The Formation of Spatial and Symbolic Boundaries among Vietnamese Diasporic Skilled Return Migrants in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract

More than 40 years since the end of the Vietnam War, a younger generation of Vietnamese Americans is returning to their parents’ ancestral homeland with career opportunities tied to Vietnam’s economic growth in the past decade. These more permanent return migrations reveal strategies of local and global assertions of belonging and identity management among the “1.5” and second generation of Vietnamese Americans who work in high-skilled professions in their parents’ ancestral homeland. Known there as the Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese), those who work in both corporate and nongovernmental organizations draw upon multiple forms of social and cultural capital to negotiate a third space between the local and global in Westernizing pockets of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I argue that Viet Kieu constructed symbolic boundaries to distinguish themselves from foreigners and ethno-national boundaries to distinguish themselves from locals, but they also crossed these boundaries to find spaces of belonging in Vietnam. The experiences of this niche subgroup of more skilled Viet Kieu constitute “transnational” instances of active ethnic and national identity renegotiation that reaffirmed the importance of place making and subjective claims to an imagined authentic return experience. This study focused on highly skilled returnees, aiming to analyze how transnational flows of capital such as language, education, and access played into the symbolic boundary making and identity politics of return.