Traditional Toys Less Popular in Vietnam
Lanterns and moon cakes for Mid-Autumn Festival on
Ham Nghi Street, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
This past weekend was the Mid-Autumn Festival or Moon Cake Festival in Asia. My family and I attended one party each on Saturday and Sunday and have received countless moon cakes as gifts. The holiday is a fun one for children as well. Lanterns lit by battery-powered lights or candles are in each child’s hand come sundown.
The plastic lanterns come in all shapes and sizes with the most popular in the shape of Hello Kitty, Power Rangers, or Nemo; many even play annoying electronic music (what a bonus!). Modern toys like these lanterns with many whizbang doo-dads are pushing traditional toys out of the market.
It’s interesting to me that wooden toys are gaining in popularity in the U.S. (at least among my friends) but are increasingly disdained by kids in Vietnam for being too conservative and old-school. Wooden toys made by local producers cost at least half as much as those made in Europe and most are good quality. I always buy a few for my friends’ children when I visit my parents in California and my son has more than his share of wooden toys as well.
“If people want to find a suitable Vietnamese product, they will have a hard time. We have some products from the local Hanson firm, such as jigsaws and building blocks, and some locally made stuffed animals,” says a shopkeeper, Nguyen Thi Thu. But Thu says the domestic toys are much more expensive than the illegally imported ones, and the selection rarely changes.
Given that Vietnam is a developing country, people will most likely look to mass produced, cheap products for a long time coming. Perhaps when Vietnam becomes a wealthier nation, its people will occasionally turn their faces from always looking ahead and look back occasionally at traditional toys with fond nostalgia.
For more about Mid-Autumn Festival, see our sister blog, Asian Cuisine.
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POSTED IN: News and Links about Children's Things
1 opinion for Traditional Toys Less Popular in Vietnam
Miracle
Dec 21, 2008 at 10:41 am
This is one of problem of Vietnamese.Loving flashy toys and the cheap ones , so we didn’t relize how valuable tradition toy is. In near future, we soon fed up with computer games or high-tech toy and use traditional toy
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