Ông kẹ

The picture named "ông ba bị" drawn by H.Oger in the soon 20th Century

As you know, I am Vietnamese, and I'm very proud of my 4000 years culture. Today, I will write about my culture.

First, I want to let you know a little about our people. Vietnamese are people who used to live in North Vietnam today thousands years ago. Our race is austro-asialatique which is the combination of Australoid and Mongoloid. Actually, indonésie (who live in most of Southeast Asia today) is the combination of Australoid and Mongoloid, and we Vietnamese (actually, austro-asialatique) is the combination of indonésien and Mongoloid. 4 thousands years ago, my people lived in North Vietnam, and like other Eastern Asian countries, we were affected a lot by Chinese culture, but, because we lives in the land which is the interference of two culture, one from the North, and one from the South, our culture has a lot of different factors.

There are a lot of things to write about m culture, but the one I chose which I myself learn from watching people teach their children is very simple, and very few people think much about it. That is Ông kẹ (or ông ba bị, which mean Mr. Three-Sacks), an unreal person. In Vietnam, when kids are naughty, or do something wrong, we often scares them by Ông kẹ. Ông kẹ is the person who job is to kidnap naughty kids, put them into his sacks, and they are very afraid of him. I think much about it, why do our forefather have to have one person for just scaring the kids ? One time, when I see a young woman told her boy to go to bed, I realized why. She said "Go to bed now, son, father will not be happy if he see you at this time." Oh, she used the boy's daddy to scare him. Back to Ông kẹ, now I know his role in my culture. My forefathers want to teach kids by a little scaring when needed. But, to use their father, mother, grandma etc would make them have not good impression about their close people. Ông kẹ can solve this problem, he is a tool for parents to teach their kids when need without making a bad impression about themselves. Moreover, Ông kẹ teaches kids that, your parents will protect you, and you'd better listen to them to do right things.

Ok, that's it, I'm done ^^ You guys have a nice weekend, I'm going to join an American wedding celebration, time for getting know more about American culture. thanks, c ya on Monday.