Um-hum.

So, I’ve told you about the little neighborhood and its struggles. Now, a different glimpse of Saigon in the 1990s.

Parents clearly weren’t afraid to invest in their children’s education. But let’s look at the weekly schedule of one middle-class kid, not from some super-rich family.

Three times a week, there was a 1.5-hour session for each of the big three, Math, Physics and Chemistry, plus English. Literature was another one or two sessions a week.

Then came piano or organ, 1.5 hours, three times a week.

And that was on top of going to school twice a day, morning and afternoon, because this particular kid went to a gifted school.

At the weekend, there could be extracurricular sports too, aerobics, badminton or swimming.

You might think her mother must have been running around like a mad woman trying to drive her daughter everywhere.

Nope.

The tutors came to the house.

And no, these weren’t random university students. They were established teachers, some of them quite well known.

Music, Literature or art were often one-on-one. English could be shared with her older brother because they were close in age.

Math, Physics and Chemistry could be done in a small group of two or three close friends, partly for the very practical purpose of keeping everyone awake, because having someone else there gave you a little extra motivation.

And if everything worked out, there could even be a familiar motorbike taxi driver taking the child to class.

As long as she showed up at the art studio for drawing lesson, nobody needed to conduct an investigation into exactly who had dropped her off that day. And the child wasn’t exactly going to climb onto a stranger’s motorbike without being told to do so first. We did trust with … faith. hahaha

So really, Mum only had one job:

Pay the bill.

And voilà, you had a miniature school at home.

But that was just English.

Some families with children born in the 1970s went even further. The tutoring started since 1980s. They might hire a teacher for Russian. Then, before the child had even finished that, switch to French. Then English. And before you knew it, they were moving on to Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The child could either go to a language centre for fun, or simply have a professional teacher come to the house. And if the child didn’t want to learn Chinese writing, that was perfectly fine. The teacher could simply come to practise speaking, with perhaps a basic introduction to reading simple numbers or words, but no writing, as requested.

There was no syllabus, no rigid curriculum, and no school rule to follow. What the child actually wanted to learn was the only rule that mattered at that level of private tutoring with a professional teacher.

and Mum could simply bring the whole language centre home because she was busy.

That was it.

Saigon has always had this very energetic attitude toward learning. It wasn’t simply about going to school and squeezing into a classroom with 200 other students of a famous teacher. If a teacher was particularly good, families might simply invite that teacher to come and teach at home. And these teachers were truly dedicated. They did not simply teach knowledge, they also brought their own character, discipline, and respectful manner as role models for the children to learn from. Sometimes, they would even teach beyond the scheduled time without making a fuss about it, simply because they wanted to make sure the child had understood.

And if a dad, one day, happened to be in the right mood, he would hire a dance teacher to teach his wife and his 4-year-old daughter all sorts of classical dances right in their living room. With neighborhood kids peering in from outside, eagerly joining in whenever they wanted, that was simply the spirit of it all.

The important point is that child was never expected to gain first class by her parents.

Learning something extra, whether it was a language, music, drawing, literature, mathematics, or a sport, was not treated as some strange luxury. It was a very natural part of life.

You studied, you learned another language, you played an instrument, you drew, you swam, you played badminton, you did aerobics, whatever was available. You complained you were tired and busy but then you still did it.

It was simply part of growing up.

And honestly, there was a lot of energy around learning that I have witnessed and experienced since born. Hahaha.