ASIA / PACIFIC
July 21, 2014
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 5
As Vietnam’s women go abroad, dads tend the home
DOMESTIC DADS. Pham Duc Viet works in his
carpentry shop in Vu Hoi, Vietnam. When his wife
moved to Taiwan nine years ago to work as a maid —
earning far more than she could in the rice paddies of
the northern Vietnamese hamlet — Viet took over the
household chores and raised their two children on top
of his regular work as a farmer and carpenter. Now,
the double duty is second nature for Viet, 48, as it is
for many male neighbors. Hundreds of women have
left the village of Vu Hoi, 75 miles south of Hanoi, to
take better-paying jobs in Taiwan, Japan, and South
Korea and send money home, part of a wider migra-
tion of female labor from Vietnam over the past 15
years. (AP Photo/Mike Ives)
By Mike Ives
The Associated Press
U HOI, Vietnam — When his wife
moved to Taiwan nine years ago to
work as a maid — earning far more
than she could in the rice paddies of the
northern Vietnamese hamlet — Pham Duc
Viet took over the household chores and
raised their two children on top of his
regular work as a farmer and carpenter.
Now, the double duty is second nature
for Viet, 48, as it is for many male
neighbors. Hundreds of women have left
the village of Vu Hoi, 75 miles south of
Hanoi, to take better-paying jobs in
Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea and send
money home, part of a wider migration of
female labor from Vietnam over the past
15 years.
“Not a big deal,” Viet said of the extra
chores. “I’m willing to sacrifice so that my
kids can have a better life.” His wife’s
earnings are covering university tuition
for their two children and paid for a
furniture workshop next to their house.
As more women leave the country,
Vietnam is following a trend seen in other
Asian nations such as Indonesia, the
Philippines, and Sri Lanka, where women
make up at least two-thirds of workers
who leave the country. Vietnamese women
accounted for about a third of migrant
workers in 2011, according to the United
Nations.
Working as maids or nurses overseas,
women can often earn more than men
doing manual labor such as construction or
farming.
The trend has left behind legions of what
experts call “father-carers,” many of them
in countries with previously well-defined
gender roles regarding housework and
child-rearing.
The changes have contributed to some
social problems in Vietnam, and domestic
media reports have portrayed Vu Hoi as a
village where many “left-behind” fathers
have turned to drugs, alcohol, and
prostitutes.
Fathers interviewed in the village and in
nearby Vu Tien said that while that may
be true in some cases, the reports were
exaggerated. Most men were willing to
V
take on the additional work to support
their families.
Preparing meals was a challenge, some
said, but never an insurmountable one.
“In a farming family like ours, dinners
are pretty simple anyway,” said Vu Duc
Hang, whose two children helped with the
cleaning and cooking when they were at
home. Now they too have been able to
attend college.
There are few comprehensive studies on
father-carers, and scholars say the social
and psychological effects of female labor
migration on Asian societies are still far
from clear.
Some migration studies of Southeast
Asian communities have found that
female relatives typically took over child-
rearing responsibilities when mothers left
for jobs abroad.
But a 2008 survey that tracked about
1,100 migrant-mother households in
Vietnam and Indonesia reported that
more than two-thirds of primary
caregivers were fathers — a sharp contrast
to earlier findings in the Philippines and
Sri Lanka, where as few as a quarter of
dads played a similar role. Related
research on households in Vietnam,
Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines
found that Vietnam was the only country
in which grandfathers — especially
paternal ones — often played a key role in
household decisions.
While there were some cases of adultery,
divorce, and drug abuse, the Vietnam
survey results in particular appeared to
challenge the notion that female labor
migration leads to broken families, said
Lan Anh Hoang, a lecturer in development
studies at the University of Melbourne
who conducted interviews in several
Vietnamese villages for the survey. Vu Hoi
and Vu Tien were part of the Vietnam
sample, which covered the northern
provinces of Thai Binh and Hai Duong.
Vietnamese men in rural areas “actually
don’t mind doing household chores,”
Hoang said. “They have always been
involved in domestic work, so it’s not a big
issue now that their wives are away.”
One possible explanation is that the
country’s communist government has long
promoted gender equality, she said.
A Vu Hoi village official, Pham Ngoc
Thuy, agreed.
“Of course there are positive and
negative aspects of labor migration, but
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the media always focuses on the negative
ones,” he said. “In Vietnam we pride
ourselves on gender equality, and when
women go abroad, most men are willing to
pitch in around the house.”
The total amount of remittances sent
back from all Vietnamese workers
overseas now exceeds $2 billion a year,
said Nguyen Ngoc Quynh, director of
overseas labor management at the labor
ministry. Taiwan, Malaysia, and South
Korea are the top three destinations.
Tran Xuan Cuong, a farmer in a nearby
village, said some of the roughly 170
million dong ($8,000) his wife saved was
used to build an addition to their home and
to invest in raising pigs and brewing
liquor.
He said some neighborhood men fell into
alcoholism or even heroin abuse, but he
wasn’t tempted.
“It was hard to be both a father and a
mother, but it’s something we do because
it’s our obligation,” Cuong said while
sitting in his living room.
Women, too, have made many sacrifices,
giving up being with their children to earn
money abroad.
“Everything is for the livelihood of our
family,” said Cuong’s wife, Pham Thi Lien,
who worked in Lebanon as a maid and
later in a factory. “We both had to
overcome difficulties.”
Viet, the farmer and carpenter, said his
wife was planning to return home from
Taiwan for good later this year.
“I don’t mind farm chores,” he said with
a grin. “But once she comes home, I’ll be
more than happy to hand back the other
ones.”
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