Seventeenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Focusing on social interactions in the homeland among Vietnamese diasporic subjects, this study examines the complex interpretations of success and worthiness within Vietnamese transnational repertoires. As a country undergoing dramatic economic transformation for more than three decades, Vietnam is a site of new hierarchies with the increasing return of overseas migrants who encounter a growing new monied class. I examine the formation of these hierarchies in situations where individuals seek to establish themselves as “social betters” in determining criteria of worthiness. I am concerned with the cultural repertories and structural resources underlying how and why individuals create or draw lines to define themselves against each other, and how such lines are rooted in social comparisons that lead to contests over meanings about success and parity. I argue that the homeland is a site of cross-class interactions in which great confusions exist over meanings of taste, success, and achievements, all of which produce blurry measurements of worth. The analysis is based on more than 90 in-depth interviews and intensive participant observations over a seven year period with a cross section of the overseas migrant and local populations in Ho Chi Minh City.