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Raising Vietnamese: War and youth in the South in the early 1970s

This essay considers the importance of looking at writings for children for historical analysis, particularly in times of war, focusing on magazines published for youth in South Vietnam in the early 1970s. Two magazines, Thiếu Nhi and Thằng Bờm, in particular, are studied in terms of their editorial aims and contents, as well as their young readers' submissions in response to contemporary sociocultural issues raised in these magazines. The lively discussions in these magazines were made possible by the relative freedom of expression in South Vietnam, compared to North Vietnam, which was an important reason for the civil war being fought. Yet this freedom also challenged the fabric of Vietnamese society. The strongest concern of these magazines' initiators, editors and writers was that its readers not lose their sense of being Vietnamese in the face of the great wartime flood of American popular culture that captivated many youth. Anxiety that the younger generation would be Americanised and lose their identity struck at the core of what the war was being fought about: i.e. different versions of being Vietnamese in the modern world. This threat of Americanisation to fundamental Vietnamese values was perceived by some intellectuals in the South as more serious than the threat of communism, because at least the communists were Vietnamese.