It is necessary to know how to resist bravely the forces of nature but it is also necessary to learn how to live with wild creatures, tricking them and fighting them. One also starts to work very young in Viet-Nam. From their youth in rural areas, boys tend buffaloes, make them feed on small floodbanks while girls help in the household chores. Very young, from six or seven years old, they know how to cook rice, carry their little brothers, feed the pigs and ducks, carry drinking water to the familiar animals or taking part in family artisanal work. During the years when the war was at its height, young people were also assigned to dig trenches along the small floodbanks to throw themselves in when airplanes approached, live in undergrounds and tunnels to escape the bombings.
Girls have twice as much work as boys.
30's and 40's. To pay a corrupt official, a country-woman had to sell her daughter for one piastre. Nowadays, even this practice is prohibited, one nevertheless notes a great number of young female prostitutes on the streets of big cities. The living conditions are also distressing. Many young people coming from families afflicted by poverty and war continue to always crawl in tangles of badly erected huts that are dark and terribly dirty.