This essay, using multi-sited ethnographic methods, discusses the motivations for the en masse longer-term migration of 1.5 and second generation Vietnamese American professionals to their parents’ ancestral homeland during the 2000s. Social class dynamics, gender, racial, and national identity in the United States and migrant selectivity inform their decisions to migrate to the ancestral homeland for personal growth and to help develop the country. The interviewees’ framing of return experiences reflects the social ambivalence of returning as “in between” subjects in pursuit of a liberal capitalist American Dream abroad.

More than 40 years since the end of the Vietnam War, a younger generation of Vietnamese Americans is returning to their parents’ ancestral homeland with career opportunities tied to Vietnam’s economic growth in the past decade. These more permanent return migrations reveal strategies of local and global assertions of belonging and identity management among the “1.5” and second generation of Vietnamese Americans who work in high-skilled professions in their parents’ ancestral homeland. Known there as the Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese), those who work in both corporate and nongovernmental organizations draw upon multiple forms of social and cultural capital to negotiate a third space between the local and global in Westernizing pockets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I argue that Viet Kieu constructed symbolic boundaries to distinguish themselves from foreigners and ethno-national boundaries to distinguish themselves from locals, but they also crossed these boundaries to find spaces of belonging in Vietnam. The experiences of this niche subgroup of more skilled Viet Kieu constitute “transnational” instances of active ethnic and national identity renegotiation that reaffirmed the importance of place making and subjective claims to an imagined authentic return experience. This study focused on highly skilled returnees, aiming to analyze how transnational flows of capital such as language, education, and access played into the symbolic boundary making and identity politics of return.

Propelled by the globalization of work opportunities in the Global South, thousands of Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) 1.5- and second-generation migrants are “returning” to Vietnam to find skilled work. Through a global ethnography in urban Ho Chi Minh City, this article illustrates how these diasporic “returnees” negotiate their contentious relationship with their nonmigrating, often poorer extended family. My research contributes to the migrant gift giving and reciprocity literature by examining the many ways that “return” migration can create tensions and ambiguity within existing transnational family remittance relationships across borders. The increased presence of diasporic “return” migrants also prompts scholars to reconsider the durability of transnational family ties across the generations, as face-to-face encounters reveal how class, generation, age hierarchy, and gender can create micro-level axes of difference and distancing.

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