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This essay examines Vietnamese tales of marvels [kỳ] and the uncanny [quái] composed in Literary Sinitic and offers close readings of four narratives through focusing on the theme of predestined love [duyên]. The essay shows that the discourse of duyên was embedded in both Confucian and Daoist voices and that this reflected a common cultural repertoire in which the discourse of social karma was a part of a shared moral metaphysics. The essay offers a theory and methodology for examining tales of marvels and the uncanny, arguing that heretofore scholars have read around the depictions of religious phenomena, rather than by means of them.

Despite a federal resettlement policy of dispersing Vietnamese refugees entering the United States after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, refugees resisted and resettled elsewhere. Within the first decade of settlement, the largest concentration of the refugees had formed in the Los Angeles area. This article identifies a number of factors in the rise of Vietnamese communities in Los Angeles, its San Gabriel Valley suburbs, and adjoining Orange County.

This paper tackles the question of how the current court system of Vietnam can contribute to fighting against corruption in the country. The authors provide an overview of the role of the court system in anti-corruption as well as several traditional problems that weaken its power in curbing corruption. The court system also faces new challenges raised by free trade agreements as a result of development progress. Based on the current situation, the authors argue that although there have been many attempts to reform the court system of Vietnam, the ability to prevent corruption in the court system in the coming years will remain weak. The situation has been explained by the separation of power in Vietnam and the influence of the Communist Party of Vietnam. The authors agree with these arguments but also provide new reasons such as cultural background, integrity of judges, and incorrect understanding of the core principles. They hope that this paper will help to provide a clearer vision of the role of the Vietnamese court system in general as well as of the anti-corruption fight.

The generation of soldiers, advisors, politicians, and civilians who participated in Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia between 1978 and 1989 had diverse, colorful, and powerful experiences. Their impressions and reflections as immortalized in diaries, songs, poems, plays, short stories, and even novels form the core of popular memory of Vietnam’s long involvement in Cambodia, which I term Vietnam’s Cambodian Decade. I argue that all Vietnamese literature on this period exhibits some combination of state propaganda to justify the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia on the one hand, and exoticization of Cambodia and Cambodians on the other. This latter tendency I term “Cao-Mienism,” drawing the connection between Edward W. Said’s critique of Orientalism and the old Vietnamese term for Cambodia, Cao Miên, which carries many outdated connotations of a mystical, uncivilized, violent, and hypersexual other. I divide Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade into four distinct groups, based largely on the chronological order of their publication, but also on the distinct literary characteristics of each group, thereby charting the evolution of Vietnamese views of the Cambodian Decade through the years. My main finding is that Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade started out largely to serve the needs of state propaganda, but has in time shifted decisively to Cao-Mienizing Cambodia. I conclude by warning that both strands of propaganda and Cao-Mienization remain relevant in contemporary Vietnamese literature and can serve to perpetuate and legitimize a hegemonic discourse on Cambodia that is detrimental to bilateral relations.

Vietnamese American filmmaking must be seen in the context of a community's diasporic formations. As such, it maps out a politics of representation that encapsulates the issues of community and history that invariably striate the ways in which Vietnamese American films and videos have been produced, distributed, received, and archived. This article focuses on the role of the Viet Film Fest, in Orange Country, California, as a major site for the archiving of South Vietnamese and Vietnamese American cinematic memory. In examining how this vital archive is shaped by both transnational politics and local practices of commemoration, Duong proposes its status as an archive of memory for a refugee community that wants to rectify how its members have been represented by U.S. and Vietnamese national cultures in film, both in the past and in the present moment.

Recent high-level visits between China and Vietnam have prioritized Vietnamese rice exports, with varying results. When the issue was first raised in 2015, rice exports surged dramatically. From 2016 through 2017, they performed poorly despite efforts to encourage them. This paper argues that the buying behavior and lobbying preferences of business groups, made possible by a unique institutional setup, explain the different results.

This essay addresses the controversial reception of Bảo Ninh’s novel Nỗi buồn chiến tranh [The Sorrow of War] in Vietnam and argues that the novel was perhaps the most important fictional work since Đổi Mới [Renovation]. By overlooking the tenets of socialist realism, the book deals with the war and its aftermath with a candor, eloquence, and anguish that have no parallel in modern Vietnamese literature. The novel’s important questions—memory, time, and writing—can be explained in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the first two Vietnamese grammars written in Latin: (1) LinguaeAnnamiticae seu Tunchinensis Brevis Declaratio (1651), by Alexandre de Rhodes; and (2) Manuductio ad linguam Tunckinensem, a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century anonymous manuscript. Roland Jacques (2002) concluded that the editor of the Manuductio was Honufer Bürgin, and that Rhodes and Bürgin worked independently of each other starting with the same reference: the grammar of Francisco de Pina. This article also proposes a hypothesis about who the true editor of the Manuductio was.

This essay explores the complex set of sociological barriers to interethnic marriage that the Khmer-Kinh couples face and the facilitating factors that bridge the gaps and facilitate interethnic marriage. The findings highlight that geographical and socioeconomic disparities, as well as stereotypes between the ethnic groups, are significant barriers to Khmer-Kinh interethnic marriage. The study unpacks the significance of modernization factors, as well as recent demographic and social changes in bridging the geographical, social, cultural, and psychological gaps between groups.

Rapid industrialization has come at a high cost to the natural environment in Vietnam. Frustrated with regulatory inaction, Vietnamese citizens from many social backgrounds have taken direct action to protect their country’s natural environment. Most studies about environmental disputes in Vietnam have focused on large-scale conflicts, leaving smaller-scale rural disputes comparatively under researched. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article explores how knowledge about environmental activism can transform the claims made in small-scale disputes. It examines why these disputes can sometimes succeed in mitigating environmental harm when complaints through administrative and judicial avenues fail.

To fully understand the complexity of ideological commitments in Vietnam between 1945 and 1975, it is useful to return to the 1930s, when the attraction of the Vietnamese nationalists for the Fascist European regimes led a number of them to publicly celebrate the figure of Adolf Hitler. Within the context of the Popular Front in France and a certain political openness in Indochina, the intellectual and organizational turmoil of the nationalist parties gave substance to a doctrine nourished by Western models but that nevertheless remained uniquely Vietnamese. This article addresses the question of the “fascist temptation” of the prewar nationalist Đại Việt parties, which is rarely addressed by historiography.

In this article, I present a critical overview of current approaches to studying social stratification and class in the post-reform Vietnamese context. I expound on the ideologically driven and politically mediated nature of discourse on social class in Vietnam, and examine the ideological, political, and academic challenges that arise from the development of such a discourse. I then make a case for the importance of sociological research on social class in contemporary Vietnam in light of existing empirical evidence. Finally, I introduce Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework as a potentially relevant approach to studying class in Vietnam.

Based on an analysis of historical materials written in Literary Sinitic and vernacular Vietnamese (Chữ Nôm), this article examines the contexts of Buddhist knowledge and Buddhist literacy practices in premodern Vietnam. I argue that Buddhist monks were key agents in a complex system of literacy practices that mimic the conceptual form of the mandala. They taught Literary Sinitic (and sinographic characters) as well as vernacular Vietnamese (Chữ Nôm), translated texts from the Buddhist canon into Vietnamese, composed Buddhist works, made handwritten books, carved woodblocks, and published woodblock texts. Meanwhile, the Buddhist temple in traditional culture was a marvelous place not only for self-cultivation, but also to educate Buddhist novices and lay people, and to expand the Buddhist order. The Buddhist temple was a multifunctional space, existing as a hall of reverence, a place of Buddhist worship, and a temple to the forefathers, as well as a center of translation, a Buddhist school, printshop, publisher, archive, library and bookshop. There were, furthermore, complex mandalas of Buddhist temples in traditional Vietnamese society, since virtually every village contained a Buddhist temple. Thus, the network of literacy practices of a given temple directly affected the cultural life of the community of the village in which it was located, including its religious beliefs, economy, and especially its literate education. The structure of these interactions form a complex mandala of Buddhist literacy practices in Vietnamese traditional culture.

Vernacular reading—reading Classical Chinese texts in the local vernacular—was practiced throughout the Sinosphere, everywhere people adopted Chinese characters to write and read. Recent research indicates that it took place in Vietnam as well. In this paper, we introduce the variant of this practice found in Japan: kanbun kundoku (漢文訓讀). We then use the extensive documentation of the annotation, glossing, and punctuation of texts in Japan and China to identify similar practices in Vietnamese texts. Using materials digitized by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation for the National Library of Vietnam (NLV) as well as materials housed at Thắng Nghiêm and Phổ Nhân temples, we identify reading glosses, pòyīn, proper name glosses, reference marks, and punctuation, added in black or vermillion ink depending on the type of annotation. We suggest that further study of such annotations will help clarify the ways in which Vietnamese readers learned, studied, and read Classical Chinese.

In the the spring 2018 issue of Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Martin Gainsborough’s “Malesky vs. Fforde” offers to adjudicate a supposed dispute between two highly cited scholars of modern Vietnamese politics. Purportedly drawing on the philosophical traditions of ontology and epistemology, Gainsborough claims that we can gain traction as a field by looking closely into the preexisting belief systems that scholars bring to their research questions. Along the way, Gainsborough questions the plausibility of my own work and claims that I smuggle “liberal” values into my writing on Vietnam. In this response, I discuss five dimensions in which Gainsborough and I disagree and why they matter for studying Vietnamese politics. I do so by contrasting my choices with Gainsborough’s scholarship (both in “Malesky vs. Fforde” and other work), illustrating how Gainsborough’s research decisions lead him to faulty and damaging conclusions about my work.

The article explores different ways of thinking about Vietnamese politics through an examination of the writing of Adam Fforde and Edmund Malesky. It argues that in order to adjudicate between different approaches to analysing Vietnamese politics, we need to come to a view about what we think politics actually is (i.e., ontology forms the basis on which we can answer questions about epistemology). This is very different from more positivist approaches to political analysis which argue that deciding between competing arguments is about weighing the data. I argue, by contrast, that adjudicating between rival positions has more to do with a series of a priori positions or beliefs that influence what we consider reliable data in the first place.

This essay discusses leprosy patients’ lived realities during the transformation of Quy Hòa, a former Catholic-run leprosarium in south central Vietnam, from a religious care center into a state socialist institution. The change in leprosy care resulted in a radically divergent experience in which subjectivities were reshaped by socialist citizenship amid rampant poverty. Meanwhile, hard physical labor for economic survival, one prominent feature of this period, significantly disfigured bodies already afflicted by leprosy, rendering bodily loss a mnemonic for this memorable era.

This essay examines wages and the gender wage gap between 1993 and 2008 in Vietnam. Our results reveal a slight increase in the mean of the gender wage gap from 2002 to 2008, which is mainly driven by a sharp increase in the gender wage gap for low-wage workers. Decomposition results suggest that the major part of the gender wage gap attributes to gender discrimination. While gender discrimination decreases for high-wage workers, it increases for low-wage workers. Over the period, wage growth is partly explained by changes in average characteristics but mainly due to increasing returns.

Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of biopolitical subject formation and governmentality, this article seeks to understand transnational state power and how Vietnamese migrant workers negotiate within a transnational framework both while working in Malaysia and upon their return to Vietnam. By conducting multi-sited interviews in Vietnam and Malaysia between 2008 and 2015, we contribute to the transnational labor migration literature by focusing on Vietnamese factory and construction workers in Malaysia and their resistance to transnational state power. We argue that these two emerging economies, as part of the neoliberal world, use their systems, media, and technologies to produce and manage citizens (in Vietnam) and non-citizen subjects (migrants in Malaysia) who comply with labor export policy and foreign worker policy, respectively. These two states ensure both government and individual accumulation to sustain their power. Meanwhile, Vietnamese migrant subjects negotiate their roles, resist when necessary, and at times, even benefit from overseas labor migration.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 reunited factions of not just one, but two formerly divided countries: Germany and Vietnam. Utilizing this theoretically unique case of Vietnamese refugee and immigrant resettlement in Germany, I ask: How do ethnic Vietnamese individuals’ perceptions of coethnics complicate or reinforce social divisions? This essay is based on participant-observation in various sites across Berlin and semi-structured, in-depth interviews. In noting how respondents at times naturalize or reject differences among Vietnamese from varying regions of origin and migration streams, I consider how they reproduce coethnic divisions, at times to protect their societal standing in Germany.

By 1975, thousands of Vietnamese had fled their homeland to settle in America, many carrying only a spare change of clothes and a packet of photographs. This article explores how five Vietnamese-American writers describe these photographic mementos. It contrasts photographic ekphrases with refugee images from the world media, while exploring postcolonial and other theories in this context. Photographs that cross the diaspora, and photographs hidden inside it, can exercise more influence than their material delicacy suggests. Vietnamese-American literary photographs should sit within contemporary visual culture: the interplay between these discourses allows the images to keep developing within the diaspora.

This essay discusses Vietnamese labor migration to Czechoslovakia before 1990. Specifically, it focuses on the contentious issue of assigning Vietnamese workers to jobs in agriculture, forestry, and construction, which both Vietnamese workers and the state found objectionable because they required outdoor work, did not allow workers to acquire factory job skills, and paid poorly. I show that (a) Vietnamese officials exerted sustained pressure on their Czechoslovak counterparts in order to reverse Czechoslovak decisions on job assignments, and that (b) their efforts were to a significant extent successful. Thus, I conclude, that the Vietnamese state shaped the labor exchange program to a significant degree.

Briefly entering the international media spotlight coinciding with the first-ever visit by a sitting US president along with a galaxy of regional leaders, Laos in 2016 saw a new leadership lineup following a quinquennial party congress. Questions of Chinese versus Vietnamese influence over Laos and even the legacy of US bombing all gained an airing.

Following Christina Schwenkel’s call to attend to different temporalities in the study of the Vietnamese diaspora, I examine three historical representations of workers sent to Bulgaria between the early 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s. These representations mediated Bulgarian-Vietnamese interstate relations: first, workers in relation to internationalist duty; second, workers in relation to financial debt; and finally, the workers as racialized, indebted subjects. My goal is twofold. Firstly, I turn my attention to the role and the figure of the Vietnamese worker under the ethos of actually existing socialism and navigate through the socialist rationalities that stood behind their arrival in Bulgaria. Second, I trace how representations of Vietnamese workers have changed from upholding the moral duty of socialist internationalism to becoming a labor force destined to repay Vietnam’s debt. This shift took place within a framework of changing power configurations that remodeled the extraction of surplus labor by relocating debt risks from the Vietnamese state to Vietnamese workers. I then trace the production of the indebted subject, which materialized in a historic type of racialization of the Vietnamese people, and which proved indispensable to Bulgaria’s transition to a market economy.

Prior to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, thousands of students and tens of thousands of contract workers from Vietnam arrived in socialist ‘fraternal’ countries. A number of them established social and economic relations with locals, compatriots, and migrants from various socialist states in the Cold War period, although they had been discouraged by Vietnamese authorities in creating close personal ties with ‘foreigners’ in general. However, cross border connections became even more important after 1989, as diasporic Vietnamese started to intensify social and economic relations with relatives and business partners in and outside Europe. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Hà Nội this paper suggests that transnational ties after the fall of the Berlin Wall are characterized by multi-polar (rather than bi-polar) links, thereby taking into account recent critics on methodological nationalism and challenging the two-nation approach which is still at the heart of most studies of Vietnamese diasporas.

Although Vietnamese Catholics in the United States and Cambodia have been isolated from each other for at least thirty years (1975–2005), this paper argues that they have recently established diasporic ties with each other through a global chain of Marianism. Both groups have experienced racialization in their host countries, which are in turn inflected by their local church hierarchies. These experiences have motivated them to establish ties with each other. Their US-Cambodia relationships are mediated through the Vietnamese-looking Our Lady of Lavang and Our Lady of the Mekong, which make up a global circuit of distinctively Vietnamese Marianism.

This article seeks to tell the story of a river and a canal in pre-fifteenth-century Thanh Hóa. Although apparently dissimilar, the fate of both waterways reflected a similar process, as both lived or died from the consequences of dynastic attempts to promote integration by bridging the territory of northern Vietnam with that of Champa. Integration was a central goal for the Việt authorities and water was one of their most important means. The story of water in the Thanh Hóa area illustrates the ongoing historical tension between integration and disintegration in Vietnamese history.

Bodhisattvas are an essential element of the Pure Land branch of Mahayana Buddhism practiced in Vietnam and its diaspora. Many Vietnamese lovingly refer to Bodhisattva Quán Thế Âm as a “gentle mother,” and the circulation of her name and image constitutes a spiritual geography of the transpacific in distinctly Buddhist terms. Through a reading of two miracle tales, I argue that Quán Thế Âm mediates the divergent histories of Vietnamese refugees without dissolving the historical structures of difference that separate the diaspora from the homeland. Devotion to the bodhisattva should thus not be seen only in terms of Mahayana doctrine but also as the embodiment of an alternative ethics of how Vietnamese refugees make sense of their place in the aftermath of war.

The 12th party congress showed a preference for stability. Vietnam and the US grew closer over trade and China, but the US election results introduced uncertainty. The Vietnamese economy grew steadily despite drought and global economic weakness. Reform of state firms fell behind schedule, productivity growth lagged, and an environmental disaster sparked vigorous dissent.

In writings of Buddhism in the West, Vietnamese Buddhists have often been pigeonholed as bringing their Buddhism with them like baggage and replicating the practices of their native land. This paper problematizes this characterization by looking more closely at the way that Vietnamese Buddhism has been reconstructed in the diasporic context. I argue that many of the leading figures of this process were, in fact, heavily influenced by intra-Asian and Transpacific reformist trends and engaged in activist movements in southern Vietnam, rather than coming from “traditional’ Buddhist backgrounds. Furthermore, the orientations that they brought were the product of dialogues with other reform movements in Asia that started earlier in the nineteenth century and were, in turn, a result of the colonial encounter. Therefore, rather than a single transference from East to West, what actually took place was a multi-nodal and multidimensional conversation between Asian reformers from different countries and traditions, Western scholars, and Western converts to Buddhism. Consequently, what has been established in the West by Vietnamese is not simply an adaptation of Vietnamese traditional Buddhism to a Western context, but the creation of a new, invented tradition that we can call Vietnamese Transnational Buddhism.