Vietnam’s Socialist Servants: Domesticity, Class, Gender, and Identity by Minh T.N. Nguyen (review)

Vietnam’s Socialist Servants: Domesticity, Class, Gender, and Identity by Minh T.N. Nguyen is a pioneering and important study that fills a lacuna in our knowledge of the lifeworlds and experiences of domestic workers in contemporary late-socialist Vietnam. Based on carefully conducted ethnographic research, the book presents fresh in-depth data to shed new light on the impact of the rapid market transformations of the Vietnamese labour market on an occupation dominated by women.

In this qualitative study the author competently uses ethnographies, interviews and narratives to illustrate increasing social inequalities and differentiation in today’s Vietnam. Four groups of domestic workers, Ô sin, all working in the Hanoi metropolitan area, are at the fore of the study. Nguyen tells her story through the eyes of live-in domestic workers (i.e., rural migrants), live-out domestic workers (i.e., urban women laid off from factories), cleaners who are also junk-traders, and private hospital caregivers. It is a thought-provoking account of gendered class boundaries set in accordance with middle-class visions for urban modernity, visions framed in relation to what is disparaged as rural “backwardness” (e.g., p. 19).

Drawing on a wide range of scholarship not least within the field of the anthropology of Vietnam, including gender research, the author elegantly demonstrates the emergence of domesticity as a site for the demarcation of class distinctions. Contestations over the practices and moral values that employers consider imperative for the appropriate management of a modern urban middle-class home stand at the centre of this process. As explained by Nguyen, Pierre Bourdieu’s exploration of class distinction (for example, Bourdieu 1989) has informed her study, but clearly so has the work of Mary Douglas (1966). Further examination of the meaning of purity and boundaries as discussed by Douglas and by more recent Douglasinspired studies (for example, Gressgård 2010; and Palriwala and Uberoi 2008) would have added an interesting analytical dimension to Nguyen’s study.

Chapter One provides a thorough overview of the construction of family, gender roles, social hierarchies, power and domesticity over time in Vietnamese society. The second chapter illustrates market actors’ promotion of domestic workers in accordance with the needs of the urban middle class. Negotiations between employer and employee over the demonstration of what are recognized as appropriate gender values are examined in Chapter Three.

Chapter Four focuses on the discursive and structural production of class as a framework for the employer–employee relationship, while domestic labour, considered as a consumption practice, is explored in Chapter Five. The sixth chapter elucidates the distressing ways in which domestic workers are caught in between various households as mothers and workers. Chapter Seven revolves around the biographical narratives of two domestic workers of different ages and background. Crafting an identity as a domestic worker, the final chapter concludes, is a process informed by complex intersections between gender and class-specific power relations that take shape in the household, on the labour market and in society at large.

Nguyen’s trenchant research shows how domestic workers struggle to navigate a labour market informally regulated by values rather than by formal agreements between employer and employee. As the Ô sin’s occupation is a feminized one, sociocultural configurations of what are recognized as quintessential female qualities become central for her employer’s evaluation of her. Knowing one’s obligations, demonstrating sentiments, interacting with forbearance and accepting an asymmetrical order of reciprocity between employer and employee are thus qualities in domestic workers that are highly valued by urban middle-class employers.

These employers, as Nguyen vividly demonstrates, consider such qualities significant not least because domestic workers, besides cleaning homes, are also expected to take over some of their employer’s emotional and practical responsibilities towards relatives — that is, intimate responsibilities usually undertaken by close kin. For instance, employers outsource emotional commitments by requesting that domestic workers stand by for their dying elders and even stand in to...