Perspectives
by Lia Sciortino
Perspectives
China’s PR Problem Rears Its Head
Johanna Son
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CHIANG MAI, Dec 11 (TerraViva/IPS Asia-Pacific) - Powerful neighbour. A rising power. Old friend. Big, secretive investor. Big boy of the region.
These were some of the terms participants at a talk-show format discussion at the Mekong Media Forum used when asked to share the images of China they get from the media.
Reading Media
Johanna Son
BANGKOK -- Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. What images might these words conjure up in the minds of international consumers of news? Perhaps war, maybe the Khmer Rouge. Or they might say, ‘Oh, it’s that those countries that had that war some time ago. . . they’re near one another, and they’re all the same’.
China: Benign Bully of the Mekong?
Johanna Son
SYDNEY, Oct 3 (IPS Asia-Pacific) – Over the last decade or so, China’s deft use of soft power has seen South-east Asian neighbours’ view of it change from a looming threat to a largely friendly, if still imposing, giant to the north.
A Life Turned Inside Out
HEKOU, China - Packed in my luggage for a trip across the Vietnamese border to this town in Yunnan province was a scrap of paper with the name of a woman who works there as a welder. There was also a note from a colleague who works for ‘The Labourer’ newspaper in Vietnam: “You must try your best to meet with the mother and her son, and help them fulfill their wish.”
I managed to find Ha Thi Ly in the backstreet alley of a tiny working-class neighbourhood near the Vietnamese market in Hekou. Her neighbours were the families of Vietnamese women who, like her, had been lured and trafficked across the border from Vietnam to China.
Born in Yen Thinh district in Vietnam’s northern Yen Bai province, Ly was already married and had a daughter and a son when a female relative called Lan asked her one day to go across the northern border into China to sell flour.
But Lan tricked her, and Ly remembers being brought instead to a district some 18 hours by car from the city of Nanning city in China’s southern Guangxi region. There, she was sold to a Chinese man 12 years older than her, for 5,000 renminbi (731 U.S. dollars). Although he had two children, a sick wife and was not wealthy, he brought Ly to be his concubine in Guangxi.
She realised later that she had been trafficked to China, but had no money to return home.
Unable to speak a word of Chinese, Ly focused on her chores, such as those in the kitchen, but listened intently to everything that was being said around her in order to learn the language. On the kitchen wall, she scribbled down notes on how the words sounded, to help her remember them. After three months, Ly says, she was able to speak and understand enough Chinese to follow what people around her were saying.
Despite the situation she had little choice in, Ly believes she was still fortunate because her husband was a quiet and kind man, and because his children were not bullies.
Still, Ly never stopped missing her own children. She worked during the day and cried ceaselessly through the night. Seeing this, her Chinese husband allowed his industrious Vietnamese wife to adopt a Vietnamese baby. “I adopted her as a newborn. She was abandoned, pale and sick. I fed her with porridge. I put her on my back when I worked in the field,” said Ly, showing us a picture of her adopted daughter, now grown up and in good health.
Over a year later, her Chinese husband allowed Ly to return to Vietnam to visit her children. She found out that her Vietnamese husband had remarried, since he had had no information about her. He had also sold their land and field plots, leaving her two children with him without their own home.
All Hung wants is to go back to school.
Ly’s mother had also passed away. To make things worse, her relatives recounted how Ly’s daughter had almost been lured to Vietnam’s north-eastern border province of Lang Son, and trafficked into China. The traffickers had told Ly’s daughter that they would bring her to the border to find her mother. Desperate to find Ly, the daughter, who was only a high school student then, agreed to follow them.
Fortunately, Ly’s first husband went after them and brought the daughter back. Worried about her daughter, and grief-stricken that her six-year-old son had been separated from her, Ly brought them back with her to China. Because of this, their names were deleted from the household registration book of Yen Bai province.
Ly and her children were taken by her Chinese husband to Hekou, where they would try to make a living. Ly took up many grueling jobs, including picking up rubbish. At times, in despair over her difficulties, she likened her fate to that of her mother’s. Both were born in the Chinese year of the tiger – some believe that such women are bound to have an unlucky or difficult life -- and her mother had been miserable her whole life. At one point Ly considered committing suicide, but her children helped her go on living.
After years of picking up rubbish, Ly saved enough money to get the tools she needed to work as a welder, a trade she had learned from her family back in Yen Bai province. She then began repairing rickshaws and vehicles at a corner of the Vietnamese market in Hekou.
For now, the burdens that life has put the shoulders of this tiny, hard-working woman in a foreign land seem to have eased up. But Ly still has a wish: “I will work until my last breath just to put my son through school.”
THIRST FOR KNOWLEDGE
When Ly’s son, Tran Van Hung (born in 1985) followed his mother to China, he had to stop going to primary school. Today a young man, Hung never asks his mother to buy anything for him. He dresses simply and goes to the market corner to help his mother. But his one fervent wish for himself is to be able to go back to school.
Since coming to China, he has learned the Chinese language from his mother and their neighbours. Hung now read and writes Chinese fluently, and even runs a ‘class’ teaching Chinese to Vietnamese people who come to live and work here. His tiny room in the home he shares with his mother and stepfather has desks and a board, to which Chinese language characters are pinned.
But Hung remains restless, convinced that knowing the language is far from enough for a better future.
Several times now, he has asked his mother to prepare the paperwork so that he can go back to study in Vietnam. “No matter how good my Chinese is, I can do nothing without knowledge,” Hung has explained to his mother.
For instance, he says, sometimes he reads newspapers and books but does not really understand what they say. Having failed to find the jobs he wanted, Hung tosses and turns at night, longing to go back to studying in Vietnam. “Even if I have to study until I am 40, I must go and complete my schooling,” he resolved.
But things may not be that simple. Hung’s household registration in Vietnam, an important legal document that would entitle him to being recognised as a resident with rights to live there and get education, was deleted because he moved to China. In Hekou, he only has a residence permit, which does not allow him to get free education. Hung is also no longer of schooling age.
Ly has returned to Yen Bai province more than once to get back her household registration, which would also apply to her son, but with no success. She managed to save six million Vietnamese dong (355 dollars) and gave it to a cousin who said he could do the paper and get this completed so that Hung could go back to school in Vietnam. For months, they waited in vain.
Feeling bad for her son, Ly has talked to Hung many times about asking someone to fake a twelfth-grade diploma for him. But Hung has consistently turned this down: “What’s the use of having a diploma with no knowledge, and understanding nothing from books?”
Like many other women who have met difficult fates at the border, Ly did not want me to publish her story. She only agreed when I said that this was only way we could give Hung a chance to go back to school. For her son’s sake, Ly is willing to face the sneers she expects to get back in her homeland because people will know she had been trafficked across the border, or think she had been a prostitute.
(*This story, also published in ‘Hoc Hoc Tro’ (Vietnamese Students newspaper), was produced under the Imaging Our Mekong media fellowship programme 2007-08.)
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Mekong ICT Camp 2010
The Mekong ICT Camp (http://mekongict.org), a biannual training workshop on information, communication, and technologies for citizen media, community health, and civil society practitioners in Mekong subregion, is accepting applications until Mar. 31, 2010. Participants are welcome from the Mekong countries, including Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
COMING SOON: 'TALKING GENDER IN THE MEKONG MEDIA'
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BANGKOK - Do media organisations in the Mekong Region think that gender sensitivity, including giving voices to women, is part of doing better stories? How do they define it within the context of their societies and how do they report on different genders and sexuality? Do they include the use of gender-friendly language in their stylebooks and training programmes? How much is using a gender lens a news habit?
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