My doctoral dissertation, titled “In Between and Ambivalent: Diasporic Return Migration and the Global Economy” examines the situated belonging and identity politics of high-skilled Vietnamese diasporic returnees who lived and worked in their parents’ ancestral homeland, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.These return migrants are the product of both global social forces in the macro-economy and of global networks, having gone “back” to their parents’ ancestral homeland and secured work through various hiring channels.
My research points to the way second generation transnational migration affects not only the migrants themselves, but also the communities they interact with – in both their home and host societies – through communication, consumption, and the forging of intimate social ties and networks.
I conducted 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2004 and 2010 across several trips to Vietnam on the growing population of highly-skilled Vietnamese Americans, most of whom are children of Vietnamese who fled their homeland in the 1970s or later. These returnees worked in transnational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and media/arts jobs; visited their extended families to whom their parents may have sent remittances; and most lived in a rapidly-changing cosmopolitan “bubble” in globalizing Ho Chi Minh City.
My dissertation illuminates how these Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) renegotiated their class, gendered and racialized/ethnicized identity within occupational hierarchies, helping shift the analytic of race and migration towards studies outside the US.