and care for the souls of those who were sacrificed during the wars, and whose souls should be taken care of through ritual care for the bones. Ensuring that loved ones can make the passage to the other world without having to wander as ghosts is simultaneously an act of self-love, as failure to do so means that oneself and one’s children and grandchildren can be harmed by these wandering souls because of this unfinished ritual business.
The above examples refer to situations where hạnh phúc is at risk when familial continuities are ruptured as a consequence of negative or unwanted experiences, like childlessness, abortion or sudden and violent death. In the present period, however, more and more young people decide to live their own lives regardless of—or at least in defiance of—familial notions of hạnh phúc. In 1938 Đào Duy Anh still wrote that individuals without descendants commit filial impiety [phạm điều bất hiếu] (Đào Duy Anh 2000[1938]: 132–33). Today many middle-class women pursuing a career choose to remain unmarried (Earl 2014). Similarly, LGBT people do not perpetuate the patrilineage, but in the face of pressure from parents and relatives they are increasingly coming out in Vietnamese society. They may not enact the filial duty of perpetuating the patrilineage, but they choose their personal happiness over the hạnh phúc of their family and patrilineage.
Conclusion
Starting with a vignette about the wish for a child [cầu tự] of female pilgrims at Chùa Hương, we intuited that the most common Vietnamese word for happiness—hạnh phúc: the word in fact used by Vietnamese happiness researchers—somehow has to do with having children. Historically and politically, references to happiness are not alien to Vietnam, where happiness is increasingly measured in tune with international trends, and which is doing relatively well in the global happiness rankings. But the criteria or indicators for such measurements hardly refer to the offspring which was so badly desired by the women at Chùa Hương. In the emergent anthropological literature on happiness and well-being more complex and contextually salient ideas of happiness come to the fore, which seem to suggest that the subject of happiness is not everywhere an individual. Indeed, some scholars point to more collectivistic notions of happiness in which the subject of happiness is a group, notably a family or kin group; such notions are often associated with East Asia, in particular China. Delving into the various vernacular notions of hạnh phúc and kindred terms, we found that indeed hạnh phúc is more complex and does tend to have collectivist—especially familial—connotations that are deeply (but not exclusively) imbued with neo-Confucian notions of family continuity and filial piety.
To the extent that hạnh phúc is kinship-related, it denotes a relational and to some extent convivial ideal that is rather non-individualist—or perhaps we should say “was,” because as in China (cf. Stafford 2015) this is changing rapidly. More interesting, though, is that hạnh phúc is conceived as primarily intergenerational, with flows of care moving up and down the generational axis, and including both living and nonliving—dead and not-yet-born—people. The care for dead and unborn people may create comfort, but where the link is ruptured—as in the case of childlessness, abortion or violent death away from home—the impossibility to extend that care in the prescribed ritual manner creates deep anxiety among the living. This makes hạnh phúc in Vietnam not just radically nonindividualist, but also nonsecular, thus diverging from more individualist notions of happiness as developed by Aristotle and Epicurus, and more recently theorized by Talal Asad as a secular pursuit. In contrast with Aquinas’s notions of Felicitas and beatitudo, hạnh phúc in Vietnam is connected with the other world, but not subordinated to the other world; it is rather a legitimate pursuit in this life—albeit for the collective subject the kin group rather than for individuals. To that we should add: in the past, because this is changing rapidly. Like in China, the pursuit of family-based material security and well-being is expressed through a desire for accumulating transferable wealth-generating consumerist lifestyles, which seem to undermine the social fabric and moral roots of hạnh phúc in contemporary society, as younger generations pursue more individualist life projects that might clash with the cultural ideal of filial piety. As the subject of hạnh phúc individualizes, its meaning is practically redefined in people’s lives.
1See http://yeutre.vn/bai-viet/13-ngoi-den-chua-noi-tieng-ve-cau-con-cau-duyen-cau-may-man-o-viet-nam.11529/; http://www.egiadinh.com/le-cau-con-cau-tu-va-nhung-dieu-nen-biet-d79.html; http://www.hanhtrinhtamlinh.com/quy-trinh-di-cau-tu-o-chua-huong/; http://sotaychame.com/chuan-bi-mang-thai-mang-bau/co-me-nao-di-chua-huong-de-cau-con-vao-day-cung-chia-se-voi-minh-149251.html (all accessed on August 7, 2016).
2See http://www.forbes.com/sites/davisbrett/2016/07/25/vietnam-worlds-fifth-happiest-country-for-now-2/#5a8f93bf1ee0; for the Happy Planet Index ranking, see http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/vietnam (both accessed August 7, 2016).
3Intervention by Dr Pamela McElwee, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, in the VSG mailing list, July 26, 2016 (see http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/vsg).
4This statement was made by Nguyê͂n Thị Quyết Tâm, the present chairwoman of Hồ Chí Minh City People’s Council and Deputy Secretary of Hồ Chí Minh City’s Communist Party Committee; see Thu Hằng, “Con lãnh đạo làm lãnh đạo là hạnh phúc của dân tộc,” http://vietnamnet.vn/vn/thoi-su/269501/con-lanh-dao-lam-lanh-dao-la-hanh-phuc-cua-dan-toc.html (accessed August 17, 2016).
5See UNFPA (2009), as well as various media reports: http://vietnamnews.vn/society/274537/gender-imbalance-in-viet-nam-rises-steeply.html#v8hGx8zQqQOWbdWk.97; https://www.vietnambreakingnews.com/tag/gender-imbalance/; http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/society/112597/male-female-ratio-imbalance-may-reach-over-four-million.html; http://english.vov.vn/society/vietnam-faces-alltime-high-sex-ratio-imbalance-323498.vov.
6The website Nghĩa Trang Online can be found under the url http://mo.quakhu.net/, which translates approximately as grave.past.net.
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