Sojourning as a wife, a mother and a daughter: a critical autoethnography of a Vietnamese doctoral student in New Zealand

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study is a critical autoethnography in which I recorded how I, as a Vietnamese student pursuing a doctoral degree in New Zealand with accompanying children, navigated between cultures and learned to raise children to be well adaptive to the New Zealand context and at the same time sustained the bond with the Vietnamese heritage. Based on theories of transnationalism, space and place, I explored my own spatial production and place-making process during my first year of candidature when my family had just entered New Zealand. Going beyond the description of the conventional enculturation and the detailed account of social and academic challenges that are normally found in previous literature on international doctoral students, the paper focuses on the way I myself got used to spatial practices outside Vietnam, the way I grew to become ‘a cultural translator’ for my parents, the way I made my home a space of cross-cultural exchanges and inter-generational legacy inheritance. In that sense, my motherhood, daughterhood, and studenthood entangled in a complex network of different cultures, lifestyles and social structures. The paper also features a shift in family dynamics and the reconfiguration of power in a Vietnamese family in New Zealand.