Abstract
“I look at Germans and I feel that they’re so lucky. Why were they able to heal like that [after reunification] when we haven’t?” (p. xii) This is one of many striking quotes from Phi Hong Su's The Border Within, a superb ethnographic study of Vietnamese in Berlin, who migrated either as refugees to West Germany, as contract workers to East Germany, or to the reunited Germany under various legal labels, and who continue to be divided by these distinct histories. German reunification in 1990 was, in some ways, a momentous event for them—what would it mean for their legal status? how would the imminent economic transformations affect them?—but it did not unify them as a people, like (they imagine) it did for East and West Germans.
Although Su purposely prioritizes description over theory building, aiming for “analytically informed storytelling” (p. 145), I found her book unusually theoretically sophisticated and analytically coherent. The ongoing disunion of Germany's Vietnamese community, she argues, is the outcome of intersecting Cold War divisions, unifications, and border crossings. Two national groups (North and South Vietnamese) migrated to two different countries (East and West Germany) but became, after the reunifications of both Vietnam and Germany, emigrants from the same country and immigrants in the same country—an unlikely array of events reminiscent in its serendipity of a natural experiment. Su relies on historical data, interviews, and participant observation to explain how ethnic nationhood and nationalism emerged in Vietnam, how these beliefs were transported across international borders, and why even today, “Vietnamese people in Berlin deploy these identities as perspectives on the world” (p. 77). Su thus shows how “border crossings”—a term that encompasses both international migration (i.e., people crossing borders) and state formation (i.e., borders crossing people)—affect ethnic nationhood and nationalism in enduring ways, within families and across generations. Although the book's main argument is that “border crossings have long afterlives” (p. 145) and a border “within” continues to divide the Vietnamese community in Berlin decades after the Cold War that erected it has ended, Su also allows plenty of room for nuance and counter-cases, giving space to interlocutors whose daily lives defy this split.
The resulting book is as ambitious as it is humble: it shows a tremendous understanding of multiple national contexts and never makes grand claims that do not emerge from the data itself. Attentive readers will sense the work that must have gone into this study, but Su never boasts about her own position, access, or depth of insight. Like the best ethnographies, this one only hints at the relationships Su has built with her interlocutors, and she gives us just as much information about herself as we need to understand a particular story without ever making herself its center. She traces her interlocutors’ nationalisms in a variety of places, including family lives, workplaces, religious sites, and cultural organizations. In addition to participant observation with key informants, she draws on over 80 interviews with refugees, contract workers, and other migrants. Her knowledge of both German and Vietnamese languages and history and her attention to detail—explaining the minutiae of policies and historical circumstances, for example, and providing the original German and Vietnamese interview data—make her arguments highly persuasive.
These arguments complement multiple fields of scholarship, including on the inadequacy of legal labels in capturing the true range of migration pathways and experiences; on taking categories, such as ethnicity, as to be explained rather than explanatory; on immigrants as emigrants who continue to be impacted by their homelands; on the potential encumbrance of diasporic networks; on the lingering effects of the Cold War; and on how illuminating migrants’ views onto receiving societies’ histories can be. The Border Within also invites us to see state formation and international migration as “mirrored processes of border crossings” (p. 9) and shows how the histories of countries intersect and come to matter when people cross borders—a viewpoint that is sure to be rewarding in other contexts. The book should thus be of interest to scholars of migration, transnationalism, diaspora, ethnicity, religion, Asian, European, and Cold War history, and ethnography and could be assigned in both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on these subjects, as it is thoughtful without being lofty and meticulous without becoming difficult to follow. Su's writing is unfailingly elegant, clear, and accessible.
Of course, every book must draw a line somewhere, and Su herself names some of the analytical possibilities she left under-explored for the sake of a more streamlined narrative and theoretical arch, including the role of gender in border crossings and Vietnamese migrants’ interactions with Germans. I found these thematic omissions entirely justified and even took away something I did not expect to find in this book: a distinct view onto German reunification. The envy of German “healing,” which those in The Border Within express, is perplexing to Germans—particularly those from the East, many of whom still feel like second-class citizens in the Federal Republic. How valuable to occasionally perceive one's own “borders within” from the outside!