UC Berkeley

“Women Who Leave and the Men They Leave Behind” is an ethnographic and interview-based study of poor, rural Vietnamese women and men along various migration trajectories in South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. It shows how the material and cultural forces of gender shape the paths that are available for migration, and how everyday women and men utilize existing gendered tropes for mobility. Since Vietnam liberalized its markets in 1986, women and men have been forging new migration options as their country opens to the world. For women, one option emerged in the form of a bride market that specializes in matching young Vietnamese women to East Asian men. This is an attractive pathway for poor women who face a limited labor landscape in Vietnam and the need for reproductive labor overseas. For the men, women’s outmigration means fewer women in the countryside to marry. Here, national and international forces tied to Vietnam’s development converge to produce a limited labor market in Vietnam for women and a limited marriage market in the countryside for men.

This study shows how marriage and labor streams converge precisely because gender ideologies organizing political-economic and cultural conditions in Vietnam and overseas place different pressures on women and men to be “women” and “men.” Drawing from 19 months of ethnography and over 100 interviews with Vietnamese women and men in South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, I find that poor, rural Vietnamese women enact marriage migration as a strategy to find work internationally whereas poor, rural Vietnamese men participate in labor migration as a means to form families domestically. I contribute to scholarship on gender, globalization, and migration in two ways with this work. First, I build on studies that analyze the connection between marriage and labor migration for women by extending the analysis to include men. I show that marriage and labor do not simply connect, they are connected in different ways for women compared to men. Second, I demonstrate how women and men utilize cultural tropes to achieve their respective objectives, highlighting gender as both a constraint on and a resource for different forms of migration. As such, I make a case for why we must investigate globalization and migration, specifically the relationship between marriage migration and labor migration, through the lens of gender and not just through women’s or men’s experiences.