Daily life in Asia’s newest mega-urban region Vietnam has been transformed over the past quarter of a cen- EARL VIETNAM’S NEW tury by massive industrialization and urbanization that followed macro-economic reforms introduced from the late 1980s. This volume explores the social consequences of this change by delving MIDDLE CLASSES into the lives and aspirations of young women graduates who have VIETNAM’S NEW MIDDLE CLASSES come to Ho Chi Minh City in search of success in the city’s grow- Gender, Career, City ing graduate labour market. They are part of Vietnam’s new middle class, an educated and affluent segment of society growing with the rapid urbanization of Vietnam’s major cities. This rich, person- centred ethnography argues that the country’s mega-urban South- east region enables young women, so long as they remain single, to realize aspirations for betterment that affect not only their own lives, but those of their families and communities who remain in rural Vietnam. It thus highlights the important social role of remit- tances and the salience of kinship during periods of social trans- formation. The volume concludes with a wide-ranging look at the emergence of middle classes in Pacific Asia in order to locate the Vietnamese new middle class within a globalizing context. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Catherine Earl is a social anthropologist and research fellow at Federation Business School, Federation University Australia. She is frequent visitor to Vietnam and she has published on social mobility, social welfare and social change in Vietnam and in Australia GENDERING ASIA a series on gender intersections www.niaspress.dk CATHERINE EARL Earl-pbk-cover.indd 1 10/07/2014 18:50 VIETNAM’S NEW MIDDLE CLASSES Earl book final.indd 1 11/07/2014 17:11 GENDERING ASIA A Series on Gender Intersections Gendering Asia is a well-established and exciting series addressing the ways in which power and constructions of gender, sex, sexuality and the body intersect with one another and pervade contemporary Asian societies. The series invites discussion of how people shape their identities as females or males and, at the same time, become shaped by the very societies in which they live. The series is concerned with the region as a whole in order to capture the wide range of understandings and practices that are found in East, Southeast and South Asian societies with respect to gendered roles and relations in various social, political, religious, and economic contexts. As a multidisciplinary series, Gendering Asia explores theoretical, empirical and methodological issues in the social sciences. Series Editors: Wil Burghoorn, Gothenburg University; Cecilia Milwertz, NIAS; and Helle Rydstrøm, Lund University (contact details at: http://www.niaspress.dk). 1. Working and Mothering in Asia. Images, Ideologies and Identities, edited by Theresa W. Devasahayam and Brenda S.A. Yeoh 2. Making Fields of Merit. Buddhist Female Ascetics and Gendered Orders in Thailand, by Monica Lindberg Falk 3. Gender Politics in Asia. Women Manoeuvring within Dominant Gender Orders, edited by Wil Burghoorn, Kazuki Iwanaga, Cecilia Milwertz and Qi Wang 4. Lost Goddesses. The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History, by Trudy Jacobsen 5 Gendered Inequalities in Asia. Configuring, Contesting and Recognizing Women and Men, edited by Helle Rydstrøm 6. Submitting to God. Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia, by Sylva Frisk 7. The Authority of Influence. Women and Power in Burmese History, by Jessica Harriden 8. Beyond the Singapore Girl. Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore, by Chris Hudson 9. Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Gender, Career, City by Catherine Earl NIAS Press is the autonomous publishing arm of NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, a research institute located at the University of Copenhagen. NIAS is partially funded by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden via the Nordic Council of Ministers, and works to encourage and support Asian studies in the Nordic countries. In so doing, NIAS has been publishing books since 1969, with more than two hundred titles produced in the past few years. UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN Nordic Council of Ministers Earl book final.indd 2 11/07/2014 17:11 VIETNAM’S NEW MIDDLE CLASSES Gender, Career, City CATHERINE EARL Earl book final.indd 3 11/07/2014 17:11 Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Gendering Asia series, no. 9 First published in 2014 by NIAS Press NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark Tel: +45 3532 9501 • Fax: +45 3532 9549 E-mail: [email protected] • Online: www.niaspress.dk © Catherine Earl 2014 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-87-7694-145-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-87-7694-146-8 (pbk) Typeset in Arno Pro 12/14.4 Typesetting by Lene Jakobsen Printed in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxfordshire Cover illustrations: (behind) ‘300th anniversary of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City’, a billboard designed by Phan Hoai Phi (from ‘Tranh cổ động’ [Propaganda posters], Trường Đại học Mỹ thuật Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh, 2000); and (front) reworking of an image by an unknown artist (all efforts to locate the artist have failed but we would be happy to hear from him/her). Earl book final.indd 4 11/07/2014 17:11 Contents Acknowledgements vii 1. Middle classes in post-reform Ho Chi Minh City 1 2. Urban middle classes in postcolonial Saigon 49 3. Living in twenty-first century Ho Chi Minh City 87 4. Lifestyles of professional work 109 5. New middle-class leisure culture 135 6. Social mobility in a multi-dimensional family 172 7. Delaying and desiring marriage 209 8. Conclusion 240 References 271 Index 302 Earl book final.indd 5 11/07/2014 17:11 Earl book final.indd 6 11/07/2014 17:11 Acknowledgements his research began as a doctoral project at Victoria University in Australia. The fieldwork was funded by grants from the T Department of Asian and International Studies and the Secomb Travel Fund at Victoria University, and the Australian Federation of University Women E. M. Hinder Bursary for Research in Southeast Asia. In Ho Chi Minh City, my research was hosted initially by the Faculty of Oriental Studies and later by the Department of Sociology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University. The Nordic Institute of Asian Studies hosted me during the preparation of the manuscript. I am indebted to Mark Stevenson, Marc Askew, Phan Văn Giưỡng, Bùi Khánh Thế, Philip Taylor, Ngan Collins, Nguyễn Hồng Xoan, Trần Phi Phượng, Irina Vasilenka, Anastasia Sai, Noni Basalama, Minna Hakkarainen, and Adam Fforde who provided inspiration, motivation, criticism and humour throughout the project. My thanks go to my fabulous editors at NIAS Press Gerald Jackson and Leena Höskuldsson who made the process seamless. Most importantly, I acknowledge my informants in Ho Chi Minh City and the willingness with which they participated in the research. I am grateful for the sup- port of my family and friends in Australia, Vietnam and Denmark who accommodated and sustained me throughout the project. Earlier versions of sections in chapters 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 have appeared in ‘Cosmopolitan or Cultural Dissonance? Middle-Class Encounters with the Other’, in Marika Vicziany and Robert Cribb (eds), Proceedings of the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Melbourne, Australia: Is this the Asian Century? Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, 2008, pp. 1–15; ‘Post-War Mobilities: Gender, Poverty and Opportunity in Vietnam’s Third Wave of Mass Urban Migration’, Children in War: The International Journal of Evacuee and War Child Studies, Vol. 1, No. 10, May 2013, pp. 71–6; and ‘Vietnam’s “Informal Public” Spaces: Belonging and Social Distance in Post-Reform Ho Chi Minh City’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, February 2010, pp. 86–124. vii Earl book final.indd 7 11/07/2014 17:11 Earl book final.indd 8 11/07/2014 17:11 CHAPTER ONE Middle classes in post-reform Ho Chi Minh City n 1998 I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City for a Vietnamese language course and was immediately struck by the number of communist I slogans in yellow capitals on red banners strung across the major streets. The banners were not an everyday decoration but celebrated 300 years of Vietnamese settlement in Saigon. A number of colourful billboards also decorated the street corners at major intersections. Waiting on my bicycle in the traffic, I noticed a billboard that depicted Vietnamese society on the occasion of the 300th anniversary. A line of eight citizens facing a sketched cityscape – modern and progressive con- crete buildings and a parked car – exemplified Ho Chi Minh City society. At the back stood a young trio: the men in a shirt and tie and the woman in a plain blue áo dài traditional dress, the typical uniforms of state em- ployees at that time. In front of them, in the middle of the group stood a male civil servant in a khaki uniform and a female agricultural worker in a black áo bà ba peasant blouse, a sheath of rice in her arms. At the front of the group stood a construction worker in an orange boiler suit, a scientist carrying his technical books, and a schoolgirl in a blue uniform with a knotted red neck scarf. It was the prominence of the skilled and educated at the forefront of society and the centre of the billboard that was striking. In the 1990s, contributions of educated young women had become so important in the post-reform urban economy that positive aspects of đổi mới, the nation-wide macro-economic reform introduced in 1986, were symbolized by images of middle-class urban schoolgirls (nữ sinh) representing youth, mobility, modernity, cultural vitality and pride (Werner 2002, p.