Identities as an Everyday Life Strategy: A Case Study of Vietnamese Marriage Immigrant Women in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper discusses the identity complex of Vietnamese marriage immigrants in Taiwan through aspects of everyday life such as food preference and cooking, vehicle ownership and access, leisure, and religious belief. These are in parallel with acculturation, cultural hegemony, spatial and social mobility, social network-building, social capital accumulation, and the strategy of resistance to the stigmatisation of prearranged remittances. This article also analyses identities as pragmatic strategies for Vietnamese wives to demonstrate their agency, and negotiate and bargain their social places within the Chinese-dominated cultural sphere through conforming to mainstream ideologies and acquiring social capital in the local community. The relationship between happiness and identities construction is examined, too. The methodology is based upon in-depth interviews and participant observations undertaken during ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan.