The Formation of Spatial and Symbolic Boundaries among Vietnamese Diasporic Skilled Return Migrants in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract

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.

No place like home? Self‐initiated expatriates in their ancestral homeland

“…The findings here suggest that expatriates working in their ancestral homeland, and who have preserved key aspects of their cultural heritage and are fluent in the dominant host‐country language(s), are well equipped to adjust to their new environment. While this observation might, on the surface, appear rather unsurprising, it actually contradicts a notable portion of the literature, which argues that cultural similarity and common heritage does not ease adjustment – in fact it very often makes it more challenging (Barmé 2010; Nguyen‐Akbar 2014, 2017; Selmer 2007; Selmer and Shiu 1999). Given the context of our study (Chinese Malaysians in the PRC), we posit that a key factor in this is cultural preservation and linguistic fluency.…”

“…Given their ethnic connections to their host country and their foreign upbringing and citizenships, some expatriates resort to carving out an identity ‘middle ground’. According to Nguyen‐Akbar (2017, 1115), for example, the Việt Kiều construct ‘symbolic boundaries to distinguish themselves from foreigners and ethno‐national boundaries to distinguish themselves from locals’, engaging in a potentially complex process of criss‐crossing boundaries in search of a sense of belonging.…”

“…However, many of the more recent studies are based predominantly on the experiences of expatriates who have gone in a decidedly East‐West‐East direction, as it were. Though there is commendable variation in host‐country settings – incorporating such locations as Vietnam (Nguyen‐Akbar 2016, 2017), India (Jain 2013), Mainland China (Wang 2016, 2017), and Hong Kong (Yan, Lam and Lauer 2014) – these studies have drawn almost exclusively on ethnically Asian respondents who have experienced a Western upbringing and who find themselves working ‘back’ in Asia. This is certainly understandable given the large numbers of such diasporas in North America, Europe, and Australia and the findings have undoubtedly contributed much to our understanding of the phenomenon.…”

“…The context of our investigation is Malaysian self‐initiated expatriates (SIEs) of Chinese descent working in the People's Republic of China (PRC). In this regard, our study represents a departure from those studies focusing on expatriates from Western countries returning to their ancestral homeland, which usually happens to be either a different Western country (Bešić and Ortlieb 2019) or an emerging Asian economy (Jain 2013; Nguyen‐Akbar 2017; Wang 2016, 2017). At the same time, our study differs from many of the ‘intra‐Asian’ studies undertaken by Selmer and associates, which have either focused on PRC‐based expatriates from Hong Kong (Selmer and Shiu 1999) (or vice versa – Selmer, Ebrahimi and Mingtao 2000a,b) or have adopted a broader perspective by analysing ‘overseas Chinese’ expatriates generally (Selmer 2002).…”

Influencing ICTs: Born in the West and “returning” to Vietnam

“…Hoang (2016) points to the 2008 financial crisis as facilitating "the simultaneous rise of East Asia and the waning economic dominance of the United States and Western Europe" (p. 145). This has arguably led to high levels of return migration after the 2008 crisis and the arrival of highly-skilled foreign-born Vietnamese back to their ancestral land (Nguyen-Akbar 2017;Zaiceva and Zimmermann 2016). Koh (2015) and Nguyen-Akbar (2016) both described the recession as a push factor for Vietnamese heritage migration.…”