For Better or For Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy

Chapter 7: The Highly Marriageables

123 Chapter 7 The Highly Marriageables Joe ngo, a thirty-six-year-old software engineer, had changed his name from Cuong when he went to college in the United States because that was when he realized that it bothered him when people had difficulty pronouncing Cuong. The changing of his name was not a racial issue for Joe, for people’s mispronunciation of his name was not something he particularly noticed while growing up in the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area. As a child, Joe had many white friends, and he said that that “made life easier.” Joe was proud that he was able to navigate in the many racial worlds that characterize the Bay Area. Yet, although the multicultural Cuong dated white girls in high school, Joe was more racially exclusive in college. With a nearly perfect American accent that distinguished him from most of the men in my study, Joe had neat model-minority hair, the sort of hair that some men in Asia refer to as 7/3: 70 percent on one side and 30 percent on the other. Just under six feet tall, and clearly above average in size for a Vietnamese man, Joe spoke English with a sense of confidence and properness that I rarely got a chance to hear during the course of pursuing this research project. On the coffee table in his living room, Joe had a faded picture of his family when Joe was in high school; they included his parents and older brother, Lam, all of whom migrated with Joe to the United States when he was eleven. They were part of the first large cohort of Vietnamese evacuees who left Vietnam days Chap-07.qxd 10/30/07 9:26 AM Page 123 before the fall of Saigon. Shortly after they arrived in the United States, Joe’s father worked as an accountant while his mother worked as an instructional assistant for the local school district. Few of the men in my study had parents with such respectable postmigration jobs. The jobs most parents of the men in my study took after migration were usually in the secondary or enclave labor market, that is, jobs in the service sector with relatively low pay. Because his father had a middle-class job, Joe explained, his parents had high expectations for him and his brother. And the two young men met those expectations by attending the local University of California campus. Both majored in electrical engineering, and they were both active in the Vietnamese Student Association. Unlike his brother, who met his wife in the VSA club, Joe was somewhat disillusioned with the ethnic organization, and he eventually worked his way out of the club. He said he initially ran for leadership positions, but often did not like the cliques that formed. “Most of them,” Joe said, “were interested in looking pretty and wearing nice clothes.” Joe was turned off by what he described as the “material performances” that many of his Vietnamese peers participated in and after two years in the club, Joe ended his membership. When I asked if there were gendered patterns in performances of material differences, Joe explained: Of course, the women were especially materialistic. They wanted boyfriends who they could brag about, and the guys would spend all their money to get a trophy girlfriend. It was all a game of good looks and spending, and I knew many other Vietnamese students who did not join because of that. You can say that it was a marriage market for many of those people, but I did not like it. I did not like to compete with people and date girls who cared only if a guy could spend all of his financial aid package in one week. It was stupid. F o r B e t t e r o r F o r Wo r s e 124 Chap-07.qxd 10/30/07 9:26 AM Page 124 This did not mean that Joe was not interested in meeting Vietnamese American women at his university, but he avoided those in the ethnic club, a place where students celebrated history and culture, but which Joe felt was too pretentious. Yet Joe was conscientious about maintaining his sense of being Vietnamese , while embracing the middle-class privilege that he seemed to identify with while growing up. For example, he proudly spoke about his...