We choose FPE because it privileges gender as an axis of difference, it uncovers complexities of presumed social orders such as family and community, and it takes into account larger geopolitical processes that shape individual experiences. FPE privileges gender as the critical variable in the shifting landscape of family life because gender interacts with “class, caste, race, culture, and ethnicity to shape processes of ecological change, the struggle of men and women to sustain ecological viable livelihoods, and the prospects of any community for “sustainable development” . FPE seeks to challenge conventional understandings of household as “a presumed unit of homogeneous conditions and shared interests, the household” , as well as similar assumptions of local or community identity. FPE also takes into account national, regional, and global processes of socioeconomic change as they impact individuals and households. The chapter proceeds in the following fashion. The first part of this chapter describes migration trends, the competing identities of modern families, and spaces in which they compete. It outlines the major trifurcation of traditional, Socialist, ebb and flow flood table and modern Vietnamese gender identities; the dominant other identities described by men and women of this study; and the spaces and places in which these identities are negotiated as part of migration. The second part describes the methods and approach taken in conducting interviews and analyzing the data. The third section discusses the results of this spatial study for the city and village, work place, public meetings, and rural and urban homes.
The fourth section outlines implications of the Portable Family for the social fabric of Vietnamese society. We conclude with some potential future research directions in the area of mobile families.There are a number of motivating factors for rural-to-urban, internal, female migrants. Motivators are primarily financial, and include the anticipated increase in pay rate, the unemployment rate between provinces moving costs, public service disparities between provinces, demographic composition between provinces . Pay and unemployment rates are perhaps the most important motivators, regardless of actual availability of jobs in the city. Unemployment is 10 percent or under in urban areas, while it hovers around 25 percent in rural places . This pushes migrants to city centers for promises of higher wages with more regular employment. Public services are also a huge draw. The Tiebout hypothesis, that people “vote with their feet” and shop around for a province that provides a high quality of public service, is a proven motivator for migration . These services include education, health care, and phone services. Often times the decision to move can be highly influenced by a perceived loss of good public services in the destination location. Migrants face pitfalls and windfalls in their new lives in the city. The primary benefit of migration is to improve economic prospects, especially by sending remittances back home. Remittances make up between 60 and 70 percent of rural household income . They can be used for paying debt, sending children to school; costs incurred by ill family members, and can reduce the need to sell paddy rice for income, increasing a family’s food security.
Older women tend to participate in the informal economy, hired by families or selling prepared food on the street; while younger women tend to participate in the formal economy, working in physically-demanding factory jobs that prefer to hire younger female employees . Migrants unfortunately also face psychological, physiological, cultural, and practical challenges. City cost of living is higher, leaving the migrant family member with a meager allowance once remittances are sent . Cultural norms and expectations are very different than village life, with increased noise, population density, foreign influence, and a distinct lack of social support. These environmental factors take a toll on the satellite family member.Dominant ideologies in Vietnamese spaces underwent distinct shifts during the same time periods in which migration patterns shifted, as described above. In Southern Vietnam prior to 1975, Confucian philosophy was still the dominant ideological tradition. In this Confucian philosophy, there are three foundational concepts of community: household , country , and people . The home, or household, has a particularly important history in Vietnam, invoking “a moral economy characterized by unity and solidarity” . Regions include not only Vietnam as a whole, but also the three major geographic regions of the nation, North, Central, and South. Within each region, the village is a distinct and important geographic unit, where collective regional identity is enacted and reproduced through daily activities. These daily activities produce and reproduce personal identities, such as the “four virtues” traditional women must maintain: labor , appearance , speech , and behavior . Men must be the “pillar of the household,” a role model for the children, and the breadwinner . Following the end of the war in 1975, these identities and relations in space shifted.
Reunification brought a tumultuous time period for many people in Ho Chi Minh City and Southern Vietnam. Confucian philosophies were subsumed by Socialist party ideals. The People’s Committee in each village and city district became the embodiment of an organized community institution, holding public meetings at which households sent a representative, usually male. Individual identities gave way to the Socialist concept of citizen, and the home morphed into the household as a registered entity of the state, a focus of reunification efforts . In this new conception of society, women and men were meant to be equal in the home, as well as the public sphere where women were granted the right to study and seek employment . The phrase for citizen, công dân, conveyed both an abstract version of a person without social ties, but also a contributor to the revolution . After 1975 in Southern Vietnam, citizens were assigned to a household at birth through the registration system , and allocated government resources such as education and health care. In urban areas such as Ho Chi Minh City, these resources are doled out on a tiered basis, first to urban residents and selectively to migrant populations. Because many citizens of Southern Vietnam were regarded with suspicion after the war, the household became the target of many reformist policies that punished previous capitalist endeavors or anti-Socialist activities. It was not simply the individual judged by their own actions, but the citizen connected to the historic actions of all household members. Following Doi Moi implementation, the government shifted productive functions from society as a whole to household economies . This campaign was an effort to remove some of the capitalist undertones of shifting Vietnam to a market economy . In other words, integrating family economies with the larger economy still connoted positive socialist behavior, but encouraged individual entrepreneurship. Because of relaxed restrictions on household registration guidelines, the Doi Moi era has seen a decrease in deep regional divides, with more cross-pollination between North, Central, and South Vietnamese populations. Urban economies were revitalized by FDI, lessening the need for government subsidies and relieving the limitations on urban migrants subject to the household registration system . Families increasingly focus on providing high quality education for their children, hydroponic drain table attending school meetings, and migrating to urban centers to increase income for their household. Today, as Vietnamese migrants move through a variety of spaces, several important situations and identities remain. Important locations include the city and village; the work place, whether formal or informal; public meetings and celebrations; and the rural and city home. In each space, the recent history of Vietnam demands differing social pretense and decorum. In each space, family members enact varying identities to contest or comply with tradition.
There are limitless identities in a given person, but the dominant aspects of personal history that influence behaviors in migrant families include the traditions of the three primary regions of Vietnam, age, gender , level of physical ability, parenthood, and fealty to traditional values. Throughout recent history, the concept of family remains strong in Vietnamese society, although it has shifted in practice for the Portable Family. Absence of family members forces each person to consciously construct their household because daily practices are missing due to migration. Family is less about daily interactions in the rural home, and “…family materializes as an imagined community of emotional ties and reciprocal obligations” . In this way, some believe family has been “relativized,” and that women must “do family” through actions that take place at a distance and in person, periodically. The following case study explores this imagined community, and how men and women of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta do family.The research team conducted interviews of spousal couples to understand how female migration impacts performance of “social reproductive work” in rural communities and in the city. As in similar studies in Vietnam, a convenience sample was used, as research was conducted out of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City . We identified local women whom had migrated to Ho Chi Minh City for work, either seasonally or permanently. Respondents self-identified as “migrants.” No minimum amount of migration tenure is required to be considered a “mobile family.” Nineteen total interviews were conducted in-person between January and May of 2017, 11 of which were women and eight of which were men. Interviews were then translated into English for analysis . This research used spatial intersectionality analysis, employing grounded theory to understand how identities manifest in different spaces. We used a grounded theory approach to determine a concepts, themes, and processes that pertain to thePortable Family. Grounded theory principles3 were used in developing codes and themes, with literature review co-occurring with interview coding in a flexible approach . As the individuals give answers for each question, I will code initial transcripts to establish categories, then selectively code transcripts as I move farther into the interviews . In this way, the research elicits a “thick description” of how constructed gender roles are being reformed in the new rural Vietnam, as well as a systematic approach to this theoretical description. As codes were established, we continued detailed memo writing to capture themes, phases, and processes . The salience and centrality of each theme was tested using Dedoose software to check for connectivity and frequency between cases. In other words, salience was measured by consistency with which the code appeared throughout all transcripts , while centrality was measured by the number of occurrences across cases .The city and village encapsulate modernity and tradition, respectively, in Portable Family minds. This is especially true if the dominant values of the destination city contrast with the regional identity of the home village. In the city, the identity that dominates decisions among migrant populations is regional identity. For women, this identity influences how often to return home for visits, whether or not to take children with them to migrate, and how much help they receive from home village connections in getting a job or housing. For men, regional identity influences their decision to stay back home because men are traditionally responsible for caring for elderly parents and practicing the family’s worshipping ceremonies. Finally, regional identity can be shifted when men and women migrate between the city and the village, having a profound impact on perceived and practiced gender roles for both men and women.Much of the western San Joaquin Valley is plagued by high water tables, which require drainage for sustained agricultural production. The land in this area was formed from materials that in geologic time originated under the ocean, and thus contains high concentrations of chemicals associated with ocean waters. Water percolates through the crop root zone, where some is drawn into the plant via transpiration. The water that remains is more concentrated than that which was applied. It moves vertically through the unsaturated area below the root zone to the saturated zone, where soil pores are all filled with water. The water table forms the interface between these unsaturated and saturated zones. The water in the saturated zone is highly concentrated with salts, including selenium, which has ecotoxic effects to wildlife, especially birds. In order to effectively drain this huge subsurface “pool” of highly concentrated water, growers in the western San Joaquin Valley have developed subsurface drainage systems.