Seminar on

'Emotional Capital and Economic Suffering across the Aging Vietnamese Diaspora'

Date: 18 November 2009
Time: 3pm- 5pm
Location: Meeting Room A, Research Clusters, Block AS7 Level 6, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS
Speaker: A/P Hung Cam Thai, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Asia Research Institute
Chairperson: TBC

• Jointly organized by the FASS and ARI Migration Research Clusters, NUS.

Drawing on my current book project that examines the link between transnational activities and consumption patterns in contemporary post-war Vietnam, this seminar focuses on economic empowerment among low wage overseas Vietnamese immigrants who make return visits and return migration to their homeland. This talk pinpoints new economic hierarchies in the globalizing city of Saigon, officially known as Ho Chi Minh City.

I explicate the nexus between emotional capital and economic suffering in this aging diaspora. I make this explication in three ways. First, I show the importance of historical patterns of immigration on the contemporary manifestation of economic empowerment among low wage immigrants through small-scale consumptive activities as they engage in return activities in the homeland. Second, I examine how the economic sphere among transnational subjects impact the familial and personal spheres through global and transnational opportunities. Third, this lecture implicitly addresses the underlying question of the increasing rise of low wage immigrants across various diasporas who make return visits to their homelands.

Data analysis is derived from 31 months of fieldwork done in distinct intervals over a five-year period between 2003 and 2009. In addition to fieldwork, I conducted in-depth interviews with 192 people from a cross section of contemporary urbanites living and working in a new “global Saigon.” This sample includes middle class local Vietnamese, overseas Vietnamese diasporic subjects, and foreigners (mainly whites) from Western countries. Focusing on return activities is important because immigrants are increasingly leading transnational lives by returning “home” for some period of their lives.


About the speaker:

Hung Cam Thai is Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Pomona College and the Claremont University Consortium, where he is also Vice President of the Pacific Basin Institute. His scholarship focuses on gender, family and international migration across the Vietnamese diaspora. His research has been funded by over 35 grants and fellowships, including from prestigious sources such as the Freeman Foundation, Haynes Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Hewlett Foundation, Asia Research Institute of Singapore, and the Pacific Rim Fellowship Program. His first book, For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy (Rutgers University Press), is a study of international marriages linking women in Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese men living in the diaspora. He is currently writing a book about consumption and return migration in Vietnam.