Vietnam takes great pains to distinguish itself from China.
It’s always fun to watch a hapless tourist suck the air out of a room by calling Tet “Chinese New Year” and it seems like, every year, some “forward-thinking” professor humbugs Vietnam’s observance of Tet for its unseemly Chinese-ness.
Two years ago, the government shut down the last university in Hanoi* that studied chữ nôm--Vietnam’s character-based, Sino-Vietnamese alphabet.
Soon, no one in the country will be able to read texts that go back further than a hundred years and Vietnam will gradually become more comfortable with the delusion that (culturally and historically speaking) it has no more do with China than, say, Sweden.
Interesting, then, that Vietnam seems dead-set on kicking off a messy Industrial Revolution cobbled out of sneaker and cell phone factories powered by coal plants.
Every day, it seems to me, the sky in Vietnam looks more and more Chinese.
*The very astute ZKarl has pointed out that this is probably bullshit. The bullshit in question originated with a wandering monk with whom I shared a motorbike along the Ho Chi Minh Road a few Springs ago. He received a call, at one point, and fell even quieter than usual. When asked what was wrong, he told me that his alma mater had shut down it’s Han-Nom project.
At ZKarl’s prompting, I wrote my boss and guru to ask if I was crazy or our newspaper had ever carried a story to back up the monk:
I believe that Han Nom studies are still available in the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Hanoi.
I don't think Thanh Nien ever had an article [about the closing of said University/program]. I read that some scholars have even called for re-introducing Sino-Nom scripts to high school students. Though I don't think many students are interested. They'd preferred Japanese or Korean.
So in short, yes, Han Nom studies are alive. But you're not crazy at all - most of us don't care about that language.