In Vietnam, you always learn all the subjects. There is Math for every semester in every grade; so are Literature and Foreign Language (mostly English), which altogether constitute the trio of basic subjects that are often taken as the point of comparison across students to evaluate their competency. Most schools that follow the national curriculum follow the exact same textbooks. Teachers are thus required to teach the same exact contents if they want to ensure that, when the time comes to ‘compare’, either through middle-/high-school or university entrance exams or just regular finals, students are equipped with the right materials to score highly the test. There is a pretty good basis of fairness.

Math and English are not really major subjects of contention because the tests do not ask the same thing as in-class practices. You can perhaps learn some tricks to eliminate answers in multiple-choice questions, but in general you have to actually understand the concepts to achieve good grades. Literature, however, is different. Because students are introduced to the same texts, and logic of tests is to ensure students are generally competent (i.e., actually studied what they were supposed to study), then perhaps the easiest way to “test Literature” is to ask them to analyze texts that they have seen and have been familiar with what they mean. If the goal was to differentiate between students’ analytical capabilities, then the method would be different (e.g., Literature Academic Competitions, where students have way more flexibility in picking textual material and inserting their own analysis). But in the name of sufficiency, this testing method has been the de facto since… structured schooling is a thing in Vietnam.

In elementary school, students generally learn narrative and descriptive writing. Describe to me one of your parents; third-graders are generally required to compose between seven and ten sentences illustrating the beauty of their closest family members. How would one describe a person? In retrospect, it is not hard to come up with different ways to describe. What is your mother’s facial shape? Is her hair long? How tall is she?, one might think of ways to physically ascribe words to someone’s attributes, followed by observing subjects in motion, What does she like to do? What does she do for a living? How does she treat other people?. Now of course you don’t want to tell your teachers how your mom bickers with your dad, or at least as an eight-year-old you wouldn’t even know that that’s relevant. In fact, the biggest struggle for my nephews and nieces when I was babysitting them in my high school summers was to come up with things to say without my direct instruction. It is a good exercise in perception, but unlocking the idea of prioritizing certain observations and phenomena and structuring them prosaically is a huge step for any child–and a necessary one.

Somewhere in the teaching agendas of Vietnam’s overworked Literature teachers lie their lofty aspirations: their students will be able to describe people or objects by the first semester, or use language in an emotionally deliberate fashion by the second. I cannot attest to the specifics of people’s giáo án, inasmuch as I spent years looking through online samples of them to deduce the grading criteria for my own essays. What I do know is that teachers and students both face an immense pressure to demonstrate a strong command of Vietnamese language and literature, with standards that perhaps are a bit too high for the student-to-teacher ratio of public high schools (in elementary school, about 60-to-1). My nieces and nephews had three extra afternoons from me to slowly learn how to write by themselves; that is not the case for the majority of youngsters.

Thus came văn mẫu, or exemplary literature. If the writing prompts are simple and uniform, and the inexperienced learners have no frame of reference to understand what is required of them, why not offer some examples of good writing? In any given bookstore in Vietnam, you can find anthologies of exemplary literature to variants of the same prompt in each grade, most often with more than one sample. They are long, complex, beautifully written, and representative of high-caliber education–that is why they are văn mẫu. Students should look at these pieces and learn how to write. But they have never seen something so good, so they don’t know how else to write that is remotely as good. So they take the samples literally. The sample describes some random fathers in such vague terms it could have been any parental figures anyway. My father also happens to have a caramel complexion, textured hair with grey streaks due to hard work, and veiny hands from /insert his profession/. If the task is to showcase good writing, then this is it! The students are happy, the teachers are happy. It is a win-win!

This practice of course is not sustainable. Students should ideally use văn mẫu as a reference to improve their own writing, not to rely on it. Good students generally do, but why bother? As they advance in their K-12 education, the forms of testing are more or less unchanged: they might have to analyze the rhetorical devices of a text or reflect on a social phenomenon, but the domain of requirements is so narrow that there already exist writing examples for all permutations of prompts in Literature exams: social realism is a predominant mode of literary analysis that you can almost get away with any writings that discuss how important something is to the national unified spirit. An additional layer of stress is in the outcome. Students sit once-a-year exams to compete to get into the high school and university of their choice, which involve literary analyses of their textbook pieces. It is the same pieces of writing, with the same kinds of questions, with somewhat of a correct way to interpret. Literature is treated like Math or Foreign Languages: a problem-solving practice with deterministic solutions that are well-known and proven superior to all alternatives.

Once the general desire for critical literary analysis has been adequately passivated by the glorification of văn mẫu, then they have no choice but to not think. They cannot think, because what they think is not good or enough. Instead, when introduced to an excerpt from a pre-war poem, they rely on their teachers to point out how the historical contexts played into the word choice, how sensory interpretations made by the author are deliberate and evocative, or how once again the point of poetry is about war and patriotism and social unity. At some point several decades ago, a panel of authors, I imagine, have decided upon the right conclusions to be drawn from a piece of literature that should help students understand how to read. They wanted these conclusions to serve similar purposes as văn mẫu–as examples to consult–but instead have made them infallible–as the One True Correct Interpretation, as I say. Realistically, how can middle-schoolers ever come up with the same ideas as college-educated literature teachers? The One True Correct Interpretation instrument is perpetuated through cycles of reward and punishment. If you write what I said is right, you earn higher grades, get selected for the schools you want, and become perceived as better than others. If you do not write as said, perhaps you might be right–but only on the off-chance that you are actually a genius, otherwise your life opportunities can immediately close upon you.

Literature education in Vietnam is an art form as much as a bleak reality, a constant tug of war between doing what you believe is right (saying what you feel) and doing what you believe is considered right (saying what you âre told). As a student, you don’t know if you are really that smart, but you do know that you should not be penalized for interpreting literature as you wish–that is the point of literature. As a teacher, you don’t know if you want to represent the enforcement of a subject many students disregard for its motonony (even though it is the opposite), or if you trust your students to dedicate their time among twelve other subjects to learn how to read. All these dilemmas have only resulted in an impasse, as both teachers and students are encouraged to treat Literature like another subject to learn through rote memorization of bullet points.

When I took the test for Hanoi-Amsterdam middle school, I actually earned more points in my Literature exam than my Math one. Soon enough, the way Literature were to be taught caught up on me. There is a soft ceiling of an 8 out of 10 for long-form writing, so throughout grades 6 to 8 my GPA (and everyone else’s) was marked down by atleast an overall 0.2 because of this subject. And this is already with learning Literature by heart. I just do not know what there is to earn grades higher than 8, or 8.5 if I am lucky enough. These exams truly test the tenacity of your wrist muscles because you need to convey all the points in about eight pages of pen-handwriting within ninety minutes. The teacher would give you between three to five possible questions in advance, and you can either put all eggs in one basket (học tủ) or spread out your preparation time going over notes that the teacher had told you to meticulously write down. Worse, I was also graded by the quality of my penmanship. When I sat the Literature exam for high school entrance, I already knew that I would get a 7.5 based on my handwriting alone–and I was right.

In junior year of college, I found myself trapped in a nightmare as I looked at a teacher writing the prompt for some Literature exam on the blackboard and froze midway through coming up with an essay skeleton. My teacher had stayed for an extra ten minutes, and I was the last person sitting, trying to scribble away whatever I could, fearing the consequences of this unfinished essay on my grade as my teacher pulled my papers away from my hands. The second time this happened, it became lucid dreaming. I had to remind myself that I am no longer in Vietnam, that I no longer a high school student, that I have intentionally engineered my courses at Yale to not have any timed writing assignments. Somehow writing essays in class has become such a core memory–or trauma–that I could still relive the emotions so vividly.

My high school Literature teacher was actually a beacon of light in my education. We actually originally had a different one, the teacher who was the head of the Literature department at Ams that we knew would teach English 1 every three years. Soon enough we found ourselves confused by her non-presence. She came to the first two sessions with a lot of sass, then disappeared for the next two, went back to complain about our lack of air conditioning and give my friend a 6, then announced that she would no longer teach our class because she was having allergies. We had three substitute teachers, all young and female, who showed up looking like they knew they were just goaded into this gig so our actual teacher could give them promotions. It was not until cô Lê (Mrs. Lê, her first name) that we all visibly appeared to enjoy, and she took over.

Cô Lê was just as sassy, but in a dry-humor kind of way. We soon learned that she was infamous among the teachers at Ams–she herself won the elusive First Prize in Literature Academic Competitions when she was in 12th grade here, was the top-scorer coming into Literature Pedagogy department, and came out salutatorian only because she was writing her thesis with her newborn child in her bosom. I had thought that our original teacher actually faked being sick as a way to hand-pick cô Lê into the Ams teaching faculty. Getting jobs at this school is really hard as it can set up your teaching career for life, and our original teacher was known to really like her first-prize winning successors. Nonetheless, it was clear from our first interactions that she was no stranger to the shenanigans of English 1 students, a class that famously does not take university entrance exams seriously because everyone wanted to study abroad.

When I went back to Vietnam last year, I had a coffee chat with cô Lê. I had previously written my last writing assignment on Hồ Xuân Hương vis-à-vis her sexuality and Foucault’s conception of ars erotica. I asked her for some advice on interpreting her works, especially those that are semi-censored for lewdness. She gave me a list of books that are similarly removed from public limelight for similar reasons. Five years from my graduation, cô Lê no longer teaches at Ams. She moved to Giảng Võ middle school and started being the form teacher to seventh graders, perhaps as it was the rational next step in terms of career advancement, especially as the financial pressures mounted after COVID-19. She still hangs out with my classmates and was delighted to see me, because we all represented a different stage of life to her: when she was still fresh out of college, enamored with literature and its power on society, and unbothered by existential conundrums. It also helped that she was teaching our class: a bunch of students generally well-behaved, under no pressure to conform to the One True Literary Interpretaion, yet capable of producing quality original thoughts due to other academic factors. Our class was almost like what she imagined the future of her profession would be, that is before she moved to her current school and has to deal with hyperactive children still bound by the constraints of văn mẫu.

To me, she also represented a different stage of life, but more so a much-needed symbol of change among Literature educators. Cô Lê wanted to host debate sessions in class instead of more written exams. She did not dismiss my handwritings with a nonchalant 7.5, but asked me to re-describe my ideas in each paragraph so she could actually understand what I wrote. She brought in creative prompts that could not have come with some pre-fixed sets of points to check off, so that we were encouraged to think and she felt excited to grade. Between grades 10 and 12, I slowly increased my Literature grades to a maximum of 8.9–something I had conditioned myself to be undeserving of had it not been for cô Lê to highlight that I actually made good arguments. She shared a love for the defiant, the socially unsettled, while herself navigating the disciplinary roles of an educator in general and a Vietnamese public school Literature teacher specifically.

Discourse on Literature analysis in grade school is plastered over Vietnamese Facebook circles, propagating similar tones of unease with how banal or backward their education had been. And I think this is true: I think that literature education in Vietnam needs to radically transition away from unintentionally leading students down the lazy habits of using someone else’s words, for such a subject that is supposed to blossom your critical thinking. Cô Lê was an opportune exception in my educational trajectory. I already knew the literature education I wanted; it was just that she showed me that change is really happening to me and that it should happen to everyone. At the same time, there is a larger, more malicious undercurrent of liberal arts educated people who have managed to grow away from their homeland, now looking back on their educational upbringing as nothing short of savagery and incivility. Their thinking is new, nuanced, and correct, and I can show just how much better my thinking is based on fanciful theoretical paradigms they recently learned to imbue their writing with. The truth is far more complex. Their analyses are not fair nor presenting anything new. I have been aware of the points they are packaging as revolutionary since I was in high school, and I am sure plenty of others are in Vietnam. If the point is about how new knowledge has informed better re-reading of literature, then by all means; education in the way of nationalized curriculum like Vietnam, however, requires crafting of a method that is both accessible to the general public school student and appropriate for the amount of knowledge they have amassed. It is much easier for us to look back and scoff at the insanity of văn mẫu or the One True Correct Interpretation, than for cô Lê to find a classroom exclusively made up of well-educated Westernized high-schoolers, or for policy-makers to implement actionable changes.

But they are already happening. Soon enough, students will be tested only on material they have not seen, just like Math and English, just like they way they are supposed to actually know how to narrate, describe, reflect, or analyze without the crutch of exemplary literature. I doubt that it is that easy for all Vietnamese students to just adopt high-brow literary intuition, given how complicated good literature is in reality. Perhaps the point is not to be correct, but to encourage an epistemology of daring to think amid the broader milieu of deep-seated Confucian hierarchies.