Mixing Business with Pleasure in Vietnam's Ascent to the Global Stage

Kimberly Hoang's novel ethnography, Dealing in Desire, is a powerful statement about the value of sex work, which in Vietnam and other parts of Asia has played a role in promoting national ascendancy to the global stage. Her adept analysis and clear prose give wonderful perspective on Vietnam's commercial sex industry from both the women who sell sex and the clients who buy sex. Few ethnographies consider the relational aspect of gender in their presentation of sex work, but Hoang recognizes how crucial this interaction is to a proper analysis of commercial sex. But Hoang offers an even more comprehensive analysis of this local sex industry by painting a complete picture of the different tiers of Vietnam's commercial sex industry that serves both local elite and overseas Vietnamese businessmen as well as Western businessmen and the Western backpacker community. She was able to accomplish this through twenty-four months of immersive fieldwork in four bars around Ho Chi Minh City that served men from these four different populations. Following in the tradition of other female ethnographers who have written ethnographic accounts of sex work as it is performed in hostess clubs in Asian societies (Allison 1994; Zheng 2009; Parreñas 2011), Hoang took jobs as either a hostess or a bartender in the venues that were her field sites. She worked twelve to fourteen hours per day, seven days a week, for nine months in these venues.

The power of Hoang's careful scholarship lies in the connections she makes between sex workers and their clients and the ascendancy of Vietnam to the global economic stage. The book demonstrates the relationship between a financial measure like foreign direct investment (FDI) and sex work, a connection that is rarely made but crucial for analyzing and understanding the rise of several major Asian economies like those of China, Japan, and South Korea. She demonstrates this by carefully tracing the vital role that commercial sex plays in establishing the social contracts that help private entrepreneurs and foreign investors bypass the official channels for obtaining the land and permits they need to succeed in their economic roles. Commercial sex workers create a relaxing environment in karaoke bars, where they sing, drink, and play with men. In chapter 3, for example, Hoang details a situation where a sex worker transformed a formal style of interaction between a businessman from Vietnam and one from Korea into an informal, intimate, and fun environment that helps men form the bonds that translate into the type of trust required to seal a deal in Vietnam.

The type of environment Hoang describes may seem counterintuitive to the reader who is accustomed to thinking of poverty and marginality alongside sex work. Hoang's detailed ethnographic description, however, demonstrates how sex is used to nurture the trust required for the efficient flow of capital in the Vietnamese and broader Asian context. In doing this, Hoang examines the multiple processes experienced by the men in the various groups she studies as they negotiate race-, class-, and gender-based hierarchies in their separate cultures. The Westerners she observed used their access to sex and sexuality to reaffirm their Western superiority, while Vietnamese men (whether local elite or overseas businessmen) used their sexuality as a way to contest Western power through the unique cultural access it gives them toward consolidating Asian ascendancy. The women who facilitate the industry create what Hoang calls business-oriented intimacy (79), which is crucial for the Vietnamese men working to attract FDI. For overseas Vietnamese, these women facilitate fantasy-oriented intimacy (79) as men trying to attract women across transnational borders. And finally for the Western men, sex workers in Vietnam facilitate what Hoang calls philanthropy-oriented intimacy (79) that is critical for attracting money from overseas that Westerners often frame as charity projects through benevolent remittances.

Perhaps one of the most important and novel contributions of Hoang's ethnography is...