Marrying to Labor, Laboring to Marry: Gender and the Relational Patterns of Migration from Vietnam

Amid dramatic economic transformations in East Asia in the late twentieth century, Vietnam entered the global market in 1986 through Doi Moi (renovation), with important gendered ramifications for labor, marriage, and mobility. This article analyzes rural Vietnamese people's migration against the backdrop of both global political economic dynamics and a changing local gender regime. Drawing on nineteen months of ethnography and 111 interviews with Vietnamese women and men across three different countries (South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam), I show how gender, as a relational construct, operates as both a fundamental constraint on and an enabler of human mobility. Specifically, the framing of women as "good mothers" and the corresponding emphasis on men as "good workers" enables certain migration pathways but also shapes the strategies women and men use to improve their chances at mobility. Through this examination of the migration paths and strategies of Vietnamese women and men from similar communities, I clarify three types of relational dynamics in human mobility through which gender is the unifying thread: women and men migrants, marriage and labor pathways, and global and local transformations. My findings show that poor, rural women enact marriage migration as a mobility strategy to find work overseas, whereas poor, rural men participate in labor migration as a means to form families domestically. Through this study, I demonstrate how the intertwined valuation of female domesticity and breadwinning masculinity, which shapes conditions in Vietnam and overseas, creates distinct but connected patterns for women and men in human mobility.