Cultivating Dreams: Becoming Middle- class and Affluent in Globalizing Urban Vietnam

Vietnam aspires to become a middle-class and affluent country. It encourages its citizens to take action to realize the dream of a better future. In building social development, the state’s messages are clear in encouraging individuals to marry in their twenties, have a small family, and invest in cultivating their children’s future through education and a diverse range of activities including sport. Yet, reading is a popular pastime and normative social practice in Vietnam. An urban middle class Vietnamese child’s literary diet is dominated by best-selling children’s book titles from around the globe coupled with locally produced folktales and other nationalist stories. Using children’s literature as a lens, this chapter examines how chil dren of Vietnam’s urban middle class are socialized and cultivated into relative affluence and success through reading. I draw on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that the reading habits fostered in children contribute to shaping the future dispositions of Vietnamese citizens as urban, middle-class, and globalized. This is at odds with the state’s agenda, which is aligned loosely to the duties of socialist and Asian values. This chapter suggests that reading decisions among the urban middle class in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam’s largest city, contributes to raising children as political subjects who feel empowered to enact far-reaching social change through an emerging form of networked participatory citizenship.