Review of “The Border Within: Vietnamese Migrants Transforming Ethnic Nationalism in Berlin”

Abstract

Phi Hong Su asks a question of enduring interest to migration scholars and students of nationalism: How do ordinary people, thousands of miles from their homeland, make sense of their membership in a distant nation? Su adds two absorbing, creative wrinkles to this question by using a research design that sets The Border Within apart from prior scholarship. First, she focuses on two migrant streams that left the same country at roughly the same time, but which migrated with diametrically different motivations and political views. South Vietnamese migrants, ferociously anti-Communist, understand their movement as seeking refuge due to persecution and their irreconcilable political opposition to the sending state. North Vietnamese migrants, contract laborers leaving a victorious regime, were celebrated by both sending and receiving states for their work and, through it, their contribution to Communist ideals. Second, Su places these dual Cold War migrations within a single receiving context, Berlin, a city also divided along regimes and ideologies. As Su underscores, now in the 21st century, after the end of the Cold War and in a reunified Germany, “the undoing of physical borders did not similarly undo social ones” (p. xiii). The book asks why the homeland fractures that divided Vietnamese before their migration persist in their new home, and how such different views of nation and membership continue long after the geopolitical events that created them have changed.