Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City

Six. Dodging, or Street-Level Strategies for Personal Gain

126 Six Dodging, or Street-Level Strategies for Personal Gain I n 2007 red banners heralding the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization lined the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Newly chartered banks redefined the city’s skyline. Billboards advertised new residential complexes yet to be built. And department store displays sparkled with highend imported goods. How were ordinary people negotiating their own prospects for personal gain within this highly monetized city that gleamed with such promise of prosperity? By dodging, artfully eluding the bureaucratic and regulatory apparatuses that govern the economy.1 By characterizing as “dodging” the strategies people employed for personal gain, I try to avoid the general tendency to either characterize them as resistance or designate them as corrupt. Rather, seen in the ethnographic spirit, “dodging” helps elucidate people’s strategies of mobility that characterize their efforts to realize personal gain in Vietnam’s largest city. Getting around the City Ho Chi Minh City’s astonishing growth has strained the city’s infrastructure . And, just as cash hinders the expansion of economic growth, as we saw in chapter 5, so do the clogged city streets and narrow bridges. In an effort to spur economic growth by facilitating the movement of traffic, municipal authorities with funding from international organizations such as the World Bank have implemented large-scale construction projects around the city. Roadways have been widened by tearing down buildings, and bridges have been built over the city’s canals and waterways to connect once disparate points in the city. These projects, insofar as they facilitate the mobility of some groups rather than others, are critical sites for under- Dodging, or Street-Level Strategies for Personal Gain 127 standing how the culture of circulation is being reordered in Ho Chi Minh City. One of the many streets widened to accommodate the city’s mobile population was Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa, a main artery connecting the city’s financial district to Tan Son Nhut International Airport. The street, made nearly twice as wide as its original fourteen meters, is now a spacious avenue with broad sidewalks. No landmark remained untouched in expanding the roadway. Even the gate to the Vĩnh Nghiêm Pagoda was ceremoniously lifted and moved back several meters to accommodate the expansion. The road was a showcase for the city’s transnational capitalist class—foreign investors, government officials, and Vietnamese entrepreneurs. Their travel from the international air terminal to the city’s financial center would no longer be hindered by the city’s legendary traffic­ —at least this was how several people described the project to me in 2007, each of whom accompanied me to see the widened boulevard as a model of the city’s changing infrastructure. The widened boulevard boasted the services of a globalizing economy—villas housing elegant cafés with underground parking, multistoried English-language schools open late at night, and newly chartered banks gleaming with the promise of prosperity. But widening Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa was not a project designed to facilitate the movement of ordinary Vietnamese. Nor was it intended to improve the livelihoods of those residents who earned scant incomes on the boulevard’s sidewalks. In fact, the state-sponsored project only marginalized the vendors who pushed carts and bicycles loaded with baskets of fruit, and old men and women who wandered from café to café selling state-issued lottery tickets. Despite the promise of the newly widened boulevard to enhance mobility, the project was plagued by delays. The Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee chairman finally promised that the project would be completed before the Lunar New Year in 2010. But by the end of that year, the roadway was still clogged with traffic. For residents, the city’s constant state of repair has meant devising new routes and alternative strategies to dodge the very projects intended to facilitate movement. And one of those strategies has been relying on motorbikes, not on cars, to get around. Motorbikes are the most widely used form of transportation in Ho Chi Minh City. More than any other form of motorized vehicle, motorbikes are appropriate to the scale of everyday life in Ho Chi Minh City. Unlike automobiles and trucks, motorbikes are not bound to the grid of city streets (fig. 6.1). People park their motorbikes on sidewalks, maneuver them through 128 Chapter Six narrow alleyways, and even leave...