Overlooked connections between sustainable development goals (SDG) and principles of resilience (POR) drive this case study through theoretical ‘Streams of Resilience’ thinking to expose disjuncts in gastronomy, tourism, and domestic development policy on Ly Son Island Vietnam. Grounded approach qualitative methodology supports critique of tourism developments filtered through sustainability-impact trilogy dimensions. Findings suggest that socio-economic and natural ecosystem ‘slow accumulation impacts’ result from internal and external geo-political forces. The critical carrying capacity issues for Ly Son are compounded: first by the internal success of garlic-based agritourism development; and second, Vietnam’s desire to increase ‘on-Island’, investment in tourism infrastructure as a sovereignty response to external influences in a disputed Eastern Sea. Global mobility dilemmas trigger island community and national dialogues that must go beyond sustainable livelihoods to ‘all-around’ resilient ecosystems.

This study builds upon Schegloff’s model as a template to investigate the phenomenon of how Vietnamese people perform their telephone openings. We use a corpus of 50 audio recordings of Vietnamese telephone openings to analyze such a phenomenon through both Conversation Analysis and Ethnography methods in order to capture the data in naturally-occurring settings, and to provide insights into Vietnamese culture that makes Vietnamese telephone openings different from North American ones. The findings demonstrate that Vietnamese telephone openings share some common features with telephone openings in different language communities, especially North American culture. Nevertheless, a number of variations, due to language and cultural differences, still exist. We discuss both theoretical and practical implications.