Asia’s Transformations, 44. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xxvi, 201 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-13-802341-3.
Domestic work is a subject much researched in international migration studies, but very little has been written on it in domestic rural-urban migration studies. Yan Hiarong’s and Sun Wanning’s research on Chinese domestic workers in the “post-socialist era” are among those few outstanding works. Put in this context, Nguyen’s book on Vietnamese domestic workers is an important contribution towards filling the research gap in domestic migration studies and post-socialist society.
This book’s research question examines “ways in which class identities are forged and contested through the practices and discourses of domestic service, which is central to middle-class domesticity in Vietnam” (xx). Her finding is that “these dynamics build on cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference, which in turn have been shaped by the ethos of state socialism and a moral economy specific to the country” (xx). The major sources for this book are the author’s interviews with individuals from four different groups in Hanoi: live-in and live-out domestic workers, cleaners/junk traders, and private hospital caregivers.
The arrangement of the book’s chapters is as follows. The introductory chapter puts forth the author’s theoretical and major viewpoints, with a brief description of Vietnamese social change after Doi Moi. Chapter 2 depicts the backgrounds of employers and domestic workers, and the institutional arrangements used to recruit domestic workers. The title of chapter 3 is “Power at work,” but its main theme addresses Vietnamese cultural concepts like harmony or affection, which influence personal interactions. Set against this background, the following three chapters explore three dimensions that domestic workers experience: discursive (chapter 4: unruly servants, erotic bodies, and cultural delinquents); material (chapter 5: needs, consumption, and domestic service); and emotional (chapter 6: boundaries, connections, and gendered expectations). Chapter 7, “Narrating identity,” uses two cases to trace the domestic worker’s identification process intertwined with social change. The concluding chapter summarizes the research findings and dialogues with the work of other scholars.
For those wanting to know about Vietnamese social change after Doi Moi, this book provides abundant information and colourful stories to help readers understand how individuals attain their current social positions through the ceaseless workings of the social mill. For example, how rural women autonomously pursue modernity or how urban middle-class women in the new millennium return home under the state’s new discourse. For me, the most important contribution of the book is its detailed analysis of Vietnamese gender and rural-urban relations.
However, my main concern is that there are so many variables, including class, gender, rural-urban difference, socialist ethos, culture, and neo-liberalism, that it is hard to sort out the causal relationship between them. If the main research question is how class identity is forged and contested, then the dependent variable should be class identification. But in chapter 4, variables of class, gender, and rural-urban difference are used to explain how domestic workers are represented, and how a domestic worker deciphers herself. In this chapter, these three factors are not in a dependent-independent Hong-zen Wang relationship. Similarly, chapter 5 talks about how people consume differently based on their gender, class, and rural-urban background. Chapter 6 only discusses the establishment and maintenance of intimate relations by domestic workers, without mentioning class. Chapter 7 tries to explain how two women of different generations experienced different routes to their current domestic worker status as a result of their class and rural-urban differences. In other words, the framework of the book is such that it takes discourse, consumption, and intimacy to examine the relationship between class, gender, rural-urban differences, and domestic worker identification. As the author writes, “gender interacts with class and rural-urban difference to make the post-socialist Vietnamese home a space occupied by subjects of [domestic worker and employer]” (182).
As such, it might be better to use an “intersectionality approach” in going through the book’s different chapters without worrying too much about theories that are somewhat confusing, for example Foucauldian power theory, Bourdieusian class theory, or Scott’s moral economy theory.
Methodologically, it might not be appropriate to view all employers as a homogeneous group. Table 2.1 and the consumption stories recounted in chapter 5 show that they are different. If the author wants to utilize Bourdieu’s “habitus” concept, it would be better to trace their life histories to know how their family background, educational differences, and social relations influence the tastes of these employers. In addition, a table listing the backgrounds of these employers and domestic workers would have made it easier for the reader to discern the patterns in the impact of gender, original class, and rural-urban differences on the interactions between employers and domestic workers. It is also a pity that there is not much data on the middle-class identification process, save for the consumption behaviour detailed in chapter 5 in regards to cars, children’s education, houses, or holidays. The consumption of domestic services by the middle class is an important practice for class identification, and more relevant to the book’s “domesticity” theme.
For the four domestic worker groups, the author adopts the notion of “space” to distinguish them, so the methods of interaction with employers or consumption patterns differ among live-in help, live-out help, and cleaner/junk traders. However, the fourth group, private hospital caregivers, is very different from the former three, in that members of this group interact with their employers in a public space. Besides, the author mentions this group only five times, mainly to explain general concepts like “affection,” “rich employer,” or “dilemma between home and work,” which contributes little to the book’s main arguments.
Finally, this book successfully depicts the differences between Western and Vietnamese societies in terms of domesticity, e.g., socialist ethos and state-made rural-urban differences. But if one compares China and Vietnam, one wonders about the uniqueness of Vietnamese domesticity. The author mentions that the Vietnamese indigenous matriarchal culture might influence the formation of domesticity, but it is a pity that this is not discussed further in the book since, from my view, this could be the most important distinguishing feature of Vietnamese domesticity relative to its Chinese counterpart.
Overall, this is an easy-to-read work with engaging stories that do not damage its academic rigor. It provides us a window into understanding current Vietnamese society, gender relations, and daily family life. I learned a lot from this book regarding cultural practices and I trust that readers will also find many parts of this work very useful in their research into gender, labour, or migration.
Hong-zen Wang
National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
pp. 712-714