Ambivalent Belonging, Differentiated Foreignness

• In Event: 435 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Home and Belonging

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic portrait of the ambivalent belonging experienced by the 1.5- and second-generation Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as diasporic ‘return’ migrants. Because of their transnational identification with other expatriates, their social lives in Ho Chi Minh City gravitated toward pockets of cosmopolitan and expatriate community. However, they are not entirely detached with Vietnam, being the children of refugees who fled during the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Such experiences can help sociologists understand how one type of cosmopolitan elites can exhibit ways of imagining home and belonging in multiple social worlds, but who feel neither local or completely foreign. Some Viet Kieu found belonging in what almost seemed like an “expatriate bubble” – a constantly evolving “in-group” of Western expatriates – while others crossed social boundaries; some confessed to inactively avoiding the bubble. I paid attention to the boundaries the Viet Kieu drew between themselves and local urban Vietnamese from different social classes in their age and peer groups. This article contributes to the broader notion that migration to Ho Chi Minh City did not necessarily mean a smooth integration to the “imagined” homeland for so many Viet Kieu in my study. Rather, Vietnamese American ‘return’ migrants, who comprise the majority in this study, construct their identities influenced by their ambiguous class and ethnic privilege across borders. These ideas of self mapped onto their navigation of the social and physical spaces of Ho Chi Minh City.

Author

• Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, University of Puget Sound