We interview Maya Nguyen about her book, Small Revolutionaries: Participation of Children and Youth in the Vietnam War
Our member, Dr. Maya Nguyen (SOAS, University of London, UK), talks about her book, Small Revolutionaries: Participation of Children and Youth in the Vietnam War (Cornell University Press, 2025).
Q: What is this book about?
This book is about young Vietnamese recruits who joined the military struggle against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies between 1955 and 1975. Specifically, they were a part of the communist revolutionary movement – hence the book’s title, Small Revolutionaries. I recount what their lives looked like before, during, and after the conflict to trace the forces that shaped their decision to enlist, structured their wartime experiences, and impacted their reintegration into postwar society.
The book highlights that children and youth’s contributions took many forms, such as gathering intelligence, tending and maintaining camps, building and destroying roads with rudimentary tools, or providing simple medical care. Their stories reveal the profound physical and psychological toll of ongoing war, poverty, and violence. Yet, they also demonstrate political awareness, empathy, and a striking resilience.
The book situates these stories within the social worlds that made them possible. It explores how prevailing understandings of childhood, centered on family loyalty, collectivism, and responsibility to community, intersected with communist ideology, which many children absorbed long before they enlisted. Together, these frameworks shaped both the broader Vietnamese conception of childhood and the lived experiences of young wartime recruits. I argue that it is within these conditions that we need to understand the decisions of my interviewees to support the revolutionary movement.
Ultimately, this is a study of young people navigating wartime conditions with limited resources and embedded within strict hierarchies, but finding ways to be politically engaged, creative, and hopeful.
Q: What made you write this book?
I grew up in Vietnam, and stories of the war against the United States and the earlier anticolonial struggle against France were a big part of my own childhood. I encountered, again and again, legends and lived accounts of young people, sometimes only twelve or thirteen, who participated in military activities in their own ways.
When I later moved to the United Kingdom to study International Relations as an undergraduate, I enrolled in Professor Ali Watson’s module on Gender and Generation. The course prompted me to revisit the stories that had shaped my childhood, this time through a more explicit theoretical and conceptual lens. I planned to write my undergraduate thesis on children’s participation in the Vietnam War, and was surprised to discover how little Western scholarship addressed what had seemed to me a familiar and “common sense” history.
In retrospect, this absence perhaps reflects the prevailing assumptions about children and childhood, particularly the limited ways in which children are imagined as political actors. The gap between the empirical prominence of these stories in Vietnam and their relative marginality in academic inquiry fascinated me. It was this tension that led me to pursue the topic at doctoral level and, eventually, to develop it into this book.
An excerpt from the Introduction:
Some of my interviewees did not negotiate with either their parents or the cadres, instead coming up with elaborate plans to hide their intentions and run away from home. It is also notable that while expectations regarding “what is done,” or a sense of duty, guided my interviewees’ decisions, they demonstrated an ability to adapt to and negotiate these norms. For example, Xuan used the expectation that young people engage in labor and production to join the Youth Shock Brigades. Knowing that her parents were likely to object to her joining the war effort, she lied to them, saying that she was going to find a job in another town. She was even careful to explain that the job did not pay very well, thus providing an excuse as to why she would not be able to send money back home. She remembered: “My parents just told me—okay, do as you wish. Just find a job that fits your health and do it. That’s fine. We don’t need your money, just go if you want to.”
Another similar striking example can be seen in the case of Lan, who grew up in Hai Phong, a city in northeastern Vietnam. Her father had been killed in the war, and her brothers both joined the struggle. If she also enlisted, she would leave her mother by herself. In a Confucian society, this would be a serious breach of filial piety. However, after attending a meeting held by the Youth Shock Brigades, she felt that “the opportunity has come to me.” Her thoughts echo the aforementioned sentiment that by contributing to the political struggle, recruits felt that they would liberate their parents along with the country and therefore would still be carrying out their familial duties (Halberstam 2007, 92). She reasoned with herself, “I can contribute to the revolution if I stay home, but I can contribute more if I go.” She chose to write a letter describing her desire to volunteer, and instead of arguing with her mother about leaving, left in secret. While doing so, however, she demonstrated a significant amount of planning and knowing that she had to lie about leaving so as not to upset her mother, as well as determination to control her own emotions:
While I wrote, I still didn’t let my mother know that I [was] going. I remember, the night before leaving, I lay in bed and cried. My mother asked: “Why are you crying?” I said: “The province chose me to go to study cultural education for women and children, for ten days, at the town school.” She asked: “It’s only ten days, why cry? When you marry, are you going to cry, too?” So that [not letting her mother know] was easy.
The next day, that was 22nd of December, the youth branch met me. I volunteered on one condition: no one must let my mother know where I went. I was there for about four or five days, when my mother found out. She went up to the base and called for me. But I was afraid that if I met my mother, my determination would disappear. So I hid in the squad. We wore uniforms, wore rubber sandals and caps, so she couldn’t see who her daughter was. She searched for me for those four or five days, she couldn’t find me, cried and left (Nguyen 2023, 18).
For both girls, the act of hiding their intention to join the revolution is similar to the case I described in chapter 2, where a Viet Minh soldier, who did not tell his parents that he was leaving, was convinced by guerrillas that he was still a filial son because in liberating the country, he was also liberating his parents. Although both of my interviewees were seemingly going against core virtues of filial piety, a closer look at their responses shows that they demonstrated considerable care, affection, and filiality toward their parents—sparing their feelings, deliberating how their decisions would affect their family, and ultimately choosing to participate in a revolution that, they believed, would also benefit their loved ones.
As children and youth, my interviewees’ actions echo Madsen’s (2012) observations about the meaning of “freedom” and “agency” in Confucian societies. In a society with a distinct hierarchy and strictly assigned roles, “agency” does not always mean the ability to choose or not choose to fulfill one’s obligations as desired. Rather, agency manifests itself in the dedication, creativity, nuance—and sometimes, shrewdness—with which one negotiates what their roles and duties could entail. My interviewees’ choices may have been limited by their circumstances, and indeed some of the social norms directly contradicted each other, such as choosing to be filial by staying home with parents or leaving to participate in the military struggle. However, my interviewees were able to make their decisions and negotiate the contradicting ideas of what it means to be a “good,” dutiful child according to Vietnamese cultural norms. In doing so, they demonstrated the ability to understand, navigate, and make plans within the wartime sociopolitical context.