Xin chao em!

Cecily is not Vietnamese, nor is it likely she's ever eaten Vietnamese food or seen a rice paddy or probably even considered this place in her rabbity little two-year-old's head, but I am going to include her nonetheless in my Vietnamese trip blog because I think she's cute and I miss her!

(Xin chao em is "hello little girl" ... but there is a missing accent.) If there were more Cecilies, I'd be very pleased. But here in Vietnam, there are many more little boys than little girls. Viet Nam News, an English language daily, ran this story recently: Births put yin and yang out of balance.

The paper says, "Males are beginning to outnumber females so rapidly in Viet Nam that an estimated 3 million men are likely to have difficulty finding a mate in about 30 years. Statistics show the ratio was 105 boys for each 100 girls in 1979. This increased to 107 boys to each 100 girls in 1999 and 112 to 100 last year."

The story hinted that ultrasounds and abortions were behind the trend, and indeed, the aborting of female fetuses is a tragic and persistent problem here. But there may be more than misogyny behind this mystery.

In 2004, a Harvard graduate student, Emily Oster, became "intrigued by several small-scale studies ... that suggested that if either parent was a carrier of the hepatitis B virus, the couple were more likely to have male children," the New York Times reported in 2006.

Oster's continued research revealed that countries with higher rates of hepatitis B in the 80's, such as China and India, also tended to be the countries with the highest number of missing women. Oster concluded that hepatitis B could account for about 45 percent of the "missing women" in China, Egypt, western Asia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

The NYTimes is quick to point out, though, that the widespread distribution of the Hep B vaccine should have reversed the sex ratio imbalance. But in fact, the male-female imbalance in Asia has only become worse in recent years.

The Times continues, "The chief reason, it seems, is ultrasound: if a fetus is female, she is more likely to be sex-selectively aborted. Ena Singh, the assistant representative of the U.N. Population Fund in that country, describes the misuse of ultrasound as 'an unholy alliance between tradition and technology.'"

"While Japan breaks the trend with signs of girl preference, countries like Vietnam are joining the ranks of the girl avoiders: in one province there are 128 boys for every 100 girls. Such numbers have led analysts to worry about rising violence, more trafficking of women for marriage and more prostitution."

"Population experts caution that valuing girls may take a cultural sea change. Perhaps the more than 20 million lonely, surplus men predicted in China in 2020 will be the ones to bring it about."

Viet Nam News noted that some appear to be optimistic about the gender discrepancy. (I have often noticed a positive lilt to articles in this paper.) "My two daughters will have an abundance of choices, not like the girls of my generation," it quoted Nguyen Viet Ha, 30, as saying. The accountant also speculated that the imbalance might make Vietnamese men "less self-important."

And the paper interviewed the seemingly dotty Professor Le Thi, who researches gender and families at an unnamed university. She saw the relative paucity of women as an opportunity for self-improvement (although I don't quite follow her rationale). The paper paraphrased her as saying, "Women would do better if they worked to perfect their attractiveness to the opposite sex rather than waiting for men." She told the reporter,"My research finds that women’s morality is most appreciated and followed by a stable occupation and good health."

The newspaper summed up: "Women were born with their looks but had countless ways to perfect themselves."

So here's hoping that Cecily will pursue those countless ways to perfection! Just kidding! We love you just the way you are!