Revisiting the Hekou and Lào Cai Bordertowns: Observations on Explaining Field Variations

• In Event: Meaning-Making in Southeast Asia’s Border Crossings

Abstract

This paper examines the use of the field revisit in which an investigator enters or returns to a previously studied site. Employing perspectives from reflexive ethnography, we trace the China-Vietnam Northeast Economic Corridor route from Kunming in China to Hải Phòng in Vietnam. In particular, we revisit the observed, and theorised, world of legal and illegal cross-border trade and sex work at the border towns of Hekou and Lào Cai. We argue that the purpose of such field revisits is not to seek constancy between the reported and the experienced, or to call upon a grand dichotomy between theory and practice, but to understand and explain variation over time and space. We suggest that temporal forms of field variation can be influenced by shifting perceptions that arise from respondents’ selective use of collective memory in interpreting and explaining the impact of crisis or external events on their livelihoods. Recent changes in the type and flow of migrant labour have also introduced small but significant changes in the organization of Vietnamese sex work in Hekou. We account for how ADB/donor-funded transport infrastructure development projects along the economic corridor have introduced new types of commodities traded/smuggled across borders. Finally, we examine our role as field investigators and the theory that is brought into the fieldwork in accounting for variations between heuristic and performative constructions of reality, with a view to developing explanations of change and the connection of the social sciences to the world it seeks to comprehend.

Authors

• Benjamin Loh, ISEAS

• Terence Chong, ISEAS