Hanoi

In Vietnam, women are already old maids at 28 – the two-child policy leads to a high rate of abortions.

The Vietnamese have a favourite question. At first, I understood “How are you?” but now that I have become accustomed to the Vietnamese pronunciation I know the question is actually “How old are you?”

The question is completely normal here. What is new to me, however, is that I, as a 32-year old woman, am considered an old maid. “We don’t look at any woman over 28,” a taxi driver explained to me recently. The Vietnamese population is actually very young with 65 percent under the age of 30. The remark by the taxi driver that at first sounds comical has a very serious cause. Many Vietnamese have told me that a woman who is not married by the age of 25 is written off. Right now, it’s wedding season and young couples can always be seen posing on famous Hoan Kiem Lake. It is very important to marry and especially to have children. The Women’s Museum of Hanoi exhibits a golden statue of the ideal woman: both a mother and a pillar of society. They have left behind the Marxist ideal of large families, however. In the Asienspiegel they write that the “two-child policy” was slightly relaxed in early 2010; in exceptional cases parents may have a third child.

The consequences are shocking, as the German journalist Christian Oster, who has lived in Vietnam for many years, tells me: the country has one of the highest abortion rates in the world. Here, a boy is still worth more than a girl. Therefore, having children is linked to all sort of rituals, says Elena Hansen, who worked for a year at the Women’s Museum on a development aid scholarship from the GIZ (German Society for International Cooperation). She also tells me about the custom of not using a child’s real name until they begin school, but calling them by nicknames like “potato dumpling,” as to not draw the evil spirits’ attention to them.