Socialist Mobilities: Crossing New Terrains in Vietnamese Migration Histories

This paper examines the waves of migration between Vietnam and fraternal socialist countries in the Eastern bloc from the 1950s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Arguing for a collectivist migration framework, it compares and contrasts the various generations of architecture student migrants, their multidirectional movements, and, for most, their repatriation to Vietnam. There is no single uniform narrative of socialist mobility. Each wave was driven by different war and postwar exigencies, and the groups of migrants who left Vietnam confronted a range of unique challenges related to such factors as location, gender and assignment overseas (i.e. student or worker). This paper has two objectives: first, to decentre the West from hegemonic discussions of Vietnamese diasporas in order to advance a broader understanding of the historical development of overseas Vietnamese communities in what are now post-socialist countries; and second, to complicate the story of Vietnamese migrants in Central and Eastern Europe by arguing that past socialist mobilities are constitutive of much capitalist-driven migration today. An examination of different socialist migration trajectories and experiences of living overseas across generations provides important insights into how socioeconomic and political changes that came about in Vietnam with the fall of the Berlin Wall shaped the personal lives and professional futures of returnees and their kin. It also serves to bring the study of socialist migration histories more deeply into the epistemological and methodological fold of contemporary Vietnamese studies.