Ann Marie Leshkowich

Guest Editors' Introduction: How Is Neoliberalism Good to Think Vietnam? How Is Vietnam Good to Think Neoliberalism?

The recent global economic crisis has called into question triumphalist narratives of neoliberal capitalism and its global uniformity. In this introduction to the special issue on Vietnam, we examine Vietnamese “market socialism” as a fertile site for considering how transnational neoliberalism and state socialism have intersected to shape knowledge, governmentality, and everyday cultural practices. We ask, how does the endurance of socialist interpretive frameworks and logics of morality contest or rework neoliberalism and its global modes of regulation? Conversely, how might socialist continuities work in conjunction with neoliberalism to affirm its basic tenets? We argue for an understanding of transnational neoliberalism as a globally diverse set of technical practices, institutions, modes of power, and governing strategies informed by cultural and historical particularities. We caution against addressing “neoliberalism” as a uniform project that signifies the retreat of government or the triumph of a global market economy that fetishizes the “free”; instead we call for more attention to the ways in which socialism is deeply, though unevenly, woven into particular cultural forms, political practices, and historical legacies to ask, What if anything is unique about “neoliberalism” in socialist Vietnam, and to what extent is neoliberalism a useful lens for thinking through contemporary socioeconomic change in Vietnam?

Wandering Ghosts of Late Socialism: Conflict, Metaphor, and Memory in a Southern Vietnamese Marketplace

In the late 1990s, a marketplace trader in Hồ Chi Minh City reported being plagued by wandering ghosts. The postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently without descendents to honor them, but the trader’s wandering ghosts were living: male market officials who demanded that merchants, most of them women, pay a fee for use rights to their stalls. Examining the conflict that ensued, this article argues that the wandering ghosts metaphor aptly captures the bitter struggles over resources and status that have accompanied late socialist economic reforms. More subtly, the metaphor also alludes to lingering wartime animosities. Market officials supported the victors, whereas many traders sided with the losers. Although daily interactions have intersubjectively reworked these tensions so that they seem instead to reflect gender differences, “ghosts” inevitably emerge: odd fragments of memory that wander homeless in the wake of social and individual efforts to render the past coherent. Most traders have paid up simply to avoid the market management board’s harassment. It’s money sacrificed to appease the wandering ghosts [tiền thi co hồn]. —Bến Thanh market trader, Hồ Chi Minh City

Rendering Infant Abandonment Technical and Moral: Expertise, Neoliberal Logics, and Class Differentiation in Ho Chi Minh City

Over the past several decades, transnational adoption of Vietnamese children has developed from a response to war into a routine option for foreigners trying to build families. This article explores how the logics that have emerged within Vietnam to make sense of the transnational movement of children reflect both broader neoliberal ideologies of family and selfhood and late socialist anxieties about class differentiation. Child welfare professionals, the media, and casual observers in Ho Chi Minh City explain rising adoption rates as due to the desperation, ignorance, or emotional inadequacies of poor, rural single mothers who abandon their children. Such claims about maternal unfitness are part of a growing neoliberal tendency in Vietnam to render the family and reproduction technical problems to be solved through the application of scientific expertise. Although rendering technical has elsewhere been analyzed as a process of depoliticization, this article argues that it is neither objective nor value neutral. Rendering technical succeeds by convincingly rendering its targets moral: in this case, expert intervention and social commentary about monstrous abandoning mothers construct a morally ideal maternal subject who recognizes that appropriate child rearing requires particular family configurations, material resources, and forms of knowledge. At the same time, ascribing such notions of personhood, self-improvement, and expertise to a global neoliberal advance ignores details of ethnographic context and history in Vietnam, where neoliberalism operates as much through exception as through normalization. Recent idealizations of particular family configurations and forms of personhood compellingly resonate with preexisting moral discourses about motherhood, family, and political economy, including those promoted by the state in earlier phases of socialism. Narratives about failed reproduction also reveal the particular contours of urban middle-class anxieties in a late socialist context. Through “monster stories” identifying particular kinds of classed, gendered, and localized subjects as unfit parents for reasons of individual morality, education, and “cultural level,” urban middle classes implicitly justify their economic, social, and geographical privilege in terms of a moral worth that their class others lack. Such claims nonetheless provide space for contestation precisely because moral renderings are flexible and contingent. One such rejoinder, in the form of a birth mother’s eloquent testimony, invokes universal notions of human rights and scientific theories of child development to argue that the structural inequalities created by recent economic transformations have denied some vulnerable citizens the ability to express appropriate maternal femininity and moral personhood.

Finances, Family, Fashion, Fitness, and … Freedom? The Changing Lives of Urban Middle-Class Vietnamese Women

Drawing on more than 15 years of ongoing ethnographic research in Ho Chi Minh City, this chapter explores the dilemmas of freedom, constraint, anxiety, and morality experienced by middle-class women with respect to finances, family, fashion, and fitness. Although many women welcome the chance for self-determination afforded by new forms of production and consumption, and this might signal a retreat of the state from involvement in private life, this chapter demonstrates that market-oriented economic policies have enabled the Vietnamese government and communist party to interpellate women as consumer-citizens in new commercial arenas.

On Radicalism and Ethnographic Research on Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Vietnam

I first read Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution from cover to cover shortly after I began graduate school in the early s. I had encountered earlier versions of some of the chapters in an undergraduate course on modern Vietnamese history that I had taken with Professor Tai, but it was not until I had the opportunity to savor the complete book while contemplating conducting my own fieldwork on gender and economic transformation that its scope and import captivated me. As an American of what had just then been termed Generation X, I came to the study of Vietnam with pressing questions forged by my earliest memories: heated political arguments between my parents; disturbing footage on the CBS Evening News that I could only quickly glimpse before my mother jumped up to change the channel (no remote control back then); the sense that the very word “Vietnam” meant something deeply significant and unsettling. I had since come to recognize these Vietnam questions as peculiarly American and had happily cast them off in favor of trying to learn about contemporary Vietnam. There, rapid market-oriented changes had rendered the late s to early s a time of both opportunity and uncertainty in which people were asking themselves questions about who they should be