Family, Identity, and the Vietnamese Diaspora: The Quebec Experience

Abstract

This paper attempts to identify and explain changes in family ethos and practices among the ethnic Vietnamese in Quebec, Canada. Using data drawn from in-depth interviews conducted in 1 997 with twenty-one Vietnamese, the analysis focuses on an emerging diasporic space linking family, host society, and Vietnam. Whilst exploring the familyidentity link, the analytical gaze is on the age and gender politics of the family. It concludes with a note on the gradual nuclearization and democratization of the Vietnamese family overseas although these processes are not without attendant attempts on the part of members of the Vietnamese diaspora to hold on to certain aspects of the old family form - thus the resultant ambivalence. According to estimates of the Vietnamese Government, 1.2 million Viet Kieu (Vietnamese overseas) live in the United States, 400,000 in France, 300,000 in China, 200,000 each in Australia and Canada, 120,000 in Thailand, 100,000 each in Germany and Cambodia, and 80,000 in the former Soviet Union. Smaller Viet Kieu communities are found in Taiwan (15,000), Eastern Europe (12,000), Japan (6,000), North Korea (2,000), and Mongolia (500) (Nguyen Phan Phuong 1997; Lamb 1997). The global Vietnamese diaspora is made up of an estimated 2.6 million who have migrated to some sixty countries over the past fiftyfive years, most fleeing war and political persecution beginning with the independence struggle against the French in the 1940s, leading right to the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, and immediately afterwards (ibid.). The Viet Kieu economy has been estimated at US$15 billion a year, remitting US$600-700 million a year back to families in Vietnam (Economist Intelligence Unit 1995, p. 4). The number of Viet Kieu visiting Vietnam increased from 160,000 in 1993 to 300,000 in 1997 (Nguyen Phan Phuong 1997).