Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City

Two. Renovating Households

41 Two Renovating Households C apitalist ideologies cast the household as a threshold separating the realm of the public from that of the domestic or the family.1 Money crosses this threshold, providing a bridge that integrates this institutional dualism into a coherent and stable whole.2 Renovation policies in the 1980s emphasized “household economies” (kinh tế gia đình) as a way of containing the alienating and impersonal forces attributed to capitalism. The revival of household economies in Vietnam exposes some of the presumptions within the dominant ideologies of capitalism. Households in Ho Chi Minh City were elevated as the “locus of economic, social, and cultural reproduction and transformation” and continue to be a key arena for understanding money’s widening role.3 How money both remade and unmade household economies illuminates the paradoxical qualities of its mediating role in Vietnamese society. Contributions to the Revolution The word for “household” in Vietnam invokes a moral economy characterized by unity and solidarity.4 Both a physical dwelling and a social structure, the household defines the roles and obligations of its members. Its ideological importance in Vietnamese society is rooted in Confucian doctrine. The household was one of three foundational concepts of community: household (nhà), country or realm (nước), and people (thiên hạ) were the basis for a stable and harmonious social order. Today households are metaphorically linked with order and governance, most explicitly in the Vietnamese term for “government,” nhà nước. But to assume that households have always been the ethical basis for the modern nation-state is to overlook how they were targeted for reform in Ho Chi Minh City after 1975. In postwar Vietnam, citizenship was framed by the struggle for national 42 Chapter Two liberation. The word for “citizen,” công dân, conveyed an abstract notion of personhood, one stripped of personal obligations and social ties. But in Vietnamese the word also conveyed the word for “contribution” (công), which designated virtue and moral worth. Citizens were recognized for their contributions to the revolution. Citizenship in postwar Vietnam was not reduced to a formal relationship between the individual and the nationstate . It was also regulated through membership in a specific household, an understanding of membership that contrasted sharply with citizenship in liberal democratic societies where an ideology of equality and universal citizenship prevailed, an ideology that in turn sustained the institutional dualism of the public and private spheres.5 In postwar Vietnam, the household and family were still key elements in how the rights of citizenship were distributed in society. An individual’s contribution to the revolution was not simply a historical act; rather, it signified a moral quality that was extended to all members of an individual’s family . And because citizenship was defined in terms of allegiance to the new regime, many southern Vietnamese families were regarded with suspicion.6 Households were thus defined within a geopolitical vision of the Cold War in spite of the official reunification of northern and southern Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Constructing a socialist society in postwar Ho Chi Minh City required remaking citizens, and the household was a target of reform. As in other national socialist regimes, state policies aimed to eliminate the “private” through the extension of state control over economic activities, public spaces, and personal relations.7 Residents in southern Vietnam, as we saw in chapter 1, were forced to turn in their old currency for a new currency of uncertain value as a technique for eliminating private wealth. Pricing mechanisms were later instituted to fix prices and subsidize consumption. These mechanisms were not incidental to defining personhood; they were central to classifying citizens. Full membership was not extended to all residents in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Many people in southern Vietnam were cast as outsiders and denied access to state-based employment and its accompanying allocation system. Men who had served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or government were accused of betraying the nation and sent to reeducation camps. Women and men who earned their livelihoods through commerce and trade were accused of profiteering and were often required to leave the city for new economic zones. After 1975 men who had once taught French in Renovating Households 43 the university earned a living as cyclo drivers or sold petrol on the sidewalk, while lawyers tutored school children. A former automobile dealer walked the streets...