Moral Dilemmas of Transnational Migration

Abstract

Given that care duties are central to the definition of motherhood across contexts, an extended separation from the woman’s family due to migration presents a major threat to her social identity as a mother and wife. Drawing on West and Zimmerman’s notion of “doing gender” and ethnographic research on Vietnamese low-waged contract workers in Taiwan, I provide vital insights into the discursive processes and everyday practices that underlie migrant women’s negotiations of motherhood and femininity. Specifically, I examine the various ways migrant women perform and negotiate meanings of hy sinh (self-sacrifice) and chịu đựng (endurance) that are core values of Vietnamese womanhood. Combating the stigma of bad motherhood and failed femininity, I emphasize, is not just about reasserting one’s sense of gendered self but also about reassuring her access to the future support and care of the family. The study emphasizes intentionality and pragmatism in women’s social doings of gender and highlights moral dilemmas in gender politics.

Keywords

transnational labor migration motherhood femininity morality Vietnam

In modern societies, contradictory social changes with regard to the gendered division of labor have produced new moral dilemmas (Gerson 2002). Research shows that gender ideals about care persist across contexts, even in the face of female migration (Parreñas 2002; Dreby 2006). With rare exceptions (e.g., Hoang and Yeoh 2011; Pingol 2001), the absence of the mother and wife tends to shift care duties from one woman to another rather than altering masculinity ideals with regard to care. Migrant women themselves are not prepared to relinquish their caregiver’s role altogether – they strive to perform care at a distance even when this claims a substantial part of their meager financial resources (Dreby 2006; Hoang and Yeoh 2012; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parreñas 2001). Their efforts to remain at the center of family care are driven not just by practical concerns but also by the desire to assert their feminine identity that is under threat as a result of their physical absence. Beyond its utility in social reproduction, care functions as a principal parameter and a crucial strategy in women’s gender identity (Collins 1994; Glenn 1994).

For both givers and receivers, care involves the physical, the emotional, and the symbolic (Kofman and Raghuram 2009, 15). In the context of female migration, emotional and symbolic aspects of care tend to be overdone to compensate for the lack of physical care. Supplying gifts and money and maintaining the so-called “absent presence” (Pertierra 2006) through routine phone conversations and text messages become migrants’ primary forms of care for the family back home (Dreby 2006; Parreñas 2005b). Although these practices might have positive effects in the short run, scholars tend to be skeptical about their long-term repercussions. The (over)compensation for migrants’ absence with gifts and money, for example, has been shown to lead to some levels of commodification of family relationships (Parreñas 2001). Likewise, the “care about” performed by migrants via telephony tends to have limited effects if not followed by physical acts (Leifsen and Tymczuk 2012, 229), or it might even backfire if not done in a sensitive manner (Hoang and Yeoh 2015b).

Because care has been essentialized as a feminine vocation that makes a woman womanly, the migrant’s inability to perform care duties in the conventional manner inevitably subjects her to the social stigma of “bad motherhood” and “failed femininity.” In their groundbreaking theorization of gender, West and Zimmerman (1987, 126) have pointed out that gender is not ascribed but achieved through “social doings” that involve not only perceptual but also “interactional and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine ‘natures.’” Migrant mothers defy the prevailing notion of an ideal woman (Isaksen, Devi, and Hochschild 2008, 411) not only by engaging in masculine pursuits of mobility and breadwinning but also by vacating what is considered central to the woman’s nature – caregiving. She is thus called to account for failing to do gender appropriately (West and Zimmerman 1987). In situations where the family falls apart, the blame tends to fall on the absent mother and wife – a tendency that is largely cultivated by mass media and, to a certain extent, supported by academic research. Discussions of migration and marital dissolution, for example, tend to pay inordinate attention to female migrant families (see Kabeer 2014; Oishi 2005), inadvertently lending support to the popular belief that female migration is disruptive for family life while male migration is unproblematic.

Social doings of gender are not always about measuring up to normative gender ideals but also about engaging in behavior at the risk of gender assessment (West and Zimmerman 1987, 137). Men’s and women’s doings of gender are essentially situated and, for that reason, interactional and institutional arenas of gender doings require special emphasis. There is growing evidence in the migration scholarship about new meanings of gender emerging from transnational interactions. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997), for example, have provided a fascinating account of how Latina migrant mothers in Los Angeles rework meanings of motherhood to encompass not only breadwinning but also nurturing from afar, forsaking deeply felt beliefs that biological mothers should raise their own children. Filipina (Parreñas 2001) and Mexican women (Dreby 2006), on the other hand, counter the “bad motherhood” stigma by maintaining a daily presence in their children’s life through Short Message Service (SMS) and phone calls. Yet, migrant women continue to battle feelings of regret, guilt, and loss. Moral dilemmas of migration not only trouble migrant women and their families but also trigger fundamental changes to the fabric of society in the long run.

Drawing on West and Zimmerman’s (1987) conceptualization of gender as an emergent feature of social interactions, I seek to provide insights into the discursive processes and everyday practices that underlie migrant women’s negotiations of motherhood and femininity. My study engages with and advances their idea of accountability in gender doings. In particular, it underscores West and Zimmerman’s (1987, 136) view that social doings of gender are often designed in such a way that they would be characterized as in accord with culturally approved standards and at the same time highlights the reflexivity and instrumentalism in such actions. In other words, seemingly compliant behaviors are not necessarily a passive enactment of social norms but may be a strategic means to other ends. What is often taken for granted as an oppressive gender regime could be exploited by those perceived as its perennial victims to further their interests. In what follows, I discuss the institutional setting of Vietnamese womanhood, throwing light on the migrant woman’s moral bearings and the social doings of gender that these underpin. It is then followed by a methodology discussion and examination of the case of Vietnamese women in Taiwan. In my analysis, I first recount an intriguing encounter with a migrant mother named Thuận and her Taiwanese husband to highlight the continuing grip of rigid gender norms on the woman’s life in spite of her physical and economic mobility. This is supported by further empirical evidence on everyday acts of endurance and self-sacrifice that women perform to combat complex moral dilemmas associated with their migration. Finally, I provide a critical assessment of the discursive undersides of these moral strivings and emphasize the strategic and pragmatic nature of those practices.

The Vietnamese Notion of Womanhood

The prevailing notion of womanhood in northern Vietnam¹ takes its roots in Confucian ideologies of social order. As Confucian values are highly anti-individualistic (Vandermeersch 1986, 162), family interests are prioritized over individual desires and needs. A premium value is placed on duty, responsibility, obedience, and a commitment to the family collective, and parents expect to rely on their children’s support in later life (Chung 1992; Pyke 2000). Despite major political upheavals and social transformations within Vietnamese society in the past century, motherhood remains the core of a woman’s identity (Rydstrom 2004, 75). In the so-called “thiên chức người mẹ” (natural vocation of motherhood), women are essentialized as mothers while care and related housework are praised as their natural capacities and duties (Fahey 2002; Tran and Le 2000). Paradoxically, as women are revered for performing this noble vocation, they are also expected to always endure hardships and sacrifice their own interests for the family (Werner 2009). Enduring hardship and sacrificing one’s self-interests are acts of selflessness and compassion, demonstrating some of the most highly valued social virtues; insisting on one’s rights to freedom and self-determination comes out as very selfish and socially illegitimate behavior (Gammeltoft 1999, 213). These values are woven into the traditional codes of female conduct—Tứ Đức (the Four Virtues: công, to be adept in domestic work; dung, to be modest and humble in appearance; ngôn, to be gentle and moderate in speech; and hạnh, to be faithful and chaste) and Tam Tòng (the Three Obediences: to the father, husband, and son). From early childhood, girls are socialized to acquire the feminine qualities suited for endurance and sacrifice in both psychological and physical terms (Rydstrom 2004; Shohet 2013).

Vietnamese womanhood also bears the hallmarks of two distinct histo-cultural eras in the nation’s modern history: the war and nation-building time from 1945 to the late 1980s and the Đổi mới² period from the early 1990s. The expectations for women to espouse virtues of hy sinh and chịu đựng were accentuated in wartime nationalist discourses. Communist leaders tactically deployed essentialist notions of womanhood to knit women into the revolutionary cause (Gammeltoft 1999; Rydstrom 2012; Werner 2009), forming a new gender regime that serves purposes of nation-building and defending the country from foreign occupiers. Wartime standards of femininity, namely “womanly stalwartness, self-sacrifice, revolutionary ardor, thrift and sexual asceticism,” were reinforced through the usage of fiction and war films (Werner 2006, 314). Motherhood in this period was seen as both a privilege and duty for women, with the future of the family and nation dependent upon it (Rydstrom 2012, 290).

Đổi mới reforms have resulted in a renewed emphasis on women’s role in maintaining family “harmony” (Belanger and Barbieri 2009). The reessentialization of femininity, particularly with respect to maternity and nurturing, and a preoccupation with women’s morality, are typical features of post- and market-socialist societies, embodying anxieties about new economic and political regimes (Leshkowich 2011, 278). Policies such as the 1986 Marriage and Family Law and the Happy Family Campaign strongly emphasize women’s mothering role and stress that the integrity of family structure is the cornerstone of nation building (Gammeltoft 1999; Phinney 2008). The woman has a pivotal role in building family happiness through her economic contributions to the household, giving birth to male descendants for the family, and socializing her children into avoiding social evils (Locke, Nguyen, and Nguyen 2012; Rydstrom 2006). State discourses keep preaching to young women about stereotypical virtues of Vietnamese womanhood, especially motherly devotion, endurance, and self-sacrifice, which are key to the maintenance of moral and harmonious families (Werner 2009). While Vietnamese men’s sense of masculinity is primarily benchmarked by their ability to provide for the family (Hoang and Yeoh 2011, 723), women are judged by the quality of their reproductive work, regardless of their economic contributions to the family (Hoang 2011; Truong 2009). Expressions such as “Con hư tại mẹ, cháu hư tại bà” (A naughty child is the mother’s fault, a naughty grandchild is the grandmother’s fault) or “Đàn bà chẳng phải đàn bà; Thổi cơm cơm khét, muối cà cà chua” (A woman is not a woman if her rice is burned and her pickles are too sour) reflect the emphasis on women’s caring and nurturing skills.

The rise of a consumerist culture and the phenomenal expansion of the media following Đổi mới have introduced new values to Vietnamese womanhood (Nguyen-Vo 2008; Werner 2009). Research notes an unfolding process of individualization in Vietnamese society (Gammeltoft 2001; Ghuman et al. 2006; Nilan 2012). Younger generations are becoming more individualistic (Nilan 2012), and the notion of femininity is beginning to incorporate new aspirations for “modernity, urbanity, beauty, and sexuality” (Werner 2006, 314). This has somehow caused a moral panic in society to which the state and popular culture respond by reaffirming feminine virtues of endurance, simplicity, and hard work as morally superior through heavily censored cultural products (Nguyen and Thomas 2004; Pettus 2003). In state-sponsored media, women who pursue self-interests and desire money, clothes, or romance are demonized, while modernity is equated with good mothering and maintaining a family (Nguyen and Thomas 2004, 147).

With increased mobility and greater exposure to foreign lifestyles, lived realities of femininity and motherhood become more diverse and complex. Yet, Nguyễn (2004, 174) observes an enduring importance of the family in the social life of younger generations. A life with only professional and financial gains is regarded as a life that is incomplete and imbalanced. Devotion to the family is still expected of women and used as a key parameter defining the feminine identity. “Good women” are those who accept the hardships of their lives with endurance and resilience and without complaint (Gammeltoft 1999, 180). How migrant women confront and negotiate these competing claims on Vietnamese womanhood is an intriguing matter that deserves greater scholarly attention.

Methods

This article draws on an ethnographic study in Taiwan in 2012 that followed up on a larger project named CHAMPSEA³ (Child Health and Migrant Parents in South East Asia) on the health and well-being of children left behind by migrant parents in Southeast Asia. I became intrigued by stories of marriage disruptions when coordinating the qualitative component of CHAMPSEA during 2008–2010 and decided to explore further gender and sexuality aspects of the transitional family in 2011–2012. In 2011, I conducted in-depth interviews with 44 “left-behind” husbands in Thai Binh Province, Vietnam, and with 15 children from the participating households (eight boys and seven girls) aged between 12 and 15. Twenty-seven of the interviewed men provided me with the phone numbers of their wives who were in Taiwan. Because of unforeseen difficulties in accessing the women in Taiwan (primarily due to employers’ mobility restrictions and the women’s reluctance to expose their Taiwan life to someone who had established contact with their families in Vietnam), I could reach only 15 wives of the interviewed men and decided to expand the sample to include another 15 Vietnamese migrant women. All the interviews were conducted in Vietnamese by myself and audio-recorded with their permission. The recorded interviews were then transcribed verbatim and coded in NVIVO—a software package for qualitative data analysis—under the themes emerging from fieldwork notes.

As a Vietnamese national sharing some key demographic characteristics (such as gender, age range, marital status, and place of origin) with the respondents, I quickly established rapport with them and was able to gain insights into the aspects of their transnational lives that would have been inaccessible otherwise. Yet, the fact that I knew the families of 15 women had undoubtedly restricted my access to their intimate lives, and I had to rely on third-party sources of information or participant observation. This is not to say untruths and partial truths have been completely dismissed and excluded from my analysis. Lies (when adequately cross-examined and validated) hold an immense potential to reveal the most intricate layers of research participants’ psychological and discursive “undersides.” Being a Vietnamese native speaker hailing from the same region as my research participants, I conducted this research from a vantage point of a learned observer who was able to read subtle cues and draw on shared conceptual schemas to make sense of the tacit messages that they conveyed. As Fine (1993) points out, deceptions and self-deceptions are intrinsic elements of qualitative research. What matters is that we are cognizant of them as well as of the analytical choices that we make to share those choices with readers.

The migrant women in my study were between 30 and 51 years old and married at the time of the fieldwork. With only one exception, they all were engaged in low-skilled employment, including domestic work (23), care work in nursing homes (3), service (2), and manufacturing (1). Nineteen of them lived in Taipei and the adjacent New Taipei City, and the rest lived in Taichung city and rural counties all over Taiwan. To supplement the interview data, I held informal conversations with many Taiwanese locals and Vietnamese workers across the country and did extensive ethnographic observations at migrant settings such as rail stations, parks, churches, ethnic eateries and discotheques, lovers’ hotels, Vietnamese pop concerts, and weekend classes targeting foreign workers in Taipei.

Performing Self-Sacrifice and Endurance

This article was inspired by my encounter with 35-year-old Thuận in Taiwan and earlier interviews in Vietnam with Tấn, her ex-husband, and Tài, her 14-year-old son. Her “left-behind” family was surveyed by the CHAMPSEA study in 2008 when Thuận was still married to Tấn and working in Taiwan as a domestic worker. By the time I revisited Tấn and Tài in their home province of Thái Bình in late 2011, the couple had divorced. Tấn suffered from a mild mental health problem and did not have a regular job. He and Tài were dependent on Thuận’s monthly child support payment of VND500.000 (USD25) and occasional catches from the nearby river. Their poverty was unmistakable. The one-room brick house was almost bare save for a couple of decrepit wooden stools, a broken tea cabinet, and a creaky bed covered with an old sedge mat. Tấn was still enraged by his wife’s divorcing him and blamed the morally degrading Taiwanese society for corrupting “40 percent of migrant women” in his village. My heated conversation with him was followed by a somewhat melancholic talk with Tài, who kept saying that he wanted his mom to return home. Even though Thuận had given Tài a mobile phone before she left and called him (from a public payphone) every other week, neither Tài nor his father knew her contact details. Tài said his mom had told him that she was working at a chicken farm for very little pay and that she had to work very hard from early morning until night. I later had a hard time in Taiwan pinning Thuận down for an interview. She belonged to a small circle of women from the same village who had “run away” from their contracted jobs and were cohabiting with their Taiwanese partners at the time of my fieldwork in 2012. Her friends gave me her phone number, telling me they often met for dinner at her place. After countless phone calls over a month and when I was about to give up on Thuận, she suddenly agreed to meet me for 15 minutes.

My research assistant, Huyền, and I had been waiting at Hukou station, 73 km southwest of Taipei, for about 45 minutes when a slim and young-looking woman emerged in front of us from a new and sleek silver BMW X5. Unlike what I had anticipated, Thuận looked very relaxed in light makeup, an elegant white blouse, grey pants, and an immaculate pair of black leather pumps. As she was announcing that she would leave in 15 minutes to feed the chickens at 7 pm, a middle-aged Taiwanese man behind the steering wheel of the BMW motioned us to follow his car to a fancy restaurant round the corner. The man, who was introduced to us as Thuận’s boss (ông chủ), generously treated us to delicious beef steaks and happily engaged in a conversation with Huyền in Mandarin Chinese while I talked with Thuận in Vietnamese at the other end of the table. She was reserved and passive throughout our conversation, checking her wristwatch every now and then, and appearing particularly sad and teary when talking about her son. She confirmed what I had heard from Tài that she was having a tough life at the chicken farm. She never went out or met any fellow migrants due to long hours at work, a constrained budget, and mobility restrictions imposed by her boss. I never had a chance to ask her the interview questions I had prepared because Thuận was fixated on one and only one message—she was agonizing over the separation from her son and the divorce, which was the only, albeit painful, avenue to exit an unhappy marriage:

We started to fight a month after the wedding. He said that I was sleeping around but he could never supply any proof. His parents said that they would kick me out if he had any proof but he didn’t. It was his delusions. . . . It is not because of Taiwan. . . . I know some people in Taiwan. . . . They see how rich Taiwanese people are, start craving the same thing and then divorce their husbands. But I am not one of them. I feel sorry for Tài. . . . I tried to carry on but I could not.

The message that Thuận had been a victim of an abusive marriage which had effectively destroyed her was reiterated multiple times during our dinner. She told me she would not remarry because she feared the new husband would be abusive and jealous like Tấn and that Taiwan was all about hard work and survival:

I sleep right at the farm. I never have breaks—growing veggie, weeding, and feeding chicken, and so on. Life is very hard here, much harder than in Vietnam. I don’t like Taiwan at all. It is just for survival. I feel sad all the time and cry a lot. I ask myself why my fate is so hapless. I pity myself.

Although I had already found it difficult to relate Thuận’s narratives to her groomed appearance, sophisticated table manners, and the man’s loving gestures to her, I was still taken aback by Huyền’s postinterview report that the man was actually Thuận’s new husband. Oblivious of what his wife was conversing with me in Vietnamese, the man gave Huyền a candid account of his marriage to Thuận. He had undergone his own divorce when hiring Thuận to look after his ill mother and quickly fell in love with her. After Thuận successfully ended her marriage with Tấn, they got married and traveled all over Vietnam to celebrate the event. Only then could I understand the blushing and apparent embarrassment on Thuận’s face every time her husband interrupted our conversation to confirm the names of the spots they had visited or the delicacies they had tried in Vietnam.

I was deeply intrigued by the encounter. Why did she refuse to meet me so many times only to suddenly change her mind? Why did she lie about her second marriage? What underlies her portrayal of herself as a lonely and suffering mother? What would have been at stake had she told me the truth about her comfortable life in Taiwan? Apparently, Thuận felt that her life choices were under scrutiny and that she should seek to dodge the possible condemnation of her defying Vietnamese expectations of a woman. Her case reveals poignant dilemmas in the gendered life of an increasing number of women who migrate overseas to work. Women currently account for 48 percent of the world’s migrant population.⁴ Their migration is fraught with disruptions and moral insecurities. Migration and the attendant physical separation from one’s family challenge the universal ideology of womanhood and femininity with caring and nurturing duties at its core. In the body of literature on care and migration inspired by Hochschild’s (2000) notion of “global care chains,”⁵ the primary concern has been with care regimes and practices, particularly how care duties vacated by the migrant woman are fulfilled in her absence. Less known are affective and discursive aspects of care chains. With the exception of Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) and Parreñas (2001), very little scholarly attention has been paid to how the migrant woman herself deals with the situation in which her ability to provide care to loved ones is diminished and her social identity as mother and wife is called into question. In what follows, I examine further evidence from my research to understand how migrant women like Thuận confront this “crisis of femininity” and negotiate conflicting callings when they are both the family breadwinner and caregiver.

Tension, Motherhood, and Migration

Elsewhere, I have described deliberate attempts within the Vietnamese family to construct transnational migrant life as one of suffering and sacrifice to cultivate feelings of gratitude in children and to mitigate possible adverse effects of separation on the parent–child emotional bond (Hoang and Yeoh 2015b). While migration per se is seen as an act of self-sacrifice and endurance on the part of the woman, I discovered female sacrifice and endurance in more mundane fashion during my fieldwork in Taiwan: extreme frugality in everyday life, adamant sexual abstinence (see Hoang and Yeoh 2015a), and quiet tolerance of exploitative work conditions (Hoang, forthcoming). These concerted efforts to construct the image of a sacrificing migrant mother seem to be effective. Interviews conducted with migrant mothers in Taiwan confirm the results of my previous research in Vietnam (Hoang and Yeoh 2012; Hoang and Yeoh 2015b) that “left-behind” children generally do not harbor negative feelings such as resentment or anger toward their mothers. However, many women could not help admitting, with discernible bitterness and resignation, that migration had cost them irreparable emotional damages. As migration prolongs, they grow emotionally distant from the family back home. Đào, a 36-year-old domestic worker in Taipei, for example, suspected her 10-year-old son was clinically depressed when she failed to strike up a meaningful conversation with him over a long period of time:

I said to my husband: “Is there any possibility our little Hà has clinical depression? I just can’t get him to talk with me.” His father responded: “You’ve been away for so long. He calls you mom because we tell him to do so. He would call you sister if we tell him to call you sister or aunt—if we tell him to call you aunt.” He does not really comprehend meanings of the word “mum.”

Đào’s experience was typical of mothers who left young children behind (cf. Dreby 2010; Schmalzbauer 2004). In fact, feelings of emotional distance and estrangement were mutual. As illustrated by 43-year-old Thảo’s narrative below, some women gradually lost the ability to connect emotionally with their children over the years, and family relationships were reduced to obligations and responsibilities:

We have been separated for too long. . . . I no longer feel the same. Now he just talks about issues that need my attention . . . sending him money . . . or a decision I need to take. Now we are just like friends . . . no longer the mother–son emotional closeness. I don’t even know what to say when I call him except for the usual: “Have you eaten? or “What are you doing?” I feel . . . honestly . . . I feel it’s only responsibilities now. . . . I don’t miss my family or Vietnam.

The mother–child bond is not automatic or instinctual but historically, socially, and economically contingent (Hrdy 1999; Wolf 2003). The growing emotional gap between migrants and their children makes it increasingly difficult for the former to continue to fulfill their parenting and care duties from afar. Above all, losing grip on what is supposed to be their “thiên chức” (natural vocation) unsettles the migrant’s sense of womanhood. In the collectivistic Vietnamese society, a disturbed family order or children’s academic and social failures would result in the migrant mother’s “mất mặt” (losing face) and threaten to destabilize her family. As someone primarily charged with maintaining family harmony and happiness (Belanger and Barbieri 2009; Gammeltoft 1999; Phinney 2008; Werner 2009), the migrant mother seeks to strategize and instrumentalize practices of endurance and to self-sacrifice to avert social criticisms and to make up for the emotional loss in her relationship with children.

In my study, the most important sacrifices the Vietnamese women made were in their relationships with husbands back home. As their physical absence prolongs, issues in spousal relationships start to surface. Even though the negativity in media coverage of “left-behind” husbands tends to be exaggerated (see Hoang and Yeoh 2011, 728), a number of transnational families in my study are indeed plagued by male infidelity, alcoholism, gambling, heroin addiction, and mismanagement of remittances. Forty-two-year-old domestic worker Giang’s husband was one of them. Giang had always been the sole breadwinner for a family of four. Her husband had irregular access to cash income as a waged laborer but spent it all on alcohol and mistresses. The brewing pre-migration tension between Giang and her husband due to his neglect of family duties was brought to a climax by his having two children out of wedlock during her absence, and by an alcohol-fueled fight that sent him to jail for two weeks. Giang, nevertheless, decided to put up with the unhappy marriage for the sake of her children:

My husband is an alcoholic. I left him 30 million dongs so he could renovate the kitchen and toilet but he squandered it away. Things got worse after I left. But I tell myself to carry on. . . . I’ll do it all by myself . . . for me and the kids. Let’s pretend he is not there. I am no longer interested in him. . . . I am haunted by tales about his infidelity. . . . He curses me because I do not send him money. . . . Now I avoid talking with him on the phone. I endure it all so my kids could have a complete family.

Giang was not alone. Thirty-nine-year-old Mừng burst into tears during our interview in Taipei when recounting her gambling addict husband’s misdeeds—he had not only used her remittances to feed his gambling habits but also had engaged in extramarital affairs during her absence. In another interview with 42-year-old Thanh, I had to put the interview on hold three times to console the distressed woman. Her husband back home, despite his amputated right leg, had acquired a reputation as the village Casanova, indulging himself in gambling and extramarital sex, leaving their two children in his mother’s care. Yet, Thanh chose not to divorce him so her children would not have to bear the stigma of parental divorce, which might severely damage their own marriage prospects in the future. These women’s decisions to tolerate marital woes at any cost were neatly explained by 36-year-old nursing home worker Lành: “We women are destined to be inferior to men. So if we want ‘cơm lành, canh ngọt’⁶ we have to sacrifice (our own interests).” As such, the fact that all the women in my study were married is deceptive. It obscures the tension and conflicts, pain and regrets, endurance and self-sacrifices involved. In state discourses about the family in Vietnam, family happiness is determined by the success of the marital project, particularly in terms of social reproduction and economic stability, not individual or couple satisfaction (Phinney 2008, 654). In these ideals about the “Happy Family,” the woman is charged with holding the key to marital success and her family’s public image (Schuller et al. 2006, 392). Being able to swallow anger at their husbands’ infidelity is an essential part of one’s wifely and motherly duties (Phinney 2008, 654). By tolerating the husband’s infidelity, putting up with an unhappy marriage, and shouldering the economic burden of the family breadwinner, the migrant mother believes that she is measuring up to the social ideals of womanly endurance and self-sacrifice. As 38-year-old domestic worker Ngọc put it, “Muốn được thì phải chịu mất chứ!” (No pain, no gain); migrant women were conscious of and willing to accept the costs of migration. Notwithstanding the increased economic security and autonomy that it provides, migration has not unsettled the Vietnamese institutions of marriage and family—elemental bastions of patriarchy. The perception that the gender order is “natural” is reinforced and legitimated by women’s doings of deference (cf. West and Zimmerman 1987, 146). These social doings of gender, as demonstrated further in the following section, are not subconscious but strategic performances meant to consolidate the women’s longer-term self-interests.

Strategic Moralities

Gammeltoft (1999, 230) notes in her ethnographic study of a northern Vietnamese village that women who selflessly endure hardships and sacrifice their interests for others see themselves as morally virtuous. To my study participants, being morally virtuous was an important strategy to undo the damages that migration has inflicted on their gendered selves and the family. In the context of transnational migration, the mother–child bond is particularly fragile because it can easily become devoid of the intimacy and affection that are often nurtured and sustained through everyday acts of (physical) caregiving (see Hoang and Yeoh 2012; Hoang and Yeoh 2015b; Parreñas 2005a). Acts of endurance and self-sacrifice as described above are crucial to their efforts to sustain the mother–child bond, their sense of femininity, and their status within the family as well as the social security attached to it. If the woman cannot be seen as a caring mother, at least she could be a moral one. In Vietnam, social disapproval of one’s lifestyle hurts not only her own social standing but also that of her family and lineage. Popular sayings such as “Đời cha ăn mặn, đời con khát nước” (Children are thirsty because their parents have eaten too much salt), and “Lấy vợ xem tông, lấy chồng xem giống” (Who one marries is not as important as what family one marries into), indicate the importance of the family’s symbolic capital (see Bourdieu 1984) in determining individuals’ life chances. As mothers, the migrants are charged with constructing and maintaining an image of a model family so their children may not be ostracized and disadvantaged in their personal lives. As affirmed by 42-year-old Ngát: “Sống sao còn để phúc đức cho con cái sau này nó còn lấy chồng” (I must conduct myself in such a way that my daughter may be blessed in her own marriage). The notion of phúc đức, the Vietnamese family’s symbolic capital, is the ingrained belief that the prosperity and happiness enjoyed by the family at present are the result of cumulative merit and labor by their forebears, while misfortune and poverty are viewed as the retribution for the misdeeds committed by them. Each individual, therefore, has a stake in the family’s phúc đức. Beliefs in phúc đức form the foundation for social rules dictating how family members are expected to behave (Pyke 2000).

The moral bearings that Vietnamese womanhood hinges on are manifest in the opening vignette about Thuận. Thuận believed that, by initiating the divorce and leaving her son behind with his father, she had violated the moral codes of Tam Tòng and Tứ Đức that emphasized women’s unconditional devotion to the family and children, thus potentially depriving her son of the symbolic capital that he would require in his adult life. Lies about her new marriage and embarrassment at her husband’s unwitting reminders of her present upscale lifestyle indicate a sense of mother’s guilt in Thuận. Self-sacrifice, a core value in the Vietnamese definition of womanhood, requires the woman to forgo, if necessary, romantic love, food, health, or any other personal needs and interests for the benefit of her children and family (Shohet 2013, 205). In retrospect, our US$20 per head meal at the restaurant and the presence of a well-to-do Taiwanese husband next to Thuận in the background of the conversation about the child support payment of US$25 and Tài’s poor school performance somehow served as the most immediate testaments to her supposed failings as a mother and woman. Thuận felt the urge to portray her life as one of poverty, hardship, loneliness, sorrow and suffering to avoid being judged negatively, believing it would compensate for her falling short of being a faithful wife and a dutiful mother. Similar to what has been observed in other contexts (Dreby 2006; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parreñas 2001), being a provider alone is not sufficient to make a migrant woman a good mother. While her peers in stable marital relationships chose to perform care from afar (see Hoang and Yeoh 2012), Thuận sought to reinvent herself as a suffering mother in an attempt to counter the social criticisms potentially leveled against her. Gender identifications, Butler (2008) argues, are compelled performances of dominant discourses. Yet, Thuận’s case cautions us against the tendency to all too easily dismiss agency in gender performances. It underscores the intentionality and spatial embeddedness of gender performativity that have been raised in geographical research (Nash 2000; Nelson 1999).

Being morally virtuous also helps the migrant woman appease her ego, which has been hurt by the downward social mobility she experiences as a result of migration. Domestic service is highly stigmatized in Vietnamese society (Hoang, forthcoming). Participants in my research were proud to recount the hardships they had overcome during the course of migration. The ability to put up with employers’ abusive and humiliating treatments, to say “No” to Taiwanese men’s sexual advances and associated financial rewards, and to forgive their husbands’ failings testifies to their integrity and goodness. It provides migrant women with a sense of moral superiority that seemingly entitles them to condemn “lazy and selfish” Taiwanese women who only “think of themselves” or “debauched” fellow countrywomen who sleep around for money (see Hoang and Yeoh 2015a). By situating themselves superior to other women, migrant women seek to counter demeaning stereotypes about them within the host society and challenge the “master-servant” boundaries between them and the economically superior Taiwanese (see also Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Lan 2006). In that sense, acts of endurance and self-sacrifice are forms of resilience and resistance that enable the women to regain their self-esteem and achieve a sense of empowerment.

The women’s practices of endurance and self-sacrifice resonate with Amartya Sen’s (1990) writings on women’s bargaining power. According to Sen, one’s sense of self-worth and perceived fallback positions shape her choices and behavior. If individuals perceive their longer-term interests to be best served by sacrificing their personal well-being for that of others, they are less likely to press their own individual claims. Their acts of endurance and self-sacrifice reflect both the inferior status of women in the Vietnamese kinship system and a familistic care regime in which children are the primary source of care and financial support for parents in old age. The 2004 Viet Nam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) found that, on average, social welfare is received by 14 percent of the elderly in Vietnam, 18 percent received a pension, and almost 67 percent of the Vietnamese elderly received no regular formal economic transfers (Evans et al. 2007). By enduring hardships and making sacrifices today, migrant women seek to accumulate the required symbolic capital that would hopefully warrant children’s care for them tomorrow. In a society where women, and not men, bear the brunt of marital dissolution (Gammeltoft 1999, 180), their fallback positions tend to be weaker than their husbands’. Being a sacrificing mother is thus a pragmatic strategy. It not only helps migrant women deal with the mother’s guilt of not being able to care for their children but also serves as an investment in social security for their future.

Conclusion

Transnational spaces are inhabited materially and symbolically (Collins 2009). Social values attached to female endurance and self-sacrifice essentially serve to discipline female conduct and to keep women “in their place.” In the context of transnational labor migration, these gender ideologies have transcended national borders to continue to regulate women’s lives beyond the “bamboo groves”⁷ of their villages. Migration has moved Vietnamese women to a new terrain of ideological contradictions, where their breadwinning responsibilities compete with wifely and motherly duties, and where their increased economic power goes hand-in-hand with a diminished ability to measure up to womanhood ideals. Transnationalism is, indeed, a contradictory process that entails both tremendous gains and irrecoverable losses (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997). In this study, I have pointed out that migrant women’s embrace of the values of endurance and sacrifice does not, as it might appear, embody an inert internalization of the patriarchal but is a conscious strategy. Because gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences (Butler 2008, 178), adopting compelled performances of dominant gender discourses is critical in a context where the woman’s social security is volatile and uncertain.

Social doings of gender are thus “technologies of the self”⁸ (Foucault 1991) that the women actively deploy to secure long-term self-interests. The choice of whether to accommodate, resist, or subvert dominant gender discourses is part and parcel of the women’s temporally and spatially embedded discursive reflection on their gendered selves. Individuals have many social identities that “may be donned or shed, muted or made more salient, depending on the situation” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 139). As illustrated by Thuận’s story, some choose to play along with the notion of a sacrificing and enduring mother, presenting themselves as victims, because that is what society expects of them, and their complicity in the reproduction and essentialization of female subordination would be rewarded. In the cases of Giang, Thanh, and Mừng, self-sacrifices in spousal relationships helped them portray themselves as altruistic and moral mothers—a strategy to deal with not only the migrant mother’s guilt but also uncertainties in their future life back home. That the women’s exercise of agency exhibits more accommodation than resistance concurs with Pettus’s (2003) view that the economic wonders of Đổi mới have not made more women step out of the dominant discursive framework about “sacrificing” mothers and “enduring” wives. In a context where domesticity is the primary refuge of virtuous womanhood (see Leshkowich 2006, 301) and marital stability is a benchmark in femininity (Gammeltoft 1999, 217), migrant women have little room for maneuver.

Findings on migrant women’s practices of endurance and self-sacrifice offer insights into the Confucian notion of “filial piety” (hiếu) that still holds significant power in regulating family relationships in Vietnam. Filial piety—the duty of children to respect, obey, and care for their parents—is built up by the sense of children’s debt and gratitude to their parents (Gammeltoft 1999, 172). With the advance of the consumerist culture, increased mobility, and greater exposure to foreign values, filial piety can no longer be taken for granted by parents. Mothers’ acts of self-sacrifice are not just cultural performances but also parts of their economic schemes. Yet, while these practices potentially afford the migrant women in my study degrees of symbolic and material advantage, they reproduce their marginality and subordination within both the Vietnamese kinship system and the capitalist economy (see also Leshkowich 2011, 279). This underscores the historical and spatial embeddedness of gender as well as the symbiotic relationship between patriarchy and capitalism in female migration.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor of Gender & Society and five anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. The article also has benefited from Minh Nguyễn’s and Roberta Zavoretti’s feedback, for which I am grateful. This research could not have been successfully completed without the dedication and hard work of my research assistants—Nguyễn Thị Thu Huyền and Nguyễn Thành Chung. I am indebted to the wonderful Vietnamese migrant women who have been so gracious with their time, knowledge, and experiences.

The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust, UK (grant numbers GR079946/B/06/Z and GR079946/Z/06Z).

Notes

Lan Anh Hoang is senior lecturer in Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Australia. Her main research interests are migration, gender, sexuality, family, identity, and belonging. Her current study examines transnational lives of irregular Vietnamese migrants in Moscow.

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