Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment

Angie Ngoc Tran is an activist scholar working on Vietnamese transnational labor movements, migration, and its forms of resistance. In this book, she compares migratory strategies of Vietnamese migrant workers from five ethnic groups—the ethnic Vietnamese, Vietnamese Chinese, Khmer Krom, Cham, and Hre—in Malaysia and other developing countries such as Thailand and Cambodia. In her analysis, Tran uses an intersectional framework that helps her go beyond class analysis to show how the five ethnic groups use their sociocultural and economic capital to respond to the risks, precarity, and opportunities associated with the labor brokerage state (LBS).At the basic sociological level, the book examines the usual story of Vietnamese migrant workers who, due to aggressive recruiting practices and a lack of relevant information, borrowed a significant amount of money to pay for various brokerage and travel fees. In Malaysia, the workers are living in precarity caused by unsafe working and living conditions, robberies accompanied by sexual violence, and sudden deaths stemming from extensive work over the time quota. Moreover, as they are working in low-income sectors of the Malaysian economy, they are not able to simultaneously earn enough money to support their families in Vietnam and pay off their debts. As a result, 85 percent of the research respondents returned home with outstanding debts (89). It is not easy to amortize the remaining debts in Vietnam from their salaries. All of these factors push the migrant workers into various types of illegality.At the anthropological level, it shows that each ethnic group has slightly different sociocultural and economic capital to deal with the exploitation of LBS and state control. The two main ethnic groups, Vietnamese and Vietnamese Chinese, usually benefit from their common ethnically relevant migrant experiences, better access to economic resources, and stronger transnational networks. The Cham and Khmer depend on their cultural, language, or religious affinities with their employers. The most disadvantaged group of migrants are the Hre: they have no economic and cultural resources to build on, and they are only able to support each other.The differences are even more visible if we look at how they improve their lives and deal with the remaining debts upon their return to Vietnam. Arguably, this may be the most valuable part of the book. It shows that, while abroad, most of the migrant workers accumulate new skills and experiences, allowing them to improve their future lives. In the case of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese Chinese, they are able to improve their education and enjoy upward mobility. If not, they usually search for better-paid migrant jobs in higher-tier countries, typically Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Meanwhile, the Hre claim to be too poor to pay off their remaining loans. They complain that the brokerage system pushes them even deeper into economic plight, instead of elevating them out of poverty as promised by state polices. In this way, they are able to secure bank remittals on the remaining parts of their debts. If not, they, in the same way as the Cham and Khmer Krom, transfer the debts to their aging and sick parents. Banks and state officials have no leverage to recover the remaining loans from these elderly people without incomes. Besides, the Khmer Krom may use their cultural and historical connections to go to Cambodia or Thailand or to migrate into new economic zones all over Vietnam. Possibly the most successful in circumventing the LBS are the Cham, whose historical, cultural, and religious connections enable them to move across the region and work in Cambodia, Thailand, or Malaysia.Tran also adopts a gender-sensitive perspective. As the work shows, the migratory processes of each ethnic group are gendered. Migration for work by Vietnamese and Vietnamese Chinese is more gender balanced compared with the more male-centered migratory strategies of Khmer Krom, Cham, and especially Hre. Moreover, the gendered division is also apparent in the division of labor, where women usually tend to work inside, and the dominant work space of males is outside.On the theoretical level, Tran carefully linked migrants' precarity with the central concept of the “third space” and convincingly shows that states and institutions of the LBS never have been able to fully control and reap benefits from migrants who mobilize their sociocultural networks to “benefit from and subvert those states and institutions when necessary” (5). In her conceptualization, the typical “physical” third space is a cultural space claimed by socialist migrants in Warsaw or Prague, where illegal economic activities help speed the upward social mobility of first-generation Vietnamese migrants and, at the same time, create a cultural space for their children to keep their Vietnamese ethnic identity. Secret places at factory assembly lines, where migrant workers hide manufactured products to lower the daily quota of production, or ethnic restaurants where former migrant workers work illegally, are also considered as physical third spaces. The concept of the physical third space is complemented by the concept of a “metaphorical” third space that offers a discursive space “of dissent that mock[s] the LBS for the shortcomings of the labor export policy” and allows the migrants and their families to create their own identities (150). In this sense, Tran's conceptualization of the third space seems to be too broad and tends to lose its analytical grip. But it seems that, as an activist scholar, Tran uses her metaphorical concept of the third space more as a political statement—and in this she is brilliant. The concept is built on Homi K. Bhabha's concept of active and passive mimicry, as explained in his “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” (1984), which helps her ridicule and challenge the hegemony of the LBS and national states over migratory work processes in the Southeast Asia

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