Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty 9789048544639

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Vietnamese Migrants in Russia

New Mobilities in Asia In the 21st century, human mobility will increasingly have an Asian face. Migration from, to, and within Asia is not new, but it is undergoing profound transformations. Unskilled labour migration from the Philippines, China, India, Burma, Indonesia, and Central Asia to the West, the Gulf, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand continues apace. Yet industrialization in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and India, the opening of Burma, and urbanization in China is creating massive new flows of internal migration. China is fast becoming a magnet for international migration from Asia and beyond. Meanwhile, Asian students top study-abroad charts; Chinese and Indian managers and technicians are becoming a new mobile global elite as foreign investment from those countries grows; and Asian tourists are fast becoming the biggest travellers and the biggest spenders, both in their own countries and abroad. These new mobilities reflect profound transformations of Asian societies and their relationship to the world, impacting national identities and creating new migration policy regimes, modes of transnational politics, consumption practices, and ideas of modernity. This series brings together studies by historians, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists that systematically explore these changes. Series Editor Pál Nyíri, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam Editorial Board Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College Johan Lindquist, Stockholm University Tim Oakes, University of Colorado, Boulder Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley Tim Winter, University of Western Australia Xiang Biao, Oxford University Brenda Yeoh, National University of Singapore

Vietnamese Migrants in Russia Mobility in Times of Uncertainty

Lan Anh Hoang

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Sortavala train station, Karelia, August 2019 Photo: Phạm Hồng Long Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 621 4 e-isbn 978 90 4854 463 9 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463726214 nur 740 © Lan Anh Hoang / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

In loving memory of my parents who taught me to dream



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

11

Tặng Một Người Bạn (For a Friend)

15

I Introduction The Market Vietnamese migration to Russia Mobility in times of uncertainty Uncertain time, uncertain life Uncertainty: conceptual debates Productive and destructive uncertainty Structure of this book

17 17 24 34 34 36 40 42

II Russia’s post-Soviet migration regime Migration to Russia The Russian immigration regime The securitization of migration Russian migrantophobia

47 47 55 61 66

III Navigating Russia’s shadow economy Legality for sale Chợ Chim – Sadovod market The migration industry The Go-between

81 81 84 93 107

IV Market ethos and the volatile radius of trust Uncertainty and market moralities Each person for themselves Money matters

129 129 137 148

V Love and sex in times of uncertainty Provisional intimacies ‘Better safe than sorry’ What’s love got to do with it? Narratives of sex, money and ­morality

161 161 171 179

VI Transient existence and the quest for certainty I’m here to make money, not to live Consumption as belonging Renegotiating the ‘Con buôn’ identity

185 185 194 198

Conclusion

209

Appendix Methodology

217 217

References

221

Index

239

List of Maps, Photos and Tables Map Map 1 Photos Photo 1 Photo 2 Photo 3 Photo 4 Photo 5 Photo 6 Photo 7 Photo 8

Regions of Vietnam

28

Moscow Trade Complex (Tоргово-ярмарочный комплекс Москва), which is often referred to as Liublino market (Chợ Liu) by Vietnamese migrants 77 Yuzhnyie Vorota (Южныe ворота – South Gate) market (also known to Vietnamese traders as Km 19 market)77 Inside Yuzhnyie Vorota market 78 Sadovod market (Садовод рынок), which is often referred to as Birds’ market (Chợ Chim) by Vietnamese migrants78 Sadovod market at 5am in November 2016; traders 79 arriving to set up their stores for the day Sadovod market at 5am in November 2016; northern car park facing Verkhniye Polya Road 79 Sadovod market in November 2016; stores on the eastern side of the pavilions 80 Sadovod market in November 2016; a Vietnamese itinerant vendor apprehended by market security guards for working without a permit 80

VI Transient existence and the quest for certainty I’m here to make money, not to live Consumption as belonging Renegotiating the ‘Con buôn’ identity

185 185 194 198

Conclusion

209

Appendix Methodology

217 217

References

221

Index

239

List of Maps, Photos and Tables Map Map 1 Photos Photo 1 Photo 2 Photo 3 Photo 4 Photo 5 Photo 6 Photo 7 Photo 8

Regions of Vietnam

28

Moscow Trade Complex (Tоргово-ярмарочный комплекс Москва), which is often referred to as Liublino market (Chợ Liu) by Vietnamese migrants 77 Yuzhnyie Vorota (Южныe ворота – South Gate) market (also known to Vietnamese traders as Km 19 market)77 Inside Yuzhnyie Vorota market 78 Sadovod market (Садовод рынок), which is often referred to as Birds’ market (Chợ Chim) by Vietnamese migrants78 Sadovod market at 5am in November 2016; traders 79 arriving to set up their stores for the day Sadovod market at 5am in November 2016; northern car park facing Verkhniye Polya Road 79 Sadovod market in November 2016; stores on the eastern side of the pavilions 80 Sadovod market in November 2016; a Vietnamese itinerant vendor apprehended by market security guards for working without a permit 80

Photo 9

Photo 17 Photo 18 Photo 19

A room shared by a family of three in an apartment in Belaya Dacha suburb; between the mattress and the 123 bed is an ancestors’ altar A living room converted into a bedroom shared by a couple (mattress in far left corner) and three single men, in an apartment in Belaya Dacha suburb; in the 123 right corner is a Thổ Địa (Spirits of the Place) altar. A room shared by two families (four adults, two young children) in Rybak hostel. A couple and their two children sleep in a bed in the left-hand corner while the other couple sleep on a raised wooden platform (about 3m2) above the woman’s head. 124 A room shared by eight people in Mekong hostel 124 A nanny feeding a little girl on a landing inside Mekong hostel. This is as much of a glimpse of Russian society as they can get. 125 An en-suite room shared by six people in the Red Chinese Dormitory (Ốp Tàu đỏ)125 Communal kitchen in the Red Chinese Dormitory (Ốp Tàu đỏ)126 The inconspicuous façade of a building housing several illegal garment factories (xưởng may đen)126 An illegal garment factory compound 127 The night shift at an illegal garment factory 127 Sleeping quarters inside an illegal garment factory 128

Tables Table 1 Table 2

Under- and Unemployment rates by region in 2014 Socio-economic profile of research participants

Photo 10

Photo 11

Photo 12 Photo 13 Photo 14 Photo 15 Photo 16

30 219

Acknowledgements As I was writing the concluding sentences of this book manuscript, news broke about what later came to be known as the ‘Essex 39,’ sending shock waves around the world. On 23 October 2019, the bodies of 39 Vietnamese migrants – 31 men and 8 women – were discovered in the trailer of a refrigerated lorry in Essex, United Kingdom. Ten of those who lost their lives in search of a better life were teenagers, the youngest of whom was only 15 years old. The devastating loss of human life sparked outpouring of grief and sorrow in both the UK and Vietnam, prompting the Vietnamese government to launch a probe on the case and leading to calls for the UK government to rethink its restrictive immigration and border regime. The tragic incident hit my Vietnamese research participants in Moscow particularly hard because it felt so close to home. As it turned out, many of the victims had passed through Russia en route to the UK – the most common people smuggling route from Vietnam to Western Europe. Their fatal journey was a poignant reminder of the precarious life that my research participants were leading in Moscow. Although the risks and dangers they faced on a daily basis were not as deadly, the sacrifices that they had to make were tremendous. I am deeply grateful to my research participants for trusting me and sharing with me the stories that otherwise might not have had a voice. Some of them might not agree with my findings but I hope they will feel that the book has done justice to their courage and resilience and provided an honest depiction of the trials and tribulations they have gone through as an irregular migrant in post-Soviet Russia. My greatest debt is to Quang, Tâm Anh, anh Hưng, Thuỷ, Văn, anh Phát, Long, chị Phượng, Thịnh, Vân, chị Hà, and chị Hồng without whose generosity and kindness this book would not have been possible. Many people have guided me and inspired me through my academic career and motivated me to complete this project. Special thanks go to Brenda Yeoh who supervised, mentored and supported me during my postdoctoral years at Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, National University of Singapore. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with and learn from her during these formative years. I owe an enormous debt to Hưng Cẩm Thái for telling me to believe in myself and diligently teaching me the ropes. I have drawn extensively on his research on Vietnamese Americans and benefited greatly from his intellectual insights and wisdom. My former PhD supervisors at University of East Anglia – Catherine Locke and Janet Seeley – offered me a model

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Vie tnamese Migrants in Russia

of intellectual dedication, integrity, and kindness. I cannot thank them enough for believing in my abilities and teaching me skills that have made me a better researcher. My colleagues at The University of Melbourne Leslie Holmes, Anthony D’Costa and Jens Zinn provided insightful comments on the design of the project and book proposals, for which I am grateful. During the course of writing the book I had the opportunities to co-convene four conference panels with Cheryll Alipio, Minh Nguyễn, and Juan Zhang (Jessie) who offered valuable feedback, encouragement and support. I am indebted to Cheryll Alipio whose dedication and collegiality carried me through the most challenging stages of the project when I was juggling mutiple roles at work and at home. This book has benefited from our collaboration on the co-edited volume Money and moralities in contemporary Asia which was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2019. The processes of obtaining a business visa for Russia and finding a local administrative sponsor were daunting but I was fortunate to receive the generous advice and support of Sergei Riazantsev, Lee McAneney, Katya Pechenkina, Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Igor Istomin. I am thankful to Sergei Riazantsev who welcomed me into the Centre of Demography at the Russian Academy of Sciences and introduced me to my fieldwork sponsor – Moscow State Institute of International Relations. His research on foreign migrants in Russia was an important source of information and ideas for the book. The hard work, dedication, and generosity of many people have made this book possible. I am extremely grateful to Nguyễn Hà Đông for painstakingly transcribing all the recorded interviews for me and Nguyễn Thành Chung for diligently coding my data in NVivo and putting up with my demands which were excessive at times. Many thanks to Brooke Dunnell for proofreading the manuscript and Nguyễn Thanh Tâm for fine-tuning the opening poem. I am indebted to Phạm Hồng Long who kindly provided me with a beautiful cover photo and Đỗ Minh Phương who developed the map of Vietnam and sent it to me at lightning speed. Many thanks to Saskia Gieling, my editor at Amsterdam University Press, and her production team for their expert advice, professionalism, and patience. Constructive and critical feedback from Pál Nyíri – New Mobilities in Asia book series editor – and two anonymous reviewers helped me sharpen my arguments and strengthen the structure of the book, for which I am grateful. I am thankful for the feedback I received from audience at various international events including the 10th and 11th International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) conferences, the 11th Engaging with Vietnam Conference 2019,

Acknowledgements

13

the 2018 Australian Sociological Association conference, the 2017 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference, the 2016 Asian Studies Association of Australia conference, the 3rd International Conference of the Thematic Group Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty of the International Sociological Association (ISA), and the 2015 Australian Anthropological Society conference. Hy Văn Lương and Melody Lu who served as the discussant for my panels at the 2017 AAS conference and the 11th ICAS conference, respectively, provided important criticisms and suggestions for improving my analysis. The book has also benefited from the lectures I delivered at University College London (UK), University of East Anglia (UK), and RMIT University (Australia). The project would not have been possible without the generous financial support provided by my home institution – The University of Melbourne and School of Social and Political Sciences. My fieldwork and data processing were financed by various internal grants including a Faculty of Arts research grant, two Special Studies Programs (SSP) grants, and annual research funding from School of Social and Political Sciences. The work behind the publication of this book was also supported by School of Social and Political Sciences. Parts of the conceptualising and writing stages were conducted during my research fellowship at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and sabbatical leave at University of East Anglia, respectively. I am deeply grateful for the advice, encouragement and ideas I received from Lai Ah-Eng, Theodora Lam, Melody Lu, Lucy Porter-Jordan, Laura Camfield, Nitya Rao, Peter Lloyd-Sherlock, Cecile Jackson, and Maria Abranches during these visits. I am indebted to many people who have enriched my life and nourished my soul. I especially thank Lý, Bình, Cúc, Thái Anh, Linh, Hồ Huyền, Tùng, Thái, Phương Anh, Phượng, Quỳnh Hà, Khánh Vân, Xoan, Thảo, and Tú for their love and unflagging support. Writing this book has been a lonely journey at times and I could not have completed it without their friendship and companionship. I learned something new every time I talked with Marla Asis, Phan Lê Hà, Trần An Huy, Trần Thanh Giang, Nguyễn Hà Phương, Shu-yi Pearl Wang, Roy Huijsmans, Nana Oishi, and Catherine Gomes. At the University of Melbourne, I was fortunate to have the support and guidance of my colleagues on a daily basis. Thanks to Bina Fernandez, Tammy Kohn, Monica Minnegal, Karen Farquharson, Adrian Little, Dan Woodman, Vicki Schubert, Paul Green, Nadeem Malik, Anne Decobert, Andy Dawson, John Langmore, Kalissa Alexeyeff, Rachael Diprose, Erin Fitz-Henry, Ghassan Hage, Dolly Kikon, Jonathan Goodhand, and Michael Herzfeld for providing an intellectually stimulating and collegial environment which has enabled me to complete this book.

14 

Vie tnamese Migrants in Russia

My second child – Anh-Vũ – was born during the final stage of writing this book and together with his sister – Linh – has kept my spirits up by filling my days with laughter and joy. I am indebted to Chung and Linh for tolerating my physical and mental absences and tirelessly supporting me in the pursuit of my dreams. Writing this book has been a great pleasure, a labor of love. My family history is intimately linked to the history of Vietnamese migration to Soviet Union and, later, Russia. My father studied physics at Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University) during the 1960s and returned to Soviet Union in 1982 to work as the manager of a construction brigade. He came home briefly in the mid-1980s to care for my terminally ill mother and went back to work in Russia upon her death. He did not return to Vietnam for good until the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember vividly the thrill of opening the letters and pinewood gift boxes he sent all the way from far far away Russia and the enthrallment with his riveting tales of the exotic people and places he had visited. My father’s love for Russian language and culture was infectious. I voraciously read anything about Russia that I could lay my hands on and spent any time I had refining my Russian language skills, hoping that one day I could follow in my father’s footsteps and travel to Russia to study and work. Sadly, my childhood dreams were shattered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the cancellation of bilateral agreements with Vietnam on educational exchange and contract labor migration. As I was reluctantly steering my life in a different direction, my older sister began her own Russia story by joining her husband in Moscow. She remains there with her family to this day. In writing this book, I give a nod to my childhood dreams and pay tribute to my father, sister, and my fellow countrymen who had the courage to pursue their Russian dream and the strength to persevere through extreme adversities. Lan Anh Hoang March 2020



Tặng Một Người Bạn (For a Friend) Author unknown1

Tôi và anh sang cùng một chuyến bay Xa quê hương đi kiếm tiền xứ lạ Kiếp tha phương mỗi người một ngả Giờ gặp nhau cùng dãy chợ Chim Cũng áo quần, bán lẻ bán buôn Cũng đóng thuế, còng lưng cho chủ nợ Lại còn phít, công an, thuê nhà ở … Suốt ngày cày, lờ lãi chẳng thấy đâu Hết nắng mưa, bão tuyết dãi dầu Đến cũi sắt, phòng giam trong đồn quận Nhiều khi uất chỉ cúi đầu nuốt hận Sống đất người ta, đâu phải ở quê mình Qua nhà này phố nọ sống lênh đênh Ô vi bắt, công an khu vực đuổi Trộm cướp rình mò, khách hàng giả dối Lúc tưởng lời thì lại lỗ vì xanh Làm ở xứ người cực nhọc bấp bênh Giá đồng rúp nổi chìm theo hối đoái Được ít nào lại nợ nần trang trải Biết bao giờ dành dụm đủ để về? Đứa cùng phòng làm cửu vạn vác thuê Đau gân cốt bỏ ăn nằm rên rỉ Gia tài ở nhà: cha mẹ yếu Vẫn sớm chiều mong đợi đứa con xa

We came here on the same flight Leaving the homeland to work in a foreign land Leading a nomadic life, we parted ways Our paths crossed again at the Birds’ market2 one day Both selling clothes on the same lane, retail and wholesale Working from dusk to dawn, yet never earning enough To satiate loan sharks, market bosses, police, and landlord Toiling day in day out, still empty-handed Rain or shine, snowstorm and ice Chains and shackles in the detention center All we can do is to swallow our pride and anger What can we do? It’s somebody else’s land We drift from one place to another Forever running and hiding Harassed by police, terrorized by robbers, cheated by customers When things start to look up, the green3 goes down Life is nothing but hard work and uncertainty in this foreign land The rouble keeps rising and falling Every dollar earned goes to debt payment When can we save enough money to return to the homeland? A room-mate who works as a market porter Is in so much pain, skipping meals, wailing in bed The only treasure is left at home: ailing parents Languishing in the pain of separation from their dear children

1 The poem by an anonymous author was circulated on the Facebook page Người Việt tại Nga (Vietnamese people in Russia) in 2016. 2 Birds’ market (Chợ Chim) is commonly used by Vietnamese migrants to refer to Sadovod market (Садовод рынок) – my main f ieldwork site – due to its adjacency to a birds’ market (Птичий рынок). 3 ‘The green’ is a slang term commonly used among Vietnamese migrants to refer to the US dollar.

I Introduction The Market It was a crisp, chilly Friday morning in early April 2014 when I stepped out of the main door of a fifteen-story apartment block in Kotelniki – a working-class suburb 25 kilometers southeast of Moscow’s city center – and headed for the nearby minibus stop to commence my second fieldwork stint in Russia. Having arrived in Moscow from scorching Singapore less than 24 hours before, I was dazed and momentarily disoriented by the biting northerly wind. It was 8.00am and I was already late for my first day at Sadovod market. My Vietnamese host, Trang, 4 had left hours ago with her husband – their work day at the market began between 4.30 and 5.00am. Thirty roubles5 and ten minutes later, I found myself strolling along CT7 – the first linia (линия, ‘lane’) behind the northern gates facing Verkhniye Polya Road (Bepxниe Поля Улица) – towards Trang’s công (‘store’),6 where I would be based for the next three months. Friday tended to be the quietest day of the week at Sadovod, as much of the retail activity happened at the weekend when long-distance wholesale customers had come and left, but 4 All names in this book have been changed to protect research participants’ privacy. 5 The exchange rate was RUB 30=USD 1 at the time of my first fieldwork trip in May-June 2013 and RUB 36=USD 1 in April-June 2014. The value of the Russian rouble dropped sharply toward the end of 2014 due to economic sanctions following the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Ukraine, slumping to RUB 80=1 USD in mid-December 2014 before gradually recovering over the following two years. At the time of my third fieldwork trip in November 2016, the exchange rate was RUB 65=USD 1. Because of the wide variations in the exchange rate over the period from 2013 to 2016, I convert the Russian rouble to US dollars each time money is mentioned in the book according to the approximate exchange rate at that period of time. 6 Công is the short version of công ten nơ – the Vietnamese equivalent of ‘cargo shipping container’ – which is used by Vietnamese traders to refer to their stores at Russian markets. The first markets that sprung up spontaneously in post-Communist Russia in the early 90s were open-air sites such as the Luzhnyky market (Лужники рынок), where sale spots were claimed on a first-come-first-served basis. From the late 1990s to the late 2000s, trade was gradually moved into former student hostels and factory accommodation (such as the famous Saliut 2 [Салют 2] and Saliut 3 [Салют 3] in northern Moscow) and makeshift markets made up of old cargo shipping containers, hence the use of the term công to refer to market stores. The closure of Chợ Vòm (Cherkizovsky market) – an infamous, expansive open-air market near Cherkizovsky metro station – in 2008 signaled the end of the shipping container-market model that was deemed incompatible with the modern and cosmopolitan Moscow. Although most markets in Moscow or at least large sections of them nowadays are securely built with wood, corrugated sheet metal, and/or steel and concrete, the term công is still widely used by the Vietnamese to refer to market stores.

18 

Vie tnamese Migrants in Russia

as I soon learned, the rest of the week was not much different during the economic downturn of 2014. The market was almost empty save for clusters of Kyrgyz, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese traders and shop assistants huddling together around the edges and at the hot beverage carts scattered idly along the linias. With staggering rental rates, ranging from RUB 330,000 to 600,000 (USD 10,000-18,000) per month for a 20-square-meter công as of April 2014, an empty market was a depressing sight. Each day an average công needed to generate at least USD 700 to cover running costs, including công rental, accommodation, food, and hired labor. Yet I was intrigued by market traders’ calm acceptance of the situation – their life in Russia had been anything but uneventful or predictable. Uncertainty had become their way of life over more than two tumultuous decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The period from 2013 to 2014 was a particularly difficult time for Vietnamese migrants in Russia. In late July 2013, the killing of a young Russian man by an Azeri migrant at Western Moscow’s Matveevsky grocery market (Матвеевский рынок) led to mass arrests of migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia and prompted unprecedented large-scale raids on migrant enclaves on the outskirts of the city. On 31 July 2013, 1,200 Vietnamese workers were arrested at 20 different illegal garment factories across Moscow and sent to a makeshift detention center in the east of the city to await deportation. The government’s aggressive anti-immigration campaign went on for months, during which construction sites, warehouses, factories, hostels, migrant residential areas, and public transport were subjected to regular raids, and markets were closed. Sadovod – one of two markets in Moscow with large concentrations of Vietnamese traders – was first raided on 7 August 2013 and 1,185 foreign nationals were arrested. From then until the end of the year, the market and affiliate migrant dormitories were raided on a regular basis, throwing market traders’ lives into disarray. The distressing situation took a turn for the worse in early 2014 when the armed conflict in Ukraine erupted, prompting the West to impose a range of economic sanctions on Russia. To compound the situation, a major fire broke out in the middle of Sadovod market in the early days of 2014, destroying scores of côngs along linia 27 together with all the merchandise and cash stocked inside of them. It is common for Vietnamese traders to leave their cash in the công at the end of the day due to their fear of robbery and police extortion on the way home. Although the affected traders eventually managed to claim some form of compensation from the market owners (a waiver of two months’ rent and RUB 300,000), the amount was only a fraction of what they had lost. As the economic crisis deepened, they were dealt another serious blow

Introduc tion

19

toward the end of 2014 when the Russian rouble crashed, hitting its record low of RUB 80 to USD 1 in mid-December and losing more than half of its value within a few months. Inflated living costs due to economic sanctions went hand in hand with stagnant market trade, deepening the distress and anxiety that could be felt across the market. Despite the economic stagnation and the government’s radical crackdown on irregular migrants, it remained business as usual for Vietnamese migrants. The disruptions had neither led to an exodus from Russia nor discouraged new arrivals. Everyone I met at the market in 2014 was convinced that the situation would soon change for the better, as had always happened in the past. They were, indeed, no strangers to crisis. The history of Vietnamese migration to and survival in post-Soviet Russia is characterized by the cyclical boom and bust of the markets where the vast majority of them earn a living. In the riveting life histories narrated to me by my research participants, major milestones in their migrant lives are signposted by momentous turning points at the marketplace. Vietnamese engagement in market trade started with the illicit ‘suitcase’ trade in the early 1980s, when students and guest workers smuggled Chinese or Japanese merchandise as travel luggage from Vietnam into the Soviet Union’s closed economy and shipped highly-valued Soviet-made products back home (Dang & Beresford, 2000, p. 90; Schwenkel, 2014, p. 236). These activities continued in a discreet and ad hoc manner until the mid-1990s, when profit making was no longer considered illegal (see also Sik & Wallace, 1999, p. 697). As well as Vietnam and China, traders began to source merchandise from new markets including Poland and Turkey, and moved their businesses from streets, metro stations, and stadiums into residential quarters referred to as đôm (дом – residential block) and ốp (общежитие – student hostels). Cramped studio flats in these đôms and ốps, each with access to communal bathrooms and kitchens, served as both living quarters and wholesale stores supplying cheap clothes and shoes to petty traders from all over Russia. As of late 2001, the heyday of the Vietnamese ‘apartment trade’, an estimated sixteen commercial-cum-residential đôms and ốps were in operation across Moscow. Most of them were under the control of two Vietnamese companies, Sông Hồng (Red River) and Bến Thành,7 which leased abandoned buildings and dormitories from local factories or colleges and rented out the units to Vietnamese traders. Capitalizing on the so-called ‘institutional void’, where the state’s role in the regulation of trade and commerce shrank quickly but substitute institutions had not been set up (Elster, Offe, & Preuss, 1998), this 7

Bến Thành is the name of the largest market in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam.

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form of trade flourished and many traders became millionaires overnight. The ‘golden age’ of unregulated trade and commerce was a common feature of European post-socialist economies in the 1990s when ‘one could sell anything and turn a profit’ (Pieke, Nyíri, Thuno, & Ceccagno, 2004, p. 132). Between 2002 and 2007, spurred by growing anti-immigration sentiments among the general public and concerns about security, fire hazards, sanitation, and possibly criminal activity, the Moscow government decided to close down the commercial đôms and ốps, sparking a major social and economic crisis within the Vietnamese community. The heavily crowded Đôm 5 (Дом 5) and ốp Saliut 3 (Салют 3) were closed by force, without prior warnings or any form of compensation. Tales of Special Purpose Mobile Unit (OMON)8 forces beating up traders, burning and flushing their cash down the toilet, and evicting them from Saliut 3 during the night still haunt my research participants to this day. In the aftermath of this turmoil, many fell into bankruptcy and had no choice but to leave Russia. They had invested their lifetime savings in these commercial đôms and ốps, but did not receive any compensation from the government. While some traders rented rooms from the managing company, others had paid around USD 15,000-20,000 for the use rights of each flat they were using or renting out. The debts owed by provincial sukhoy9 wholesale customers were irrecoverable because they could not be tracked down. The closure of đôms and ốps marked the end of Vietnamese domination of the wholesale trade in footwear and clothing, as they had to relocate to multi-ethnic markets where recently arrived Chinese traders were quickly establishing themselves at the top of the game. Most ended up in Chợ Vòm (known to Muscovites as Cherkizovsky market due to its proximity to a metro station with the same name), which was then Eastern Europe’s biggest trading ground, controlled by the conglomerate Ast Group. The Ast 8 ОМОN – Отряд мобильный особого назначения (Special Purpose Mobile Unit) – is a special police force created during the Soviet era (1988) that played a critical role in the armed conflicts following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Nowadays, OMON are used as riot police or combatants in troubled areas including Chechnya. OMON forces are occasionally deployed in government campaigns to crack down on irregular migrants in Moscow and particularly feared for their blunt use of force and uncompromising approach toward migrants. 9 Sukhoy (сухой) literally means ‘dry’. Sukhoy sale (buy now, pay later) was a common wholesale practice in the unregulated market trade in Russia in 1990s-2000s. Interprovincial wholesale customers were allowed to take merchandise on account and pay the debts in installments or at the end of the season when they had sold all the wares. This was a high risk practice that was purely based on trust. Interprovincial wholesale customers came from as far as the Russian Far East (e.g. Vladivostok) and the only contact detail they left with Moscow traders was a telephone number. It would be nearly impossible to recover the debt if sukhoy customers decided to dodge debt payment.

Introduc tion

21

Group belonged to multimillionaire Telman Ismailov, an Azeri-born Jewish businessman with strong connections to political elites.10 In a deal typical of post-socialist ‘wild capitalism’11 (see Hankiss, 1990; Harper, 2005; Upchurch & Marinković, 2010), Ast Group paid the Moscow government (or, more precisely, the Federal Sports University) a pittance to rent the land, then partitioned and sublet it to traders at exorbitant rates. Chợ Vòm, which had been in operation since 1995, was dominated by Chinese, Azeri, and Turkish merchants. With traders engaged in both wholesale and retail activities, the market was the main supplier of consumer goods in the country. Vietnamese traders initially struggled to compete with capital-rich and well-networked Chinese traders, who had direct access to cheap imports from China. Chinese migrants tended to come from regions with a centuries-long culture of migration and be endowed with superior social and cultural capital that allowed them to acquire low-cost merchandise from factories in China and access the sources of information, capital, and opportunities vital to their entrepreneurial success (see Pieke, 1998, p. 7; Pieke et al., 2004, p. 131). Many were well-educated city dwellers from northern China, with strong connections to state enterprises and trading networks that facilitated their importation of consumer goods to undersupplied economies in Eastern Europe (see Pieke, 1998, pp. 7-8). Furthermore, transnational migration was new to the Vietnamese, who were predominantly from rural backgrounds and lacked the broader business knowledge and strong networks that were critical to the success of their Chinese rivals (Williams & Balaz, 2005, p. 542). Nevertheless, many Vietnamese traders thrived during Chợ Vòm’s ‘golden’ years, between 2005 and 2009. The remarkable prosperity of the market in the 2000s was fueled by the energy-driven economic boom that increased Russians’ disposable incomes sevenfold within the first decade of the millennium (KPMG, 2013, p. 9). The massive boost this gave to consumers’ confidence and household spending was nevertheless at odds with the sluggishness of Russian light industry. Together with their Chinese peers, 10 Telman Ismailov was said to be a close friend of Yury Luzhkov, who served as Moscow’s mayor from 1992 to 2010. 11 ‘Wild capitalism’ broadly refers to blind trust in the free market ideology and the failure to appreciate the dangers of underregulation in post-socialist Europe that has caused widespread corruption, economic failure, social misery, and ecological destruction. In this ‘unfettered capitalism,’ political elites seize the chance to become new economic elites through forming interest groups and ‘an orgy of personal asset accumulation and insider dealing as privatisation of state assets gathered pace’ (Upchurch and Marinković 2010, p. 4). The weak or non-existent business ethics, gangsterism, and corruption are a barrier to outsider and institutional investors seeking a safe home for their investment.

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Vietnamese traders successfully capitalized on the consumerist fever in a rapidly stratifying Russian society – they supplied affordable, low-quality, and often counterfeit garments and footwear to the lower-middle and working classes who had acquired a taste for foreign consumer goods, yet were severely constrained by a paltry budget. In the early years of post-Soviet Russia, the nascent retail sector was a sharply bifurcated system, with exclusive boutiques and shopping malls catering to the nouveau riche’s thirst for luxurious brand names on the one hand, and markets providing less affluent consumers with cheap imports on the other. While generally of low quality, market merchandise is diverse in style and material, appealing to large segments of the Russian population. The growth of Chợ Vòm and the bad reputation it came to acquire, due to criminal activities, money laundering, and sanitation failings, soon alarmed the federal government.12 In 2007, the Russian government instituted a ban against foreigners trading in markets. While the ban was lifted shortly after that, it foreboded more radical actions by the government. In September 2008, the police raided the market and confiscated 6,000 containers of purportedly counterfeit and contraband goods from China, worth USD 2 billion in total – the biggest haul of contraband in Russia’s history.13 In June 2009, facing intensifying public vitriol against irregular migration and the shadow economy, the then Mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov announced that Chợ Vòm would be closed down with immediate effect. My research participants vividly recalled the chaos and distress outside the market when they went to work one morning to find Chợ Vòm had been sealed off by police. The Moscow government confiscated all merchandise found at the market, which was estimated to be worth USD 5-8 billion in total (A. Larin, 2012, p. 64). The repercussions of Chợ Vòm’s closure were devastating. Công use rights cost much more than what migrants had paid for studio rooms in đôms and ốps, and the scope of their business dealings was also considerably more extensive than before. The extraordinary success of Chợ Vòm, and Telman Ismailov’s powerful connections, boosted people’s confidence in the future of the market and prompted many to invest everything they had. According 12 One of many reasons for the closure of Cherkizovsky market, according to my informants and the Russian media, is that Ismailov had upset the federal government by investing his fortune in Turkey rather than at home. Most notably, he invested USD1.5 billion in the construction of the super luxurious Mardan Palace Hotel in Antalya, Turkey, which opened a month prior to the closure of Cherkizovsky market. It is also believed that the closure of the market was taken as a step toward unseating Yury Luzhkov, who had fallen out of Putin’s favor due to accusations of corruption. 13 ‘Luzhkov, a market and a $2bln haul.’ The Moscow Times, 19 June 2009, http://old.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/tmt/378889.html, accessed 13 March 2018.

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to the Federation of Migrants in Russia, Cherkizovsky was providing jobs for over 100,000 people at the time of its closure.14 Many traders lost every last dollar. Disheartened by the successive crises and by a growing sense of vulnerability and helplessness, some decided to leave Russia for good. Yet this did not lead to a significant decline in the Vietnamese population because new migrants kept arriving, and many of the original migrants quickly made their way back. The closure of Chợ Vòm ushered in a new era of market trade in Moscow. Upon their relocation to suburban markets, traders were confronted with a bleak reality when rental rates soared to an unprecedented level, competition within the ever-growing migrant trader population intensified, and the formal retail sector continued to expand rapidly. Vietnamese trade in the post-Chợ Vòm era is primarily concentrated in three sturdily constructed and securely guarded multi-ethnic markets (all reputedly belonging to the same men):15 Sadovod, Liublino,16 and Yuzhnyie Vorota (a.k.a. Km 19 market).17 The markets are about 5-10 kilometers away from one another on the southeastern edge of Moscow. There is also a Vietnamese presence, albeit on a much smaller scale, at a market next to Dubrovka station (halfway between Moscow city center and Liublino), a newly constructed market named Lotus at KM 41 on Moscow Automobile Ring Road (MKAD), and a new Vietnamese-owned commercial complex named Incentra in the north of the city. Like Chợ Vòm, the markets are operated with rules akin to those of the mafia, which is possible due to the owners’ strong connections with powerful individuals in the federal government. Although traders at all the markets engage in both retail and wholesale, they are highly stratified, 14 The Independent, Thursday 16 July 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ europe/oligarch-pays-for-party-that-enraged-putin-1748289.html, accessed 13 January 2015. 15 The markets are owned by the three Azeri-born billionaire businessmen Zarakh Iliyev, God Nisanov, and Ilkham Ragimov, who was a classmate of Vladimir Putin. According to Forbes, Zarakh Iliyev and God Nisanov also own the Radisson Royal Ukraine Hotel, European Shopping Center, and Radisson SAS Slavyanskaya Hotel in Moscow and many other large properties in Russia (Source: Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/god-nisanov/, accessed 8 January 2015). Iliev and Nisanov were reportedly co-owners of Chợ Vòm and are named by Forbes magazine among Russia’s 40 richest people with a net worth of USD 3 billion each. Their latest acquisition is the 1.5 million square meter Lotus City, located 14 kilometers southwest of Moscow along the Kaluga highway, which is set to become the largest wholesale market in the Moscow region. 16 The off icial name of Liublino (Люблино) market is Moscow Trade Complex (Tорговоярмарочный комплекс Москва). It is commonly referred to as Liublino market (or Chợ Liu by Vietnamese migrants) due to its proximity to the Liublino metro station 17 Yuzhnyie Vorota (Южныe ворота – Southern Gates) is often referred to by the Vietnamese as Km 19 market, a name deriving from its geographical location at km 19 on MKAD ring road (Moscow Automobile Ring Road – Московская Кольцевая Автомобильная Дорога).

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and the extent of one’s economic success is largely indicated by the market where they work. At the top of the hierarchy is Liublino, where the monthly rental averages around RUB 600,000-700,000 (USD 17,000-20,000), and where relatively well-established and well-stocked traders have succeeded in developing a stable wholesale customer base. The prohibitive rental rates at Liublino mark it as a highly exclusive space – only the savviest and wealthiest traders can survive there. Yuzhnyie Vorota, where retail predominates and rentals range from RUB 20,000 to RUB 35,000 (USD 570-1,000), is on a lower rung of the ladder, where those who have not ‘made it’ struggle to scrape a living. In the middle is the largest market, Sadovod, where rental fees, merchandise, and traders’ economic circumstances are wide-ranging. The size, diversity, and fluidity of Sadovod were the main reasons I selected it as the main base for my fieldwork. It offered me an ideal space to examine the interrelationships between uncertainty, mobility, and morality within and beyond the Vietnamese community in Moscow.

Vietnamese migration to Russia The history of Vietnamese migration to Russia is tightly linked to Cold War geopolitics, starting in the mid 1950s when small numbers of students, mostly war orphans and children of communist cadres, were sent to Russia for higher education and vocational training. Student migration picked up gradually in the 1960s and 1970s but significant increases in the Vietnamese population did not happen until the early 1980s, when war-torn and debt-stricken Vietnam began to export labor, first to the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia and later to other Eastern European countries, to meet its obligations to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON)18 (Piper, 2002, p. 9; Williams & Balaz, 2005, p. 536). Vietnamese labor export to Europe peaked in 1989, when 167,503 workers were deployed (Dang, Tacoli, & Hoang, 2003, p. 12). Official records indicate that a total of 217,183 Vietnamese were employed as contract workers in the Eastern European socialist bloc between 1981 and 1990, and 42 percent of them (or 92,000) were female (MOLISA, 1995). Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1990, about 100,000 Vietnamese 18 COMECON (1949-1991) was an economic organization comprising Eastern European socialist countries and their socialist allies in other parts of the world. Despite its stated aims of economic cooperation and integration, much of COMECON’s activities were restricted to economic assistance from wealthier members, especially the Soviet Union, to less developed members such as Vietnam and Cuba.

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workers were in Russia (Iontsev, 2005, p. 11). They mostly worked in construction, mechanics, textile and garment production, agriculture, health care, and education (Nguyen, 2009, p. 10). In the context of widespread hunger and poverty in post-war Vietnam, labor migration to Eastern Europe was considered a privilege reserved for people from ‘priority’ backgrounds, such as family members of war veterans, war martyrs, war invalids, former service members, ethnic minorities, and workers and cadres with excellent work histories (Schwenkel, 2014, p. 43). Because of these criteria, those selected for overseas labor migration were often from poor, rural backgrounds and had no higher education. There was no publicly advertised recruitment system, so people mostly secured their overseas placements through informal social networks and bribes (Bayly, 2004, p. 338). The collapse of communist regimes across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s caused a sudden halt to labor imports from Vietnam. Political unrest, unemployment, and intensified nationalist sentiments (which at times escalated to xenophobic and racist backlashes), as well as official repatriation programs, drove large numbers of Vietnamese workers home. By the end of 1991, approximately 80 percent of workers had left Eastern Europe (Dang et al., 2003, p.12), although many subsequently made their way back when confronted with the harsh realities of the then struggling Vietnamese economy (see also Schwenkel, 2014, pp. 252, 255). Students and workers who chose to stay formed the backbone of Vietnamese diasporic networks in Eastern Europe that have been continually expanding ever since. New migrants often arrive under student or tourist visas acquired through sophisticated brokerage networks (Molodikova, 2008, p. 28; Soboleva, 2005). Because a substantial proportion of migration to post-Soviet Russia is of a clandestine nature, it is impossible to accurately gauge the size of the Vietnamese population in the country, and estimates vary widely. According to International Organization for Migration (IOM, 2008, p. 25), there were around 69,076 Vietnamese people in Russia as of 2008. However, this figure did not include irregular migrants, whether in transit or living in Russia on a long-term basis, as well as shuttle and seasonal traders. According to Russia’s Federal Ministry of Labor, Vietnam is one of the leading sources of irregular migration to Russia, alongside the Caucasus, Central Asian countries, and China (ICMPD, 2006). The Vietnamese government estimated that there were between 80,000 and 100,000 Vietnamese nationals in Russia as of 2007.19 A more recent source suggests that there are up to 150,000 Vietnamese 19 Source: Sài Gòn Giải Phóng, 17 Jan 2007, http://www.sggp.org.vn/chinhtri/2007/1/81930/, accessed 12 January 2015.

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immigrants in Russia (Nožina, 2010, p. 229). If this is correct, Vietnamese nationals in Russia make up half of the total Vietnamese population in the former Eastern European socialist bloc (Committee for Overseas Vietnamese, 2005; Williams & Balaz, 2005). It is predicted that Vietnamese migration to Russia will continue to grow in the years to come (Ivakhnyuk, 2008; Rybakovsky & Ryazantsev, 2005, p. 14). New legal and institutional barriers put up by the Russian government to deter irregular immigration do not stop people coming; they only make it more expensive. Vietnamese migrants in Russia, like their compatriots in Eastern and Central Europe, mostly engage in market trade (see Drbohlav et  al., 2008; Romaniszyn, 1997; Rybakovsky & Ryazantsev, 2005; Williams & Balaz, 2005). Kamenskiy (2002, p. 94) estimates that 91.6 percent of Vietnamese migrants in Russia generate their incomes from trade and commerce, often without work permits, a figure much higher than what is reported for Central and other Eastern European countries (around 70 percent: see Williams & Balaz, 2005, p. 545). The heavy concentration of Vietnamese migrants in market trade today is largely shaped by a restrictive and exclusionary migration regime that blocks their access to formal employment opportunities. Yet it was originally driven by the failure of the redistributive system to produce and deliver goods – a common feature of command economies of Eastern Europe (Sik & Wallace, 1999, p. 699). In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, consumer goods scarcity became even more acute as light industry was falling apart while formal international trade and commerce channels had not been established (A. Larin, 2012, p. 41). Across Russia, factories were closed down, collective farms were abandoned, and the central government was, in effect, bankrupt. The political change and economic reform gave the Vietnamese an opportunity to develop their fragmented, spontaneous, and discreet trade activities into an extensive ethnic economy that fuels further migration to Russia. Migrants’ lives are highly unpredictable, characterized by the cyclical booms and busts of market trade (which have mostly been caused by kneejerk, reactive policy changes by the federal and Moscow governments) and routine anti-immigration campaigns. With no opportunities for social mobility beyond the shadow economy, Vietnamese migrants are confined to wholesale markets, which entrenches their social marginalization and vulnerability. This is confirmed by large-scale quantitative surveys on Chinese migrant traders, who report multiple difficulties associated with exorbitant rentals, a high cost of living, excessive taxes, a volatile economy, and the bad reputation of Chinese products (A. Larin, 2012, p. 42). Most

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of these issues are directly or indirectly attributable to the widespread corruption in state bureaucracies, which presents itself in various forms, from police harassment and protection racketeering to a multitude of migration-related procedures and expenses and graft and bribery among tax and customs officials. In the shadow economy, migrants’ social lives are severely circumscribed by exploitative market regimes and opportunistic criminals who enjoy a sense of impunity due to the migrants’ irregular status. In recent years, Vietnamese migrants have been expanding to other economic sectors in remote and frontier regions within Russia. Reports of Vietnamese workers employed at construction sites and agricultural farms in Siberia and the Russian Far East have started to surface (V. Larin, 2012, p. 71; Soboleva, 2005, p. 58). Yet a lack of language skills and fear of racist attacks are still major barriers to their attempts to move beyond market trade and metropolitan regions. Transnational migration is a relatively recent phenomenon in Vietnam; therefore, unlike their Chinese peers (Benton & Pieke, 1998; Pieke et al., 2004), most Vietnamese migrants in Russia do not come from regions with a so-called ‘culture of migration.’ However, there is no doubt that informal social networks play a vital role in Vietnamese spontaneous migration (see detailed discussion in Chapter III and also Hoang, 2011, 2016b). Because an opportunity to migrate overseas for work or education before the 1990s was treated as a reward for loyalty to the communist regime, the Vietnamese in today’s Russia mostly hail from Northern and North Central Vietnam. In these regions, families of war martyrs, war veterans, and state employees were the main beneficiaries of labor export programs. Northern and North Central Vietnam have been plagued by severe under- and unemployment20 since the launch of Đổi mới21 reforms. During the Đổi mới years (between 1991 and 2000), Vietnam went from one of the 40 poorest and least-developed countries in the world to the second biggest rice exporter, with an average growth rate of 7.6 percent per 20 While official statistics indicate relatively low unemployment and underemployment rates in Vietnam – 2.22 and 2.96 percent respectively in 2011 (http://gso.gov.vn/default.aspx?tabid=714) – academic studies are much less optimistic. Nguyen and Ezaki (2005, p. 11), for example, suggests that around 70 percent of rural residents can be seen as underemployed if full-time employment is to involve 2000 hours of work annually. This is due to the limited availability of arable land and off-farm jobs. 21 Đổi mới (Renovation) refers to the economic reforms launched in Vietnam in 1986, moving the country from the command economy to the so-called ‘socialist-oriented market economy.’ The most important reforms included the decollectivization of agricultural production, the permission of private ownership and a multi-sector economy, and the liberalization of foreign trade and investment.

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Map 1  Regions of Vietnam

Source: Đỗ Minh Phương (2019)22

annum (APEC, 2002). Hunger was substantially reduced and the poverty rate was halved from 60 percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 2002 (Akardie et al., 2010). 22 This map was developed by Đỗ Minh Phương, Senior Researcher, Remote Sensing and GIS Center, National Institute of Agricultural Planning and Projection (NIAPP), Vietnam

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Yet this impressive economic growth and the unprecedented incomegenerating opportunities it generates have disproportionately benefited those with education, skills, and connections with the communist regime, widening the gap between the elites and those without these crucial forms of cultural and social capital. The abolition of state subsidies in agricultural production, education, healthcare, and many other social benef its is accompanied by consistently high inflation rates, low productivity, and underemployment. More than one-fifth of the population still lives under the international poverty line of USD 1.25 per day and most pockets of poverty remain in rural areas (Badiani et al., 2013). Wiens (1998, p. 94) has linked rural poverty in Vietnam with a number of factors, such as the shortage and low quality of productive resources, lack of access to markets, and high numbers of dependents relative to productive resources. With around 1,000 persons per square kilometer of agricultural land, the farming sector in Vietnam is one of the most overcrowded in the world (Dollar & Litvack, 1998, p. 12; Kabeer, Tran, & Vu, 2005, p. 5). The Red River Delta in the North, which is the main source of migrants to Russia, is one of the most densely populated rural areas in Asia. The rural provinces of Bắc Ninh and Hưng Yên, for example, had respective population densities of 1,289 and 1,242 persons per square kilometer, as of 2011.23 While the distribution of agricultural land in the 1980s and 1990s was relatively equitable in the North, the area of land available for distribution was very limited. Average farm size is a little more than one-third of a hectare in the Red River Delta. Land fragmentation as a result of local authorities’ attempts to avoid ‘land wars’ made the matter even worse. Rice farming is treated as a subsistence guarantee since incomes generated from this activity are too limited for it to be a viable route to upward mobility (Bryant, 1998, p. 256). Problems of under- and unemployment are particularly acute in places where the intense population pressure on limited arable land has long rendered subsistence farming unviable. With 66.4 percent of the population living in rural areas as of 2015 and 48 percent of the labor force employed in the agricultural sector as of 2012,24 underemployment is widespread. While official statistics indicate that Vietnam has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world – 2.2 percent as of 2013 – the figure is highly inaccurate due to dubious 23 Souce: General Statistics Office of Vietnam, https://www.gso.gov.vn/default.aspx?tabid=3 87&idmid=3&ItemID=12875, accessed 10 June 2016. 24 Source: CIA Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ vm.html, accessed 10 June 2016.

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statistical methods.25 The General Statistics Office of Vietnam (GSO) defines an unemployed person as someone who had not worked at all in the week preceding the survey, meaning even one hour of work during that week would qualify one as employed. Under- and unemployment rates are most severe in the Red River Delta. While the figures in Table 1 below are underreported, they still show the Red River Delta to be a region with exceptionally high rates of under- and unemployment. An academic source, however, suggests that three-quarters of the Red River Delta rural population could be considered underemployed (Bui, 2004, p. 188). Off-farm employment tends to be available only to small groups of farmers living in areas in close proximity to urban centers and markets. Only eight million out of the total 30 million members of the rural labor force have some off-farm employment (Bui, 2004, p. 194). Table 1  Under- and Unemployment rates by region in 2014 Unemployment

Country Red River Delta Northern Highlands Northern Central Coastal areas Central Highlands Southeast Mekong River Delta

Underemployment

Total

Urban

Rural

Total

Urban

Rural

2.10 2.82 0.76 2.23 1.22 2.47 2.06

3.4 4.86 2.35 3.71 1.94 3.00 2.79

1.49 1.87 0.46 1.70 0.93 1.60 1.83

2.35 2.44 1.45 2.58 2.49 0.61 4.20

1.20 0.99 1.03 1.86 1.89 0.30 2.32

2.90 3.12 1.52 2.84 2.73 1.11 4.80

Source: General Statistics Office of Vietnam, https://www.gso.gov.vn/default.aspx?tabid=714, accessed 10 June 2016

In a context where the return on farming is marginal and yet off-farm income-generating opportunities are few and far between, transnational migration for work, be it of regular or irregular nature, becomes the obvious choice for many. At present, there are two principal, distinct flows of transnational migration for work from Vietnam, particularly from the densely-populated North and resource-poor North Central: 1) low-waged contract workers deployed by state-owned enterprises to other Asian countries under bilateral agreements between governments; and 2) irregular, spontaneous migration to post-communist countries in Eastern 25 Source: ‘Dubious statistical methods skew Vietnam’s unemployment rate’, http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/business/108082/dubious-statistical-methods-skew-vietnam-s-unemploymentrate.html, accessed 21 June 2015.

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Europe, including Russia. Under the formal labor export program, there are about 500,000 contract workers currently employed in various Asian countries, with Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and the Middle East as the top destinations.26 Most Vietnamese workers migrate on two- or threeyear contracts, with men concentrated in construction sites, farms, and industrial estates and women in manufacturing industries and personal and social services (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a). While they sound different in terms of pathways, work regimes, and state governance (or the lack thereof), both migration flows are controlled by complex and highly exploitative transnational brokerage networks. In my previous studies, I have revealed how the expanding migration industry thrives on migrants’ structural vulnerabilities, partly by blurring the lines between legality and illegality, state and market, and discipline and exploitation (Hoang, 2016b, 2017; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a). In Chapter III of this book, I offer further insights into the vital role of transnational intermediaries in shaping Vietnamese out-migration flows in an increasingly interconnected world. Because Vietnamese migration to Eastern European destinations is largely undocumented, the commercial brokerage networks catering to this corridor are even more sophisticated and exploitative than those we find in the intra-Asian migration industry. Russia has signed bilateral agreements on labor migration with all major source countries including China, but there is no such legal framework with Vietnam. Like their Chinese peers (see Datsyshen, 2012, p. 31; V. Larin, 2012, p. 69), Vietnamese migrants are most likely to enter Russia on a one-month tourist visa or three-month visitor visa and overstay. A small number of migrants are able to ‘buy’ a work permit (РВП – Разрешение на временное проживание) that is valid for one or three years, but the work permit is becoming more expensive and difficult to obtain. Unlike the labor export regime, where the brokerage system is, for the most part, formalized (in Vietnam, labor export licenses are granted only to certain state-owned enterprises: see Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a; Hoang, 2017), commercial brokers catering to Russia-bound migrants are exclusively informal, private services operating on an impromptu, opportunistic basis. They thrive on the endemic corruption within Russian state bureaucracies and Russia’s seemingly boundless capacity to absorb foreign labor. While Vietnamese migration to Russia is overwhelmingly of an economic nature, the ease of entry also makes the country an ideal hideaway for men and women running away from problems in their intimate, 26 Source: http://laodong.com.vn/Tin-Tuc/75850-LDVN-di-lam-viec-o-nuoc-ngoai/23376, accessed 8 November 2011.

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social, and economic lives. A tourist or visitor visa obtainable within three to five days at a relatively low cost offers many an extremely affordable getaway from marital woes, business failures, debt insolvency, and even impending incarceration and death penalties. It is much more difficult and costly to migrate to other Eastern European countries. Transfer to the Czech Republic assisted by unlicensed agencies, for example, costs between USD 7,000 and 12,000, while a labor contract secured through a licenced agency costs each worker around USD 7,500 – a significant investment for migrants from rural areas, one that often takes them one to three years to recover (Nožina, 2010, p. 239). Population movements from Vietnam to Russia challenge the tendency to characterize international migration as unidirectional flows from the periphery (i.e. developing countries) to the core (i.e. the developed world or ‘global cities’) (Piore, 1979; Sassen, 2001). As of 2010, transnational movements within the periphery accounted for one third of international migration and were almost equal to the periphery-center migration pathway (35 percent: IOM, 2013). Since 2000, the annual migrant stock in peripheral areas has been growing at a higher rate than that of developed centers (2.3 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively, during the period from 2000 to 2013: UN, 2013a). The literature on migration to Eastern and Central Europe shows that some peripheral and semi-peripheral regions have become destinations of choice for large segments of migrants from the developing world (Benton & Pieke, 1998; Demko, Ioffe, & Zayonchkovskaya, 1999; Pieke et al., 2004). Peripheral destinations have their own appeal – what is often considered a ‘problem’ and a barrier to economic growth elsewhere (for example, a loosely regulated market, weak law enforcement, widespread corruption, and an underdeveloped entrepreneurial culture) constitutes a particularly propitious economic environment for opportunistic investors and traders looking to ‘make a fast buck.’ In transitional societies, ethnic enclaves develop rapidly, in response to not only the need to be self-sufficient, but also the uncertainties engendered by the volatile social, economic, and political climate. Vietnamese migration to Russia is aptly captured by Douglas Massey’s (1990) notion of ‘cumulative causation.’ Drawing on Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s (1957) work, Massey contends that migration is a selfperpetuating phenomenon since each act of migration alters the social context within which subsequent migration decisions are made, therefore making additional movement progressively more likely. The continual expansion of Vietnamese market trade boosts the demand for ethnic goods and services, encouraging more migrants to come. Despite sharing the marketplace with other ethnic groups, Vietnamese people’s daily lives

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revolve around strictly co-ethnic circles, which are self-sufficient in most aspects. Broadly speaking, the Vietnamese making a living at the market or from it can be found in five occupational categories: 1) entrepreneurs (garment factory owners and hostel owners/operators); 2) traders (market traders, long-distance merchants, shuttle traders, customs-confiscated goods dealers, shop assistants, grocery suppliers, itinerant grocery vendors, and newspaper sellers); 3) caterers (restaurateurs, coffee shop owners, cooks, waiters, food deliverers, and itinerant food vendors); 4) service providers (barbers, hairdressers, manicurists, clothes alterers, masseuses, porters, drivers, shoe menders, private security/bodyguards, and translators); and 5) go-betweens (real estate dealers, migration brokers, courier service providers, money transfer agents, education brokers, and all-purpose middlemen). There are also a number of people making a living from illicit activities: debt collectors, small-time moneylenders, loan sharks, drug dealers, sex workers, football bookmakers, lottery syndicate ringleaders, and gamblers. Russia, with one of the largest shadow economies in the world (see Schneider, Buehn, & Montenegro, 2010), proves to be an ideal haven for low-skilled, irregular migrants who would not be able to find the same economic opportunities in a more tightly regulated economy. There are, nevertheless, some exceptional individuals who have been able to move away from the marketplace and the shadow economy. Capitalizing on their prized cultural capital in terms of Russian higher education qualifications, language proficiency, and knowledge of Russian polity and society, a small number of former students have successfully established their own places in the formal economy. Given Vietnamese migrants’ concentration in the garment trade, it makes sense that most of the Vietnamese-owned enterprises in the formal economy are garment factories (which are often referred to as ‘white factories’ [xưởng may trắng] as opposed to illegal factories or ‘black factories’ [xưởng may đen]). There has been some recent, albeit modest, diversification to real estate development. With their growing economic success and political connections, some Vietnamese entrepreneurs have successfully lobbied the Vietnamese and Russian governments to endorse and support their further expansion in the formal economy. On his state visit to Russia on 10 May 2015, for example, Vietnamese President Trương Tấn Sang made a formal request to Moscow Governor Andrey Vorobyov to allow the establishment of a Vietnamese-owned industrial zone in the Greater Moscow region.27 Vietnamese presence in the formal 27 Source: http://vnexpress.net/tin-tuc/the-gioi/nga-bat-dau-giai-doan-moi-ra-soat-xuongmay-den-cua-nguoi-viet-3218018.html, accessed 27 May 2015.

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economy of Russia, nevertheless, remains very modest. No Vietnamese enterprise has been able to establish a recognizable brand name like their Chinese counterparts elsewhere in Europe (see Pieke et al., 2004, p. 137). Even their presumed monopoly over garment factories is being threatened by Chinese competitors, as there are reports of Chinese migrants engaging in similar activities in the Russian Far East (see Alexseev, 2006, p. 125). With the Chinese migrant population projected to continue to grow, life at the market will become even more uncertain in the foreseeable future.

Mobility in times of uncertainty Uncertain time, uncertain life Migration and mobilities provide opportunities for challenging pre-existing and emerging identities and social relations (Van de Veer, 1995). In the context of transnational migration, the changes triggered by one’s physical mobility are particularly profound because of not only the attendant shift in membership and rights, but also the transition to a new sociocultural milieu. Whether those changes are positive or negative, celebrated or loathed is shaped by multifarious factors. That is, individuals undertaking the same movements in temporal and spatial terms do not necessarily experience them the same way because they are ‘classed, raced and gendered bodies in motion in specific historical contexts within certain political formations and spaces’ (Smith, 2005, p. 238). Migration is also fraught with disruptions. Collective experiences of certain migration regimes and foreign cultures may create agency, solidarity, and a sense of inclusion as well as division, exclusion, or even conflict. The routinization of uncertainty and insecurity in migrants’ lives in Moscow provides me with an opportunity to examine how core social values and cultural logics that underpin Vietnamese personhood are being challenged and reconstituted by mobility and the ethos of a postsocialist market economy. Using the notion of uncertainty as a conceptual lens, I bring to the fore crucial questions about the relationships between money and morality in Vietnamese society at large. The decision to use uncertainty as a central concept in this book is informed by empirical evidence on the Russian migration regime and its impact on migrants’ lives (Davé, 2014a; Hoang, 2015). As mentioned earlier, a vast majority of the estimated 150,000 Vietnamese in Russia are irregular migrants (Nožina, 2010, p. 229). Positive projections about the future growth of the Vietnamese population notwithstanding (Ivakhnyuk,

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2008; Rybakovsky & Ryazantsev, 2005, p. 14), there are no signs that Russian immigration policies will become more welcoming to non-Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)28 citizens in the near future. The academic literature on Vietnamese nationals in Russia is almost non-existent except for some brief remarks in policy-oriented quantitative studies conducted by Russian scholars (Ivakhnyuk, 2008; Kamenskiy, 2002; Ryazantsev, 2005). The lack of empirical knowledge about such a large group of transient migrants in the volatile political and economic situations of Russia cripples our ability to effect change in this important migration corridor. Post-Soviet Russia, with its volatile economy, restrictive (and heavily corrupt) migration regime (Gavrilova, 2001; Yudina, 2005), and disturbing levels of hostility towards foreign migrants (Alexseev, 2011; Tishkov, Zayonchkovskaya, & Vitkovskaya, 2005, p. 23; Yudina, 2005, p. 597), proves to be a particularly unwelcoming host society. Within such an inhospitable environment, the ghettoization of irregular migrants in isolated ethnic markets both results from and further entrenches their exclusion from Russian society, which is still embroiled in its own social mayhem in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Over four years of fieldwork in Moscow, I heard and witnessed countless accounts of dramatic changes to people’s lives: some went from rags to riches overnight, while others suffered freefalls from wealth to destitution in a matter of months. Implicated in these mind-blowing tales are vivid narratives of love and hate, trust and betrayal, unions and breakups, violence and camaraderie, fear and courage, despair and hope. It was surreal to sit among Vietnamese market traders in their cramped dormitories night after night and hear them recount stories of Hollywood-style kidnappings, rapes, robberies, and murders that had happened to their business partners, friends, relatives, and acquaintances during the two turbulent decades following the Soviet Union’s dissolution. The Russian state’s ambivalent attitude to foreign migrants (i.e. maintaining restrictive immigration policies on the one hand and turning a blind eye to the growing presence of irregular migrants on the other) leaves them in a perpetual state of uncertainty and precarity. Millions of migrants, most of whom are from former communist allies, endure an irregular status for indefinite periods of time with no settlement prospects. A deep-seated sense of uncertainty, however, is also highly productive. The Vietnamese I met in Moscow were highly resilient, creative, and resourceful 28 The Commonwealth of Independent States (Содружество Независимых Государств) is a regional association of nine former Soviet Republics – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – founded in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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in their everyday lives, actively seeking to build new relationships and embracing the trials and tribulations of life with ease. Uncertainty, indeed, shapes people’s ways of knowing and being (Cooper & Pratten, 2015b). As demonstrated later in the book, the particular life circumstances and social relationships that uncertainty produces transform people’s sense of place, space, and identity in the most profound manner. In contexts of uncertainty, social values, belief systems, and moral codes of conduct are put to the test. The choices that migrants make in their everyday life in Russia are reflective of both the power structures in which they are embedded and the particular transnational social fields that they inhabit. ‘Diaspora,’ Vertovec and Cohen (1999) argue, is a fluid and multi-local construct rather than something fixed and closed. As the ‘community’ with the largest concentration of irregular migrants, Vietnamese nationals in Russia are confronted with fundamental questions about identity and belonging that are dissimilar from those faced by their fellow countrymen in other contexts. Conditions of illegality, uncertainty, and insecurity unite and divide them at the same time. Social networks take on new meanings when they become the principal – if not only – system of social security while, at the same time, trust comes to be increasingly tenuous. In my analysis, I am concerned with the myriad ways that such liminal and precarious conditions of life fashion people’s conduct in day-to-day living as well as their projections of the future. This knowledge deepens our understanding of the processes of mobility and social change in post-communist societies that continue to grapple with yawning chasms between the old and the new, the local and the global, policy and practice, and obsolete governance techniques and rapidly changing ways of life. Uncertainty: conceptual debates Theoretically, this study is underpinned by an understanding that uncertainty is both a lived and imagined experience that shapes individuals’ dispositions to social practices. Uncertainty, whether real or perceived, calculable or incalculable, has become a dominant trope, an ‘inevitable force’ in subjective experience of contemporary life (Cooper & Pratten, 2015b; Johnson-Hanks, 2005, p. 366; Kinnvall, 2004, p. 742). Increasingly, empirical studies have cast doubt upon the theorization of social action as the fulfillment of a prior intention (or a rational calculation), overemphasizing agency at the expense of structure (Schutz, 1967; Searle, 1983). On the other hand, questions have also been raised about the claims that Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of habitus, which refers to an objective basis for regular modes of

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behavior, resolves the subject-object dualism in social theory (Brubaker, 1985, 1993; de Certeau, 1984; DiMaggio, 1979; King, 2000). The main assumption of the habitus is that much of human behavior follows particular regular modes of practices and is thus predictable. Because such a position implies the role of a priori rules in determining social action, Bourdieu has been criticized for slipping ‘back into exactly the kind of objectivism that he refutes’ (King, 2000, p. 418). There is ample evidence from developing and transitional societies that challenges causal links between a priori intention or a priori rules and social action, particularly in situations of lived or perceived uncertainties. In contexts where uncertainty and insecurity are routinized features of life, there does not seem to be a consistent or clearly defined frame of reference that may render social conduct predictable. In Cameroon, where everyday life is unpredictable and inconsistent, for example, Johnson-Hanks (2005) observes that social action is not based on the fulfillment of prior intentions but on judicious opportunism. In other words, people just grasp at whatever is available in the present when projections of future perfects prove particularly tenuous (Johnson-Hanks, 2005, p. 366). My previous research on Vietnamese migrants in Taiwan has also shown that the most fundamental moral principles regulating social relationships can be easily cast aside when they conflict with migrants’ immediate, vital interests, or even potentially aggravate their exclusion and vulnerability in a foreign society (Hoang, 2016b). There are no particular patterns or consistent rules with regard to social networking, leading to the erosion of trust within the ‘community.’ The inconsistency and unpredictability of social practice are particularly salient in the social life of Vietnamese migrants in Russia. In a climate riddled with fear, distrust, anxiety, and insecurity, the social structures that serve as preconditions for routinized behavior are disabled or disrupted, compelling greater degrees of deviancy and delinquency. Boundaries are easily shifted, and social values reset to accommodate constantly changing needs and priorities. Over time, the deviant becomes the new normal. Bourdieu has also acknowledged the intersubjectivity and situatedness of social practice. Specifically, he considers social agents the so-called ‘virtuosos,’ who have a ‘sense of game’ but know the script so well that they do not allow themselves to be dominated by abstract social principles; instead, they elaborate and improvise in light of their relations with others and tailor their action to the context (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 79). While I do not totally discount predictable, routinized behaviors in this book, I am more concerned with the ‘improvisation’ aspect of social practice as well as the social values and cultural logics underpinning it.

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In what has been characterized by Beck (1992) as ‘risk society,’ one should expect greater degrees of uncertainty and deviancy in human behaviors. While risk is treated by economists as a rational, objective, and quantifiable phenomenon, sociological studies have pointed out that risk is a social construction that is constantly negotiated and interpreted within particular social contexts and cultural histories (Douglas, 1992; Lupton, 1999). Given the reflexive nature of modernity (Beck, 1992), people’s perception of and response to potential risks are grounded in both their subjective knowledge and the institutional structures they are embedded in. People, Nelkin (2003, p. viii) concurs, perceive risks through different ‘frames’ that reflect their values, world views, and concepts of social order. These frames can influence definitions of risk, allocations of responsibility and blame, and ideas about appropriate decision-making authority. It is important to bear in mind that the subjectivity in risk and uncertainty is socioculturally constructed and mediated. Beck (1992) also draws systematic interlinkages between the social production of wealth and the social production of risks, and points out the far-reaching damages of globalization to modern societies. However, the preoccupation with risks that have global impact, including technological risks, ecological crises, and economic downturns, has overshadowed the everydayness of social risk and uncertainty at the individual, micro level. It is the mundanity and routinization of risk and uncertainty in social life that holds the power to transform one’s notion of personhood and social relationships. The so-called ‘new risks’ (as opposed to pre-industrial risks) that pervade our contemporary life are man-made side-effects of modernization and the social processes that ensue, including consumerism and individualism. These man-made hazards are primarily produced by prevalent institutional contradictions in risk societies (Beck, 1999). Risks in modern societies are, by essence, produced by the rules, institutions, and capacities that structure the identification and assessment of risk in a specific sociocultural context (Beck, 1999, p. 149). Indeed, in the context of Vietnamese migration to Russia, the insecurity, uncertainty, and precarity that migrants have to deal with arise from the tension and contradictions between policy and practice, and post-communist governmentality and the realities of socioeconomic lives in Russia. Foreign migrants are treated as a security threat, a menace to an ethnically homogeneous society. Embedded in different notions of risk is the underlying issue of uncertainty, stemming from varying conditions of imperfect knowledge, ambiguity, and unpredictability (Lupton, 1999; Williams & Baláž, 2012; Yeoh, Platt, Khoo, Lam, & Baey, 2016). However, Beck has overlooked the

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fluidity and heterogeneity of culture (beyond what is produced by the modernization process) and the intersectionality of key social markers such as race, class, gender, and sexuality in the discourse, representation, and practice relating to risks (see also Dean, 1999; Tulloch, 2008). Risks, Zinn and Taylor-Gooby (2006, p. 54) argue, are ‘discursively constructed in everyday life with reference to the mass media, individual experience and biography, local memory, moral convictions, and personal judgments.’ The risks and uncertainties that the Vietnamese in my study are confronted with on a daily basis are produced by the complicity and contradiction between three principal institutions: the state, the market, and the media. Yet the marked differences in the ways Vietnamese and members of other ethnic groups (which are subject to the same regulatory regime and discursive space) respond to those risks and uncertainties underscore the significance of cultural values, symbols, and beliefs (see also Lash, 2000; Mythen & Walklate, 2005). By adopting a sociocultural lens in my analysis of uncertainty, I seek to engage with and advance both the ‘cultural turn’ scholarship and the sociology of risk. It is impossible to obtain in-depth knowledge of the transnational lives of Vietnamese migrants in Russia without taking into account the myriad ways in which institutional rules and structures intersect cultural values, ideologies, and practices. People’s representation of and response to risk and uncertainty, I emphasize, reflect not only the institutional context they are embedded in, but also the cultural background from which they come. A central concern in my examination of Vietnamese migrants’ lives in Russia is trust (or the lack thereof). In the face of risk and uncertainty, trust is the key to action (Williams & Baláž, 2012; Zinn, 2008). Trust is particularly important to individuals on the move because they tend to have incomplete knowledge of the new environment and the people around them. As Lewis and Weigert (1985, p. 462) note, ‘trust begins where knowledge ends.’ Yet, without knowledge, there is no basis for trust (Williams & Baláž, 2012, p. 177). The absence of shared values and routines that are prerequisite elements of trust (Anheier & Kendall, 2002, p. 347) discourages individuals from taking risks or distorts the ways they engage with them. In the context of Moscow, the lack of knowledge of and certainty about the migration regime, Russian society, and the broader economy creates a sense of apprehension and angst among Vietnamese migrants, leading them to question their pre-existing knowledge about the values and routines they share with their fellow countrymen. Deviant behaviors, in many contexts, represent the self-defense mechanisms of those who constantly live on the edge.

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Ironically, by disrupting a shared sense of morality and community solidarity, migrants undermine their own ability to cope with risks and uncertainties. Uncertainty is thus both an antecedent and an outcome of a moral decline and social fragmentation. There is abundant evidence across disciplines about direct links between a lack of social capital and social cohesion, and poor socio-economic outcomes for individuals and the community as a whole (Coleman, 1988; Fukuyama, 2001; Kawachi & Berkman, 2000; Putnam, 1995; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). Although questions around moralities form the overall thrust of this book, they receive special attention in Chapters IV and V, where I describe how social and intimate relationships are rendered particularly fragile in a context where trust cannot be taken for granted, and lived and perceived uncertainties undermine people’s ability to commit. The uncertainties examined in this book are not just social, economic, and political, but also psychological and moral. Productive and destructive uncertainty As a conceptual tool, uncertainty is often used in its negative and constraining sense in association with opacity, risk, insecurity, instability, and the inability to predict the outcome of events or actions (Berthomé, Bonhomme, & Delaplace, 2012; Cooper & Pratten, 2015b). As such, it is a problem with the potential to disrupt and distress lives. In her ethnographic account of contemporary life in Cameroon, Johnson-Hanks (2005, p. 366) offers insights into how uncertainty is described as being accountable for incompetence, graft, sexual infidelity, school failure, and even witchcraft. The widespread sense of crisis and unpredictability legitimates and reinforces both the interpretation of the world as uncertain and behavior that contributes to that uncertainty. Risks and uncertainty are also seen to possess positive and productive potential (Cooper & Pratten, 2015a; Zaloom, 2004). Empirical studies have provided ample evidence of how uncertainty is used as a social resource to negotiate insecurity, conduct or even create relationships, and project the future (Berthomé et al., 2012; Carey, 2012; Cooper & Pratten, 2015a; de Vienne, 2012). As the basis of curiosity and exploration, uncertainty ‘can call forth considered action to change both the situation and the self,’ bringing about new social landscapes and social horizons (Whyte, 2009, p. 214). Yet it is important to note that, as a ground for action, uncertainty fashions unique dispositions, a particular mood of action. With a lived experience of uncertainty and precariousness, the subject approaches the present and the future with doubt, hope, caution, tentativeness, and provisionality. This

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so-called ‘subjunctive mood’ of action (Whyte, 2005) becomes a basis for regular modes of behavior. The subjunctive nature of action is, nevertheless, inconsistent with the precondition of trust, namely ‘regular, honest, and cooperative behavior, based on commonly shared norms’ (Fukuyama, 1995), weakening people’s ability to successfully navigate social relationships. The concept of uncertainty employed in this study has some parallels with Erik Harms’ (2011) notion of ‘social edginess,’ both of which prove particularly fitting for research on post-socialist and transitional societies. In his ethnographic account of transformations in Hồ Chí Minh City’s urban fringe, Harms (2011) uses ‘social edginess’ to describe ambivalences and contradictions in the lives of people belonging neither here nor there, marginalized in not only spatial but also social and economic terms – an existential mode that is both empowering and alienating. In the face of marginalization and deepening inequalities, edginess operates like the double-edged sword, sometimes cutting back against structures of power and sometimes cutting the very social agents who wield it (Harms, 2011, p. 4). Living on the edge is about opportunity or despair, power or exclusion, depending who you ask. Harms’ ideas about social edginess resonate strongly with what I observed in Russia and I will draw on his work extensively throughout this analysis. Yet, unlike his interlocutors, my research participants are mobile subjects circulating in a foreign, alienating environment where life is highly insecure and unpredictable. Edginess indicates some sense of a static, sedentary existence, while uncertainty allows me to capture the fickle nature of life that conditions migrants’ social practices. In this book, I am concerned with both the productive and destructive power of uncertainty due to their equally important, complementary roles in Vietnamese migrants’ livelihoods and social lives. In some circumstances, the routinization of uncertainty breeds feelings of envy, jealousy, and distrust, and leads to competition, tension, conflict, betrayal, and sexual infidelity. In other situations, uncertainty functions as a productive resource that motivates individuals to seek out new social relationships and strengthen existing ones. Routine experiences of uncertainty also boost people’s resilience, positivity, and optimism in their day-to-day lives and projections of the future. Uncertainty in the life of Vietnamese migrants in Russia is not merely a perception: it is a lived experience, a stark reality. It dictates people’s conduct of business at the market, permeates social and personal relationships, and (re)shapes their sense of moral self. In the context of mobility, social exclusion, and uncertainty, social norms and values are subject to constant renegotiations and relationships are routinely reassessed to accommodate the ever-emerging contingencies.

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Migration itself is seen as a risky undertaking, even as it represents a coping strategy of dealing with risk and uncertainty for individuals, households, and communities (Charsley, 2007; Williams & Baláž, 2012). As discussed earlier, physical displacement often entails multifarious disruptions to migrants’ social lives, leading many to scramble for a new ‘mooring’ upon which some sense of stability and security can hopefully be restored. In the Moscow context, I found that money, which is highly valued for its ‘unconditional interchangeability’ and ‘uncompromising objectivity’ (see Simmel, 2011), has emerged as a new ‘mooring’ in migrants’ lives. As disenfranchised, invisible migrants in a foreign society, other forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1986) that they possess might easily be rendered worthless. In that situation, money is the only steady element with a value independent of inconsistencies and insecurities in the migrant’s transnational life. Money, Zelizer (1997, p. 19) notes, is a socially created currency, ‘subject to particular networks of social relations and its own set of values and norms.’ Yet, as I show later in the book, a preoccupation with money and money-making carries its own social risks.

Structure of this book In this book, I am primarily concerned with how uncertainty, whether as a lived experience, a perception, an ethos, or a mode of action, can be productive as well as destructive for social relationships. The case of Vietnamese migrants in Moscow provides me with an opportunity to examine how the core social values and cultural logics that underpin Vietnamese personhood are being challenged and reconstituted by the mobilities and ethos of a post-socialist market economy. In so doing, I highlight crucial questions about the relationships between money and morality in Vietnamese society at large. The chapters of the book are organized along three main analytical axes of the concept of uncertainty within a sociocultural framework, namely: (1) the institutional, in Chapter II: Russia’s post-Soviet migration regime, and Chapter III: Navigating Russia’s shadow economy; (2) the social, in Chapter IV: Market ethos and the volatile radius of trust, and Chapter V: Love and sex in times of uncertainty; and (3) the cultural/subjective, in Chapter VI: Transient existence and the quest for certainty. In what follows, I provide a short summary of how I tackle my core concerns in each chapter. The routinization of uncertainty in migrants’ lives in Moscow, I argue, is first and foremost produced by an exclusionary and corrupt migration regime. In Chapter II, I provide an overview of international migration

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flows to Russia during and after the Soviet era before discussing the inner contradictions of the Russian migration regime. As I point out in subsequent chapters, inconsistencies and contradictions in the way the state deals with transnational migrants lead the migrants to resort to the behaviors that seemingly justify further restrictive and repressive government techniques from the state. The securitization of migration helps to legitimate the socalled ‘migrantophobic’ sentiments among local Russians, pushing migrants to the edge of society and the depths of the shadow economy. Illegality is thus a self-perpetuating paradox. As the most powerful force regulating migrants’ lives and dictating their behaviors, in-depth knowledge of the Russian migration regime is instructive for understanding how Vietnamese migrants conduct themselves in their transnational lives. Chapter III delves deeper into the institutional structures and processes that render migrants’ lives precarious and vulnerable. Unlike Chapter II, where I look at the governmentality of Russia’s migration regime at the macro level, Chapter III provides ethnographic insights into the shadow economy, where most Vietnamese migrants earn a living, and the transnational brokerage networks that facilitate and condition mobility from Vietnam to Russia. In what seems to be a laissez-faire system, the state and market work together to perpetuate migrants’ vulnerabilities and precarities to ensure they stay docile and exploitable. In the face of an opaque, complicated, and restrictive bureaucratic system, migrants have no choice but to go through layers of unscrupulous go-betweens and predatory, corrupt civil servants to obtain the right to enter to the country, secure economic opportunities, and access basic social services. Yet I also show that migrants do not always fit the image of an innocent, passive victim. In many situations, they navigate the corrupt system with agency and occasionally succeed in outwitting or even subverting it. In the volatile context of the Russian shadow economy, the categories of exploitative brokers and victimized migrants are extremely fluid, as individuals might easily swap places when opportunities arise. In Chapter IV, I discuss how the exploitative market regime and a perpetual angst about the uncertain future have led migrants to adopt a pragmatic and individualistic approach to life that is at odds with the communitarian values that are central to Vietnamese culture, which renders their own lives even more precarious. Co-ethnic social networks are migrants’ main, if not only, sources of support, information, and social security, but might as well become a burden, liability, and major threat to their livelihoods. While I find that social ties among migrants retain many of the original features that characterize social networks in Vietnamese society (such as the central importance of family ties, the apprehension about the unknown stranger,

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and barriers to membership: Dalton, Pham, Pham, & Ong, 2002; Rambo, 1973; Turner & Nguyen, 2005), they depart from certain core values that are vital to the sustenance of social networks back in Vietnam. In particular, money has come to replace the trust and reciprocity that are supposed to hold social ties together, changing the nature of social networks. Living on the margins of Russian society means existing in a moral twilight zone where migrants have considerable leeway to redefine their values and reorder their priorities. Much of the literature has been focused on Otherness as a source of fears and anxieties (for example, Delanty, 2008; Laruelle, 2010), somehow assuming Sameness is safe, undivisive, and unproblematic. This chapter calls that view into question. Chapter V furthers my concern with how conditions of uncertainty and precarity shape the migrant’s transnational life, albeit from a different angle. Ethnographic accounts in this chapter show that uncertainty can be both productive and destructive for migrants’ intimate relationships. On the one hand, uncertain and transient conditions of life seem to make the transgression of Vietnamese restrictive sexuality norms more tolerable and justifiable. They help bring people together, create a sense of freedom, open up new possibilities, and blur social divisions between men and women from diverse backgrounds. On the other hand, sexual-affective relationships are rendered particularly fragile by the sense of uncertainty and vulnerability, which encourages individualistic behavior and the pursuit of intimacies in a transactional and rational manner. The materials from my research in Moscow illustrate the so-called ‘ethos of contingency,’ which is about the tentativeness but also flexibility of people’s actions when they feel they have no control over their lives or ability to predict the conditions on which they are dependent (Whyte & Siu, 2015). The chapter emphasizes the importance of situating sexuality, intimacy, and affect within the broader political economy of migration. Chapter VI examines how migrants’ transient existence in Russia shapes their sense-making with regard to self and life, as well as their aspirations for the future for themselves and their families. The choices they make today, my research shows, embody the anxieties and apprehension built up over the years through their lived experiences of pre-migration poverty and unemployment and a sense of precarity and vulnerability in Russia. Uncertainty can be extremely productive as it fosters a future-oriented disposition, cultivates feelings of hope and possibility, and provides migrants with the strength and motivation to endure hardships and make sacrifices today. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s various works (Douglas, 1982; Douglas & Isherwood, 1979; Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983), this chapter uses consumption

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as a lens for understanding how migrants define meaning and purpose of life. People’s choices and priorities in consumption, whether through daily meals, real estate investment in Vietnam, or financing an upgrade to middle-class status for their children, express not only their identities and subjectivities, but also their social belonging. Every dollar that can be put aside is judiciously spent in such a way that a sense of certainty and security can be restored to migrants’ lives. In other words, uncertainty does not eliminate the possibility of choice for the migrants but shapes their choices in such a way that would guarantee uncertainty is eliminated from their future.

II

Russia’s post-Soviet migration regime

Migration to Russia The end of the Cold War gave rise to a new migratory system with Russia at its core (Ivakhnyuk, 2009; Sadovskaya, 2012, p. 85). According to the latest statistics compiled by the United Nations, there were over 11 million international migrants in Russia as of 2013, making it the second most important destination in the world, after the United States (UN, 2013b). The majority of migrants to Russia come from former member states of the Soviet Union, which is reorganized into the more loosely-structured CIS. The IOM reported that CIS nationals accounted for 53 percent of migrants to Russia in 2006; this f igure did not take into account undocumented migrants, who were believed to exceed the number of documented migrants (IOM, 2008, p. 26). Some Russian scholars estimate that around 70-80 percent of population movements to Russia is of irregular nature (Ivakhnyuk, 2009; Zayonchkovskaya, 1999a). In a context where demographic decline29 is seen as one of the three main threats to national security, together with technological breakdown and territorial defense issues (Herd & Sargsyan, 2007, p. 51), further growth in immigration is both imperative and inevitable. The current pool of irregular migrants in Russia is a mix of former Soviet citizens, who came to Russia from other Soviet republics with Soviet passports immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, whose residence in Russia is not necessarily treated by the authorities as illegal, and more recent economic migrants from the CIS and beyond, who are subject to harsher governance measures and more negative public discourse. There are no reliable statistics for irregular migrants and estimates vary widely from 1.5 million in 2002 (by the Ministry of Interior) to 15 million in 2003 (by Russian media) (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 42). Variations in the estimates provided by academics tend to be less significant. Mukomel (2005, p. 196) believed that there were 4.9 million irregular migrants in Russia as of 2005. Ivakhnyuk (2009, p. 43), however, suggested that the total number of irregular 29 The Russian population is declining fast, by an estimated 700-750,000 people each year. The United Nations Population Division forecasts that the Russian population will drop to 101 million people by 2100. The Russian population as of 2015 was 142,098,000. Source: UN DESA, Population Division, Population Estimates and Projections Section http://esa.un.org/unpd/ wpp/unpp/p2k0data.asp, accessed 16 March 2015.

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migrants could amount to five to seven million if seasonal workers were accounted for. CIS countries are responsible for the largest volume of both regular and irregular migration to Russia (IOM, 2008, p. 55). Ryazantsev (2010) estimated that CIS citizens accounted for approximately 70 percent of irregular migrant labor in Russia as of 2008, with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Ukraine as the most important sources. As the largest metropolitan area in Russia, Moscow city and the Moscow region host about one third of irregular migrants. Although migration within the CIS has been subjected to tighter control since the early 1990s, it is still relatively easy for migrants to circulate within the bloc thanks to visa-free regimes and bilateral trade agreements between the now-sovereign member states. They also tend to be in a more advantageous position than non-CIS migrants in terms of Russian language skills and cultural affinity. This valuable cultural capital eases migrants’ integration into Russian society, rendering their migration a relatively more straightforward process. Large numbers of CIS citizens are employed in the formal economic sector and even in state institutions (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 32). The ethnic composition of CIS migrants in Russia is reflective of the state’s geopolitical ambitions, as well as Russia’s ongoing political tensions with some former Soviet Union’s member states. In 1992, a visa-free regime for the CIS came into effect with the signing of the Bishkek Agreement. However, growing concerns about cross-border terrorism threats and the trafficking of arms, drugs, and persons prompted Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan to withdraw from the Bishkek Agreement in 2000. Russia then went on to sign bilateral agreements on visa-free population movements with all CIS members except Turkmenistan, which insisted on a proper visa regime for all the post-Soviet states, and Georgia, due to political tensions (Ivakhnyuk, 2009). As a result, citizens of all former Soviet Union member states, except Turkmenistan, Georgia, and the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) that have joined the European Union, can stay in Russia for up to 90 days without a visa. This was further reinforced by an agreement signed in November 2000 securing visa-free movement within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), including Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The EurAsEC was replaced by the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which officially came into effect on 2 January 2015. As of March 2015, the EEU had four member states – Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Armenia. As a regional economic union, the EEU allows free movement of goods, capital, services, and people within the bloc and is moving toward a single currency in the future.

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The importance of foreign policy notwithstanding, migration from CIS countries to Russia is more likely to be shaped by the politico-economic situation in the source country. CIS flows are heavily represented by Tajiks, Azeris, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Moldovans, and Ukrainians (ICMPD, 2006). These countries continue to grapple with the post-Soviet political and economic stress characterized by extreme poverty, deepening inequalities, high rates of unemployment, deterioration of living standards, and political instability. Of the 50 million people who found themselves outside their ethnic homelands in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, over 70 percent were ethnic Russians or ethnic minorities from within Russia (Vitkovskaya, 1999, p. 158). In the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, interethnic tension akin to ‘ethnic cleansing’ was cited as the principal cause for an influx of migrants from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova to Russia (Pilkington, 1998, p. 132). Russia received 10.9 million migrants from the former Soviet republics between 1989 and 2002 due to political instability and post-Soviet social panic (IOM, 2008, p. 14). At the turn of the millennium, human movement from CIS countries started to shift from political displacement to economic migration. In the early 2000s, 25 percent of Ukrainians reportedly participated in temporary, seasonal, or circular cross-border migration, primarily to Russia (Zaionchkovskaya, 2003). Ukraine-Russia is the most important migration corridor in the South-South migration pathway, accounting for 3.5-3.6 million migrants either way (IOM, 2013, p. 53). While Kazakhstan is one of the most resilient survivors of the post-Soviet shock, a strong economy and political stability do not prevent out-migration to Russia. As of 2010, Kazakhstan was the second most important source of migration to Russia, accounting for 2.6 million people. Among former Soviet Socialist Republics, Tajikistan is the poorest and most dependent on Russia as an outlet for its redundant labor – 83 percent of Tajik migrants choose Russia as their destination and around one million Tajiks are believed to live in Moscow alone (Jones, Black, & Skeldon, 2007) – a significant figure for a country of merely eight million people.30 Migrant remittances have become the mainstay of Tajikistan’s stagnating economy, representing the second most important source of income for Tajik households after wages (Falkingham & Klytchnikova, 2006, p. 18). In 2013, Tajikistan was the world’s leading 30 As of July 2015, the population of Tajikistan was 8,191,958 people. Source: CIA The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ti.html, accessed 30 June 2016.

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recipient of migrant remittances in terms of the share of remittances in the national GDP – 42 percent,31 the vast majority of which were sent from Russia (92.3 percent as of 2005: see Kireyev, 2006). Russia’s large volume of irregular immigrants sets it apart from other major destinations in the world. Given the state’s tight control over population movements within and beyond territorial borders during the Soviet era, non-CIS migration of spontaneous nature to Russia started to surge at a conspicuous scale only after the Soviet Union’s dissolution in the 1990s. Chinese laborers were brought to the Russian Far East before the Revolution of 1917, but strained relations between the two communist states during the Cold War turned the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into a terra incognita for the Chinese until communist regimes in Europe fell (Pieke, 1998, p. 5). At the peak of Soviet industrialization, from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, up to 200,000 workers and specialists were ‘imported’ from Eastern Europe, Vietnam, Northern Korea, and Cuba (Kamenskiy, 2002, p. 88). A large number of migrants from this early wave stayed on in Russia after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Post-Soviet migration from China started with shuttle trade from northern and northeastern China to Moscow, but many pioneer Chinese migrants subsequently moved on to Central and Western Europe, enticed by better settlement prospects, more stable political environments, and affluent economies (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 54). There are no reliable statistics for non-CIS migration to Russia because it is largely of a clandestine nature (see also Pieke, 1998, p. 8). According to the 2002 Census, non-CIS migrants accounted for 3.9 percent of the total number of 12 million foreign-born individuals in Russia (IOM, 2008, p. 18). Apparently, this figure accounts for documented migrants only, who represent just a fraction of the actual nonCIS population in the country. As of 2006, China was the leading source of non-CIS migration to Russia (20.79 percent), followed by Turkey (10 percent) and Vietnam (6.81 percent) (IOM, 2008, p. 20). While Vietnam appeared as the third-largest non-CIS source in the official statistics, it was believed to be responsible in actuality for the largest volume of non-CIS irregular migration into the country (IOM, 2008, p. 55). There is a myth in Russian scholarship about non-CIS migrants treating Russia as a transit point on their way to Western Europe (De Tinguy, 1998; 31 World Bank (2014) Migration and Remittances Data, http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/ EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTDECPROSPECTS/0,,contentMDK:22759429~pagePK:64165401~pi PK:64165026~theSitePK:476883,00.html#Remittances, updated as of October 2014, accessed 6 April 2015.

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ICMPD, 2006; IOM, 2008; Ivakhnyuk, 2009; Portyakov, 1996) and that many stay in Russia just because they are ‘stuck’ there when border crossings to the West prove difficult and dangerous (IOM, 2008, p. 55). The International Centre for Migration Policy Development (2006) reported that there were approximately 1.5 million irregular transit migrants from Southern and Central Asia and Africa in the country as of 2006. These people were believed to be stranded in Russia because tighter control of borders between Russia and Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia made West-bound crossings more perilous. Yet I discovered from my fieldwork that the perception of Russia as a transit point for most irregular migrants was not necessarily true, at least for those from China and Vietnam, something that is confirmed by other studies in Russia and Europe (Ivakhnyuk, 2008; Pieke et al., 2004). There is some evidence pointing to Moscow as a transit base in earlier waves of Chinese migration to Europe through the Russian Far East and Vietnamese migration to Germany and the Czech Republic in the early 1990s (see Nožina, 2010, p. 241, for example), but this concerns only small groups of people. As illustrated later in Chapters III and IV, many Vietnamese migrants in my study had actually succeeded in their border crossings to Germany and Italy but subsequently decided to return to Russia, where the lack of regulation and weak law enforcement create lucrative economic opportunities unavailable elsewhere. It is particularly difficult for migrants from countries with a strong culture of independent entrepreneurship, like China and Vietnam, to carve out a space for themselves in the regulated economies of Western Europe (see also Pieke et al., 2004, p. 33, 103). Central and Eastern European countries with unstable economies, hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, and a sharp fall in living standards since the end of the Cold War ironically offer immigrants from Asia an exceptionally attractive business environment (IOM, 1998, p. 333). In these transitional economies, is it relatively easy for low-skilled and low-capital migrants to set up businesses and, if the time is right, reap enormous profits over a short period. The most important considerations in destination selection for many migrants from East Asia, as Pieke, Nyíri et al. (2004, p. 101) corroborate, are ease of entry, income prospects, and the presence of relatives or friends, rather than security or the likelihood of permanent settlement. While much less significant in volume, migration from non-CIS sources to Russia is important to the national economy because it fills the vacuum in the retail sector that CIS citizens tend to shy away from. The Russian labor market for low-skilled immigrants is highly racialized. Except for the Azeris, who concentrate in market trade, the majority of low-skilled CIS migrants are manual laborers. While Armenian migrants are more likely to be found

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in road construction, Moldavians – apartment renovation, Kyrgyz – cleaning and logistics in supermarkets, and Ukrainians – industrial and transport work, Tajik nationals tend to be in a wider range of manual labor occupations, including farm worker, porter, and taxi driver (Kamenskiy, 2002; Rybakovsky & Ryazantsev, 2005; Vorobyeva, 2001). Low-skilled migrants from outside the CIS are mostly nationals of the Soviet Union’s former socialist allies in Asia and Africa, including Vietnam and China. As the most important ethnic groups in market trade, Vietnamese and Chinese migrants play a critical role in the development of a massive unregulated retail sector that caters to lower-middle and working classes across Russia. Open-air markets in Russia emerged from the expansion of ‘shuttle trade’ (chelnok) in the 1990s. Shuttle trade is not new to Eastern European economies, but Chinese (and, to some extent, Vietnamese) traders ‘raised it to an unprecedented level,’ fixing the broken commodity chain in the post-Soviet retail sector (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 128). They were the driving force behind the market expansion, providing Russia’s cash-strapped consumers with affordable garments and footwear of the latest fashion trends that would otherwise have been out of their reach. With a strong entrepreneurial spirit, mercantile ingenuity, dexterity, and industriousness, Vietnamese and Chinese traders galvanized the post-Soviet Russian consumer market that was being hamstrung by the sluggish domestic manufacturing sector and the absence of an entrepreneurial culture among Russians after seven decades in a command-driven and heavily subsidized economy (see Zaionchkovskaya, 2003). While Russians also participated in cross-border shuttle trade in the 1990s, their enthusiasm for it was short-lived. Russian chelnoks moved into other sectors as soon as they had built sufficient capital to do so (Iontsev & Ivakhnyuk, 2002, p. 67). Vietnamese and Chinese traders were, however, not afforded the same opportunities for mobility. The tourist visa is the primary conduit for non-CIS irregular migration into Russia. In 1992, Russia and China signed a bilateral agreement32 on a visa-free regime for Chinese tourists that opened the floodgates to Chinese irregular migrants. Larin (2012, p. 70) estimated that 65-70 percent of Chinese nationals visiting Russia as ‘tourists’ ended up engaging in petty trade or working illegally. The magnitude of this phenomenon quickly moved Russian authorities to enforce visa requirements by the end of 1990s. The period 2004 to 2008 marked a threefold reduction in the number of Chinese nationals entering the Russian Far East as tourists. However, during the same time, 32 ‘Agreement between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on Visa-free Tourism’ of 18 December 1992.

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regular labor migration received a major boost from a series of bilateral agreements signed between the two countries to provide a legal basis for using the Chinese workforce in Russia (Datsyshen, 2012; A. Larin, 2012). Despite being subjected to the same migration regime, Vietnamese and Chinese migrants’ experiences are not always comparable, partly due to differences in the ability of their home government to negotiate the terms and conditions relating to their citizens in Russia. The Government of Vietnam and their diplomatic mission in Russia do not hold as much bargaining power as those of China. China’s political leadership has long been committed to the protection of the rights and interests of their citizens in Russian territory. The Chinese diplomatic agency and the Office of State Council on Overseas Chinese maintain close connections with the Chinese community in Russia. Russia’s introduction of the ban on foreigners trading in markets in 2007, for example, triggered multiple government-level negotiations between the two countries, which quickly led Russia’s federal government to repeal the ban (A. Larin, 2012, p. 58). Regional and provincial agreements signed between local governments of the Russian Far East and northeastern border provinces of China have considerably eased the flow of Chinese goods and capital into Russian territory and made it possible for Chinese workers and traders to cross the border without visa restrictions (Datsyshen, 2012). With its geographical proximity and rising power in the global economy and politics, China is able to establish itself on an equal footing in intergovernmental relations with Russia, which has direct implications for the plight of Chinese migrants in the country. Larin (2012, p. 59) reports that around 30,000 regular Chinese workers come to Russia every year through a quota system, a figure that is forecast to increase further in the years to come. A number of high-level agreements on joint border protection and combating illegal migration such as the Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Co-operation have been signed since the early 1990s, paving the way for further increases in regular migration from China to Russia. While Vietnamese citizens have never been allowed entry to Russia without a visa, it is relatively easy for Vietnamese citizens to obtain tourist visas to Russia thanks to the friendship extending from the Cold War communist solidarity. A bilateral agreement on cooperation in tourism between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was signed on 24 November 1997. This was recently reaffirmed by the signing of a plan on cooperation in tourism for the period 2013 to 2015. There have also been bilateral agreements ‘inherited’ from the Soviet Union, such as the agreement ‘On principles of sending and receiving Vietnamese citizens to work in enterprises of the Russian Federation’ signed

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between the Soviet Union and Vietnam on 28 October 1992 (Ryazantsev, 2005, p. 81). Russia has a big interest in Vietnam’s oil and gas reserves and has invested in Vietnam’s largest power plants, such as Ninh Thuận 1 and Dung Quất. In total, Russia has 104 direct investment projects in Vietnam, worth two billion USD, and Vietnamese firms are operating twenty projects in Russia with an estimated net worth of 2.5 billion USD .33 Trade between the two countries grew by 20 percent annually between 2010 and 2015, and during a visit by the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to Vietnam in April 2015 both sides committed to boosting bilateral trade to USD 10 billion before 2020.34 Russian tourists have also been flocking to Vietnam in recent years, with 190,000 recorded in the first ten months of 2014 before a major setback caused by the Ukraine crisis.35 Vietnam has been waiving visas for Russian citizens since 2009 and the number of Russian tourists increased 7.45 times within five years following the introduction of the visa-free regime.36 The existing economic interests and past ideological and political ties between the two countries have contributed to the relaxation in visa processing for Vietnamese citizens, allowing virtually everyone to engage in transnational migration regardless of their socio-economic situation. Irregular immigration to Russia cannot be discussed without reference to the shadow economy that both stimulates and benefits from it. Russia’s shadow economy, which is one of the largest in the world and where most irregular migrants earn a living, produces 43.8 percent of the country’s GDP (Schneider et al., 2010). The importance of the shadow economy is a common feature across transitional economies in Eastern and Central Europe, and it is seen as deriving from the need to circumvent inefficient policies in command economies (Feige & Ott, 1999, p. 4). The overlap of political elites and economic elites within Russian society and the co-existence of state and non-state activities and interests in the Russian shadow economy (see Fleming, Roman, & Farrell, 2000, p. 404) have led the government to turn a blind eye to the prevalence of irregular and criminal business practices in the sector, further fueling the demand for irregular migrant labor. Migrants have no trouble finding jobs and staying under the radar in a vast and rapidly 33 Source: http://en.vietnamplus.vn/vietnam-russia-eye-bright-future-pm/74076.vnp, accessed 9 September 2015. 34 Source: http://tuoitrenews.vn/politics/27302/vietnam-russia-to-step-up-allaround-tiesespecially-trade-energy, accessed 9 September 2015. 35 Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-06/russian-tourists-defect-from-vietnamamid-rouble-trouble/6753120, accessed 9 September 2015. 36 Source: http://tuoitrenews.vn/business/28561/vietnam-likely-to-scrap-visas-for-uk-franceaustralia-and-more, accessed 9 September 2015.

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developing country. Seventy-four percent of Russia’s 142.5 million people live in large cities and urban agglomerations where the insatiable appetite for cheap goods and labor creates abundant opportunities for irregular migrants. The ever-expanding Moscow metropolis is home to a swelling population of 11.5 million by official statistics, which could increase to anywhere between 13 and 17 million if irregular migrants are taken into account.37 Following the so-called ‘economic shock therapy’ characterized by high inflation, unemployment, and a steep decline in living standards in the early post-Soviet years (Zayonchkovskaya, 1999b, p. 108), the energy-dependent economy of Russia experienced impressive growth between 2000 and 2014 (with some minor setbacks in 2009), making the country the ninth-largest economy in the world. Remarkable economic prosperity has allowed a large amount of revenue to be funneled into infrastructure investment, increased disposable incomes by sevenfold, and led to an unprecedented consumer boom (KPMG, 2013, p. 9). The rapid development of the private sector, the deregulation of the commercial and financial sectors, private land ownership, and the relaxation of population mobility provided vital stimuli to the expansion and diversification of Russia’s labor market. New employment opportunities emerged, particularly in the fast-growing sectors of construction and commerce (Zayonchkovskaya, 1999b, pp. 108-109). Yet economists are not convinced that Russia’s economic outlook will remain positive in the years to come. Given that contractions and expansions of the Russian economy are largely contingent on the world’s oil and gas prices, increased supplies of oil and gas across the world (thanks to advanced drilling technologies) cast doubts on the future of the Russian economy (KPMG 2013, p. 11). The 2014-2015 conflict in Ukraine and the economic sanctions that ensued have further depressed the economic forecast for Russia, deepening the sense of insecurity and uncertainty within the shadow economy on which irregular migrants depend. Past experiences in Russia have shown that xenophobia tends to escalate during economic downturns, as migrants easily become scapegoats for job losses (Chang, 2012, p. 13).

The Russian immigration regime Russia’s immigration policies are a site of tension between an acute need for migrant labor and intense anti-immigrant public sentiments. The Russian 37 Source: Moscow population: capital may hold 17 million people, http://www.telegraph. co.uk/sponsored/rbth/society/8555676/Moscow-17-million-people.html, accessed 15 June 2015.

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immigration regime has experienced profound changes since the end of the Soviet era, moving from a laissez-faire approach in the early 1990s to restrictive immigration laws in the early 2000s, and later to an ‘open door’ migration policy with respect to CIS citizens in 2007. These radical shifts in the Russian migration regime within such a short period of time, suggests Pilkington (1998, p. 20), tally with the reconfigurations of Russian national identity and self-esteem. Up to now, immigration policy making has been done in a reactive and emergency-oriented manner rather than a systematic and proactive one (Ivakhnyuk, 2009). Decades of state-controlled human movements during the Soviet era have blunted the capacity of the sovereign Russian state to deal with a massive influx of immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. Some Russian commentators have even gone as far as proclaiming that ‘there is no population policy in Russia’ (Perevedentsev, 1999, p. 30). Others describe the immigration policy of Russia as ‘chaotic and unaccountable’ (Davé, 2014a, p. 2) and directionless (Malakhov, 2014). Concerns about people smuggling, human trafficking, national security, and crime largely shape the ways immigration policies are formulated and enforced, overshadowing the demand for foreign labor, capital, and consumer goods. Ironically, the tightening of immigration and border control has not stemmed irregular flows but seemed to aid their further growth (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 26). Concerns about national security have been exploited by both anti- and pro-immigration voices in order to justify the need to tighten or relax Russia’s immigration legislation. It is believed that economic opportunities in Russia would reduce poverty and boost social security systems among impoverished families in the former Soviet republics, thereby increasing social stability and preventing human displacement in the region (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 35). Nevertheless, fears of Chinese expansionism and Islamic terrorism, especially following the Dubrovka Theater hostage crisis in 2002, have prompted a number of measures to hold immigration inflows in check, the most notable of which are the Concept of the State Migration Policy of the Russian Federation, adopted in 2002 as the official guideline for the Russian migration policy (Government of Russian Federation, 2002), and the Federal Law On the Legal Status of Foreign Citizens on the Territory of the Russian Federation (No. 115-FZ of July 25, 2002). The final version of the Concept shifted radically from its earlier drafts: the recognition of Russia’s demand for foreign labor and the need for ‘reasonable management of migration flows for the sake of realization of intellectual and labor capacities of migrants’ (Government of Russian Federation, 1999) gave way to the imperative to fight irregular migration. In the same vein, the Federal Law prescribes a number

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of restrictions on foreigners, including the registration of residence within seven days of arrival, the limitation of temporary stays to three months, a quota regime for permits for temporary residence in Russia, a restriction of the hiring of foreigners to licensed employers only, and the possession of a work permit as a prerequisite for employment. While the Law itself is already prohibitive, pervasive red tape and corruption in implementation further impair foreigners’ ability to secure employment in the formal economic sector. Residence registration alone requires numerous endorsements at different levels. There are two types of residence registration: 1) registration of arrival (регистрация о прибытии) for those on short-term stay visas, including tourists, visitors, and students; and 2) registration of residence (регистрация o проживании) for three-year work permit holders (РВП – Разрешение на временное проживание) and permanent residents (VID – вида на жительство). Those in category 1 must re-register their residence every time they re-enter Russia from overseas trips or after staying in a hotel or hospital; if they do not, they are subject to an administrative fine of RUB 2,000-5,000 or even deportation. Facing heavy criticisms from academics and the media, the Federal Government adopted two important laws in 2006: – the Federal Law No. 110-FZ of July 18, 2006 on Amendments to the 2002 Federal Law on Legal Status of Foreign Citizens on the Territory of the Russian Federation, and – the Federal Law No. 109-FZ of July 18, 2006 on Registration of Foreign Citizens and Stateless Persons in the Russian Federation. These new laws aim to relax restrictions on CIS immigrants coming to Russia under visa-free regimes, exempting them from the quota system, simplifying their residence registration and work permit application procedures, and extending their permit to stay to 180 days. Nevertheless, after multiple reviews and revisions, the legal frameworks for migrant registration and work permit application in Russia remain excessively complicated and time-consuming, while corruption is rife. The easy access to a large pool of irregular migrants already circulating in the local labor market and the nominal penalties for employment law violations lead employers to bypass the legal procedures involved in the recruitment of foreign labor (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 32). Vladimir Putin himself has acknowledged that cumbersome bureaucratic procedures for obtaining legal employment in Russia are responsible for the concentration of immigrants in the shadow economy (IOM, 2008, p. 15). In an address to the Russian Federation’s National Security Council on 17 March 2005, he recognized the importance

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of shifting the country’s approach to migration in order to capitalize on its benefits.38 This has led to a new Concept of the State Migration Policy of the Russian Federation to 2025, launched by Putin in 2012.39 Putin, however, made an exclusive reference to the Russian-speaking CIS citizens who are considered a better fit for Russian society than non-CIS migrants. The law amendments led to a surge of work permits granted to CIS citizens in 2008, which nearly tripled those awarded to non-CIS nationals (1.596 million and 560,000 respectively). Citizenship legislation is even more prohibitive: the 2002 Federal Law on citizenship allows foreign citizens to apply for Russian citizenship only after five years of ‘uninterrupted legal stay’ in Russia (Ivakhnyuk, 2008). ‘Legal stay’ means the possession of a valid work permit or permanent residency as well as voluntary health insurance (ДМС – Добровольное медицинское страхование), a taxpayer identification number (ИНН – Идентификационный номер налогоплательщика), and a pension identification number (СНИЛС – Страховой номер индивидуального лицевого счёта). The policy renders virtually every Vietnamese migrant ineligible for naturalization. This should be seen in a context where the majority of Vietnamese migrants consider the country their primary destination, and not a transit route for further migration to the West (Tishkov et al., 2005, p. 37). Migration policies in contemporary Russia inherit many features of the heavy-handed authoritarian governance approach during the Soviet era when population movements were strictly under state control, internal migration was severely restricted by the propiska (territorial registration) system, and millions of people perished in involuntary migration programs that were used as tools of political suppression. From 1932 to 1991, it was compulsory for Soviet citizens to register their residency at a specific address, which would be certified with a stamp in the passport by the Ministry of Interior (Ivakhnyuk, 2009). Without the propiska, they would not have access to employment, education, healthcare, and other social benefits. As such, the propiska functioned as an effective device to regulate and control human movements within the Soviet Union. There were, nevertheless, reports of citizens skirting the propiska restrictions by various means, including engaging in bogus or strategic marriages (Perevedentsev, 1999, p. 33). Although the propiska system has been abolished and mobility restrictions have been relaxed for Russian citizens nowadays, its remnants are still visible in the 38 Source: http://archive.kremlin.ru/text/appears/2005/03/85300.shtml, accessed 20 October 2015 39 Source: http://www.fms.gov.ru/documentation/koncep_mig_pol/, accessed 20 October 2015.

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current migration regime. Today, one’s residence is to be simply registered, not granted, providing individuals with greater physical mobility in the Russian territory. Yet migrants continue to be at the mercy of authorities (Zayonchkovskaya, 1999b, p. 134). The absence of a clear legal framework setting uniform and transparent procedures for residence registration allows both central and regional bureaucracies to control and restrict migration into the country (Zhukov, 1995). Gaps in the legislation provide them with considerable leeway in the interpretation and implementation of policies, depriving migrants of transparency, certainty, or recourse to legal support. Founded in 1992, the Federal Migration Service (Федеральная Mиграционная Cлужба – FMS) is Russia’s federal apparatus responsible for governing human movements of both forced and voluntary nature within and into the country. With territorial units down to the provincial level, the FMS issues visas, permits, invitations, and registrations for foreigners and is responsible for combating irregular migration. The FMS has been the subject of public criticism and state discipline since its inception. The fact that territorial migration services at the regional level are subordinate to both the federal FMS and regional authorities, whose priorities and strategies do not always overlap, renders its vertical structure ‘ad hoc’ and inefficient (Pilkington, 1998, p. 61; Zayonchkovskaya, 1999b, p. 135). FMS units at the regional level are constrained by inadequate staffing, a lack of training, and poor provision of equipment and information technology (Pilkington, 1998, p. 204). After its systematic failures in the handling of the 1990s refugee and migrant inflows, the FMS was closed down in 2000, only to be re-established in 2002 under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior. Since 2004, the FMS has been operating under the direct guidance of the President of the Russian Federation, a shift that shows the weight of immigration issues in the political agenda. Migration policymaking, too, has been in the direct command of the President, with minimal involvement of and/or influence from opposition parties or the civil society. In the early 1990s, the FMS’s work was focused on four areas, namely: 1) protection of the interests of Russian citizens within and beyond the country’s borders; 2) regulation of migratory processes (including a mandate for policy making); 3) provision of aid to refugees and forced migrants; and 4) facilitation of the socio-economic adaptation of refugees and forced migrants (Pilkington, 1998, p. 63). Toward the end of the millennium, there was a radical reorientation of the FMS’s mandate, from humanitarian assistance for refugees and displaced people to immigration control and policing, triggered by the shift in state discourse and public sentiments toward migration securitization. The treatment of the immigrant as a security threat has

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entitled the FMS to assume absolute authority in migration-related matters. FMS officers are allowed to conduct random, arbitrary document checks in public places and private homes, while regional authorities are given further leeway in their regulation of immigrant-related schemes and activities. While inefficiencies in the Russian government’s management of migration are often attributed to the absence of a robust and consistent legal framework (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 36), the FMS as an executive body is not entirely inculpable. Since the adoption of the Concept of the State Migration Policy of the Russian Federation and the Federal Law On the Legal Status of Foreign Citizens on the Territory of the Russian Federation in 2002, FMS crackdowns on irregular immigrants have intensified, sometimes involving police and OMON forces. The use of force and the deployment of militia officers in anti-immigration campaigns have resulted in an alarming rise in human rights violations. Corruption has come to be seen as a defining feature of the FMS. ‘Harvesting’ bribes from irregular migrants is reportedly an organized and routinized practice of FMS militia officers (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 38). The authorization of spot-checks in public has inadvertently opened up a new avenue for FMS and police officers to generate a lucrative source of cash income from protection racketeering. Mainstream media routinely question the real motives behind market raids. The Moscow Times, for example, labeled a major raid on Sadovod in 2014 as a way for government officials to ‘redistribute property’ or ‘get a new car or dacha.40’ Likewise, the mass arrests following the killing of a Russian man by an Azeri migrant in 2013 were described as a mock attempt to show the public that the authorities were taking action against illegal immigration while, in reality, detained workers were reportedly released as soon as they paid the police a bribe of RUB 5,000 (USD 140).41 The intensification of control and policing techniques in migration governance therefore does not produce the intended effect of curbing irregular migration. On the contrary, it aids its further growth, helping to inflate the shadow economy and the irregular migrant population to a magnitude unprecedented and unparalleled in the rest of the world. Migrants’ lives become extremely precarious when FMS officers and police forces join unscrupulous market bosses in their exploitation. Russian scholarship suggests that decades of central planning and political repression have left indelible marks on the so-called ‘Russian character’ 40 Source: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/police-raid-giant-sadovod-marketdetain-1000-migrants/488641.html, accessed 7 May 2014. 41 Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/27/opinion/moscow-market-worker/index.html, accessed 7 May 2015.

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or ‘Russian mentality’ (Ivakhnyuk, 2009; Roshin, 2008) that permeates the Russian bureaucracy. New political and economic realities notwithstanding, bureaucrats continue to approach immigration issues with ‘Soviet-style attitudes’ (Zayonchkovskaya, 1999b, p. 134) that are in favor of coercion and the use of force (Mukomel & Payin, 1999, p. 179). This resonates with studies from Eastern and Central Europe that also report the arbitrary use of force and disregard for human rights as entrenched features in the ways in which the state deals with immigrants (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 85). Yet some scholars question the attribution of Russia’s heavy-handed treatment of immigrants to the Soviet governmentality and argue that, throughout the country’s long history, bans and restrictions have always been the mainstay of any given policy, while permits and allowances are sidelined (Ioffe & Nefedova, 1999, p. 244). In other words, the inclination for prohibitive measures is a long-standing tradition in Russian governmentality rather than a Soviet legacy. Russia’s transition to a new political and economic climate has only changed the mechanisms and networks that non-state actors deploy to circumvent restrictions and skirt bans. The notions of human rights, freedom, and individual agency become impertinent in a context where nationalist sentiments are strong and the state’s power is unquestionably absolute. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a sense of anxiety and insecurity among citizens of the once Cold War superpower has allowed autocratic government to be easily justified in the language of nation-building and resistance to foreign aggression.

The securitization of migration There has been a shift in thinking about the border in recent decades. The conventional conception of the border as a topological marker of the nation-state’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, once taken for granted, has been challenged by critical border studies that consider the border as a social and mental construct with material effects (Baud & Van Schendel, 1997; Brunet-Jailly, 2011; Newman, 2011). Borders have come to be considered as complex and fluid processes, practices, discourses, institutions, and networks that shape and reshape people’s mobility and immobility, inclusion and exclusion, entitlement and disenfranchising. As globalization processes intensify, the contingency and temporality of borders have become universal features. In such a context, the questions of identity and belonging are tied less with one’s physical location or even the material credentials of membership than to the social imaginary of a community, society, and those

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deemed ‘rightfully’ a part of it. Central to contemporary debates on borders and mobilities is the question of power. Borders and bordering practices, Paasi (2009) argues, are manifestations of power relations, state authority, agency, and contestation. Whether in their material, virtual/digital, territorial, or social forms, borders embody state power in dictating access to and coverage of rights, entitlements, and political identities (Agnew, 2010). The disciplining of immigrants is not solely a matter of bans, restrictions, control, deportation, administrative barriers, and the use of force, but also about the representations, world views, ideologies, or discourses that rationalize those government techniques and make the exercise of power possible. In other words, disciplining is first and foremost about a broad set of cognitive assumptions and mental categories through which the world is conceived and ordered (Pécoud, 2013, p. 7). The securitization of migration is not unique to Russia, but a global trend (see Bigo, 2002; Fassin, 2011). There has been a major shift in public debates on migration in recent decades – a preoccupation with the links between migration and the economy prior to the 1990s has been overshadowed by alarmist security overtones (Alexseev, 2006, p. 6). Since the 1990s, major migration destinations both at the core and on the periphery of the world’s political and economic system have been enveloped in growing anxieties about human mobility and the security threats this entails. The securitization of migration is not just articulated in the conventional sense of sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also in social and economic languages. Migrants are believed to potentially dilute, contaminate, and undermine the ethno-national identity of relatively homogeneous nation-states in ethnic and religious terms (Wæver, Buzan, Kelstrup, & Lemaitre, 1993). This is further exacerbated by recent economic downturns that intensify the competition for increasingly scarce resources and a growing sense of economic insecurity in host societies. Walls and barriers in both material and statutory terms have been erected and territorial control strategies have been intensified and diversified to protect migrantreceiving societies from unwanted or even dangerous mobile subjects. In this new mode of immigration governmentality, nation-states are ‘imagined’ (see Anderson, 2006) as ethnically and culturally homogeneous political entities and as both territorial and social ‘containers’ (Geiger, 2013, p. 16). Such a representation of the nation-state serves to justify and legitimize the mechanisms and techniques of inclusion and exclusion, mobility and immobility, which come to be seen as constituent elements of the ‘quintessence’ of nation-states (Balibar, 2005). To paraphrase Torpey (2000, p. 6), the governing of migration across national boundaries and the ‘policing’ and steering of foreign populations constitute the very ‘stateness of states.’

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In a context where international migration has come to be regarded as a ‘deviant’ process, a social or political ‘risk,’ and a dangerous challenge to territorially, ethnically, and culturally ‘homogeneous’ nation-states (Geiger, 2013, p. 17), techniques of racial categorization, otherization, and stratification are deployed to separate the wanted from the unwanted, the desirable from the undesirable, who would then be subject to distinct assemblages of disciplinary measures. At the core of the world’s capitalist system, typologies of immigrants based on national disparity, racial classification, and human capital variation are developed to inform immigration and border control measures. In Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, for example, bifurcated citizenship/residency laws reward ‘high quality’ individuals with claims and entitlements comparable to those afforded to local populations, while subjecting low-waged workers to restrictive terms of employment, denying them opportunities for naturalization, and blocking their recourse to social security and institutional support (Constable, 2007; Hoang, 2017; Lan, 2006; Shipper, 2002; Yeoh, 2006). While such a system appears to be predicated solely on meritocracy and classism (see Lan 2006, p. 44), ideals about what constitutes merit (e.g. Western higher education qualifications, English language proficiency, well-remunerated employment in multi-national corporations, etc.) denote the persistence of white supremacist ideologies in the postcolonial imaginary. Likewise, in the USA, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, a range of disciplinary tactics and technologies are employed to entice the ‘best and brightest’ foreigners to come and stay, as well as to keep settlement and membership prospects beyond the reach of less desirable populations (see Kapur & McHale, 2005; Nonini, 2002; Williams & Baláž, 2012; Yeoh, 2006). The disenfranchising of subaltern migrant subjects, some argue, is motivated by the state’s intent to defend the rights, privileges, and welfare benefits of its citizenry (see Geiger, 2013, p. 20). Yet, others believe that the securitization of migration, the policing of borders, and the production of boundaries are, in essence, political games exploiting the public unease about immigration (Bigo, 2002; Fassin, 2011). Indeed, anti-migrant rhetoric was instrumental in the campaign for Moscow’s mayoral elections in 2013 (Davé, 2014a, p. 2). In 2005, nationalist politician Dmitry Rogozin released a campaign video with the slogan, ‘Let’s clean the rubbish away from Moscow.’ The ‘rubbish’ was clearly migrant workers, who were pictured speaking bad Russian and leering at a blonde Russian woman. The video appeared to boost Rogozin’s approval ratings and he later became the deputy prime minister. 42 In the 42 Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/30/hardline-australia-confusedscandinavia-and-tense-russia-the-global-immigration-picture, accessed 2 April 2018

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Russian Far East, local politicians are believed to play on uncertainty and exploit public fears in the bargaining game with the federal government over power and economic resources (Alexseev, 2006, p. 236). Larin (2012, pp. 76-77), on the other hand, suggests that fueling the paranoia over immigration could be a strategic attempt by local authorities to misdirect attention from the shortcomings of the host society itself. Given Russia’s current position in global geopolitics, it is understandable why national security concerns and nationalist sentiments overshadow economic needs in the public discourse about immigrants. In the media and government’s reports, irregular migration has been associated with mounting organized crime, the expanding shadow economy, social disruptions, cramped and often dangerous housing conditions, and increasing stress on social infrastructure. Such a negative portrayal of irregular migrants serves to justify and reinforce stricter control of mobility inflows and even the use of force in anti-immigration campaigns. Anti-immigrant sentiments are, nevertheless, not expressed in the form of blanket hostility to all foreigners but particularly directed to the racial Other coming from outside the European part of the former Soviet Union, particularly from Asia and Africa. Due to their substantial demographic size and economic influence in Russia, Chinese migrants have come to be seen as a major threat to Russia’s national security, economic stability, and racial harmony (Datsyshen, 2012; A. Larin, 2012). In fact, fears of the ‘yellow peril’ in Europe date back to the late nineteenth century, based on the twin concerns of economic competition and perceived cultural difference (Parker, 1998, p. 70). Scholars note that citizens during Soviet time harbored elaborately exaggerated fears of a Chinese ‘silent’ invasion and conquest of Russia – a sentiment that seems to have grown even stronger in post-Soviet Russia (Alexseev, 2006, p. 47; De Tinguy, 1998, p. 310). Today, these fears are compounded by a dramatic population decline among Russians and the increasing visibility of Chinese workers and traders in the Russian Far East. Restrictive, exclusionary, and punitive measures have been introduced at both central and regional levels to keep Chinese immigration in check (V. Larin, 2012, p. 78). Likewise, migrants from Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus (a.k.a. Transcaucasia) are generally viewed in a negative light because of their perceived links with criminal activities and terrorism, respectively, which are often exaggerated by the media. Compared to other CIS immigrants, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks tend to have lower levels of education and Russian prof iciency and are more likely to be subjected to document checks, fines, detentions, and deportations (Davé, 2014a, p. 2).

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The protectionist immigration regime is clearly at odds with the demographic and economic realities of Russia. Since the early days of post-Soviet Russia, there has been alarm about a deepening demographic crisis, which is ‘unparalleled in its long history’ (Perevedentsev, 1999, p. 17). The country’s total fertility rate has been at or below replacement level since the mid-1970s, largely due to Russian parents’ self-imposed restrictions on the number of births (Velkoff, 1999, p. 6). In the period 2005 to 2010, the total fertility rate was 1.44, which was exacerbated by a crude death rate of 15, nearly twice the world average. 43 The average population growth rate has been negative at -0.2 percent for the past 20 years. It is projected that Russia will need more than 25 million immigrants to compensate for the labor force decline within the next 20 years (Ivakhnyuk, 2008). Along the same line, Vishnevsky (2004, p. 182-193) predicts that by 2050, there will be a 40 percent reduction in the Russian population, and the proportion of people who are working age will decline from 60 percent to 47 percent. There seems to be a consensus among Russian scholars that immigration will be the most important, if not the only, mechanism to reverse the alarming rate of population decline in the country (Demko et al., 1999, p. xiv). The disjuncture between policy and reality begets a fertile ground for the expansion of the shadow economy and transnational networks of human smuggling. Concerns have been raised about adverse impacts of Russia’s exclusionary approaches to migrants (Chubais, 2003; Gaidar, 2005). In the face of rapid population decline and labor scarcity, an unwelcoming legal and institutional environment is detrimental to Russia’s economy and society in the long run. It foments feelings of alienation and non-committal attitudes among millions of people who live in the country for decades, if not for generations, potentially leading to a scenario resembling what Martin Luther King, Jr. (quoted in Carson et al., 1987) cautioned us against: There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have stake in their society protect that society, but when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.

Transience, be it a subjective or objective experience, in time or in space, is a quality that makes migrants ‘simultaneously marginal and threatening’ (Van 43 Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, http://esa.un.org/wpp/ unpp/p2k0data.asp, accessed 15 June 2015.

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de Veer, 1995, p. 6). Russian scholars have raised concerns about a security dilemma, arguing that simple exclusionist measures such as border control or worker registration are likely to backfire as long as the economic demand for low-cost migrant labor persists (Alexseev, 2006, p. 227). Migration securitization, it is believed, potentially discourages return migration, increases the sophistication of immigrant smuggling networks, drives migrant labor markets underground, and fosters corruption in migrant-receiving states. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau (1984, p. xiv) acknowledges the potency of biopower as a strategy through which a state secures its territory, but at the same time emphasizes ‘the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline.”’ As such, migration securitization may result in diminished security (Alexseev, 2006). Indeed, recent studies have pointed out the complex and interdependent relationships between migration securitization, corruption, illegality, and criminality in Russia (Chang, 2012; A. Larin, 2012). Migrants are able to engage in extralegal activities because the legislation is incompatible with economic realities and such activities are condoned and even assisted by corrupt authorities. In other words, migration securitization perpetuates a ‘vicious cycle’ of restriction – illegality – corruption – illegality – restriction. As such, the shadow economy is both an outcome and an antecedent of clandestine migration. A more humane and realistic approach to migration would help the Russian state not only combat human smuggling and trafficking effectively but also foster immigrants’ loyalty and commitment to the country, which would strengthen Russia’s national security in the long run.

Russian migrantophobia We do not run into hooligans every day. But (we avoid going out on) May 9th, the Victory Day … they could get hyped up. When they attack someone, they would beat the person to death. No one could stop them. Once, a friend of mine from Sài Gòn was on the metro with his Russian friend – a woman friend, his co-worker – when a skinhead came up. He took a good look at my friend and asked: ‘Where are you from?’ My friend said: ‘Vietnam.’ He then grabbed my friend and beat him. The poor man was bleeding from the mouth. The skinhead lifted him up then hurled him down. The girl did not dare say a word. They would have beaten her too if she had said anything. He was bashed senseless. The skinhead only stopped when my friend passed out. Yet, the man still counts himself lucky. Others have been beaten to death.

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Above was how Nga, a 60-year-old moneylender, related a savage assault on her friend, a terrifying experience that throws light upon the sense of fear palpable in Vietnamese migrants’ narratives. Although my interlocutors have never been subjected to racist attacks as violent as the one Nga’s friend was lucky enough to survive, fears of racist gangs were routinely brought up in our conversations, especially when people sought to explain their choices of accommodation or justify self-imposed mobility restrictions. Often referred to as ‘hooligans’ by Vietnamese migrants, members of farright groups and youth subcultures have been emboldened by intensifying anti-immigrant sentiments among the general public, who saw their living standards deteriorate rapidly in the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the early years, post-Soviet social panic and economic shock created ideal conditions for the resurgence of fascist tendencies and nationalism-driven politics within Russian society (see Shenfield, 2016; Umland, 2005; Worger, 2012). What was viewed as the nation-state’s primary threat shifted from Western adversaries to people of color, who were seen as disrupting Russia’s ethnic homogeneity and polluting her racial purity (see Chang, 2012, p. 10; Laruelle, 2010, p. 19). Scholars note striking parallels between post-Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany and raise concerns about the looming threat of fascism in a volatile political environment (see Ianov, 1995, for example). In 2004, Vietnamese communities in Russia were shaken by the horrific murder of Vũ Anh Tuấn, a 20-year-old Vietnamese student killed in St Petersburg by a skinhead gang. Tuấn was on his way home from a friend’s birthday party on the evening of 13 October 2004 when he was randomly attacked and stabbed to death by 18 skinhead youths dressed in black. 44 Seventeen gang members were later arrested and charged with Tuấn’s murder but, to the outrage of foreign students and Vietnamese communities, they were subsequently acquitted. Although it was not the first time such a racially motivated attack had happened, the brutality of the incident and the Russian government’s failure to redress such blatantly racist violence struck terror into migrant communities. Racist attacks against Vietnamese migrants continue. A Vietnamese market trader was stabbed to death in Moscow in March 2008,45 and another student – 21-year-old Tăng Quốc Bình – was murdered in 44 Source: Bắt kẻ tình nghi sát hại sinh viên Vũ Anh Tuấn (Men suspected of murdering student named Vũ Anh Tuấn arrested, VN Express http://vnexpress.net/tin-tuc/the-gioi/bat-ke-tinhnghi-sat-hai-sinh-vien-vu-anh-tuan-2020276.html, accessed 29 May 2017. 45 Source: Vietnamese woman stabbed to death in Moscow, Sputnik News, https://sputniknews. com/russia/20080322101990463/, accessed 29 May 2017.

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Moscow in a similar manner in 2009, 46 both without any legal redress. Ten years on from the senseless killing in St Petersburg, my interlocutors still make references to Tuấn’s case as proof of how vulnerable they are in Russian society, despite the fact that racial hate crimes seem to have declined since 2009. 47 Migrantophobia expresses social anxieties in a tumultuous transition time. Market transition, which involves property reform, the expansion of the private sector, and the withdrawal of state control over the economy, led to a free and diverse but also more competitive labor market (Gerber, 2002, p. 631). These radical changes produced a sharp growth in unemployment, which affected youths the most. Rising xenophobia is by no means a Russiaspecific phenomenon. Reports of hostility towards non-white foreigners and the surge of fascist skinheads are found across Eastern and Central Europe. In Hungary, for example, Chinese migrants are often subject to physical violence by skinheads, sometimes with deadly consequences (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 34). Surveys also reveal growing hostility towards immigrants in other post-communist countries, where local populations feel their ‘ethnic purity’ and ‘cultural homogeneity’ are being threatened by rising tides of non-white migrants (Drbohlav, 2000; Haerpfer & Wallace, 1998). Nyíri (2003) notes that xenophobia levels in Central and Eastern Europe do not seem to be correlated to living standards, cultural-historical experience, education, civil society patterns, or even the number of immigrants. How migration issues are dealt with in political discourse and the media might be the key to negative attitudes to immigrants in the general public. The post-Soviet economic transition deepened social inequalities, pauperized large segments of the population, and disrupted the fabric of Russian society. Material hardship characterized by falls in real incomes, frequent wage arrears, unemployment, temporary lay-offs and enforced ‘holidays’, inflation, and the loss of housing and savings (Pilkington, 1998, p. 141) went hand in hand with the social chaos associated with, but not restricted to, high mortality rates, alcohol abuse, mental illness, and family disruptions (Paci, 2002). Migrants were seen as piling pressure on the already heavily burdened social infrastructure of Russia, a perception which has been dismissed by scholars as exaggerated (Perepelkin & Stelmakh, 2005). Russians’ sense of 46 Source: Another Vietnamese student killed in Russia, Voice of Vietnam, http://english.vov. vn/society/another-vietnamese-student-killed-in-russia-101000.vov, accessed 29 May 2017. 47 Source: Under the sign of political terror. Radical nationalism and efforts to counteract it in 2009, Galina Kozhenikova, SOVA: Center for information and analysis, http://www.sova-center. ru/en/xenophobia/reports-analyses/2010/03/d18151/, accessed 29 May 2017.

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insecurity and vulnerability during the transition era required an outlet for them to vent their anxiety and anger, and anti-immigrant rhetoric fit the bill (Mukomel, 2005, p. 70). Originally targeting poor urban youths, the so-called migrantophobic movements have become bourgeois since the economic boom in the 2000s (Tarasov, 2004). Every year on 4 November – National Unity Day – members of ultranationalist organizations and skinhead groups, the most prominent of which are the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) and the Slavic Union (SS), march through the Liublino neighborhood, where foreign migrants concentrate. Although the number of demonstrators has been dwindling in the last ten years, especially after DPNI and SS were banned by the government in 2011 and their leaders were prosecuted, the annual march still spreads terror among migrants in Moscow. In 2008, the Center for Information and Analysis (SOVA), a Moscow-based nonprofit organization specializing in research and informational work on nationalism and racism, recorded 515 racist attacks, 96 of which were fatal. Although the figures have decreased tenfold (to 72 and nine, respectively, in 2016)48 thanks to the government’s radical crackdown, SOVA expresses concerns about the success, albeit modest, of the right-wing People’s Freedom Party (PARNAS – Партия народной свободы) in the 2016 parliamentary election. Hostility against migrants was exacerbated by growing fears about foreign invasion and dominance, especially amidst the rise of neighboring China as a new global superpower (A. Larin, 2012, p. 49). Surveys conducted by the Center for Migration Studies in various Russian cities in 1999, 2002, and 2004 showed that hostility towards immigrants had become widespread within the Russian population and only one-tenth of Moscow’s residents agreed that immigrants from non-CIS countries could permanently reside in Russia (Tishkov et al., 2005, p. 23). A random survey of 1,031 Muscovites around the same time found that only 1.3 percent had a positive attitude towards immigrants, while 60.5 percent had a negative attitude and 69 percent saw immigrants as a problem (Yudina, 2005, p. 597). These studies reported greater tolerance of Russian-speaking migrants from former Soviet republics, which was attributed to the belief that their cultural ‘closeness’ would reduce the potential for conflict (Pilkington, 1998, p. 183). Migrants are blamed for the expansion of the shadow economy, unemployment among Russians, the dumping of wage levels, and increased 48 Source: Old problems and new alliances: Xenophobia and radical nationalism in Russia, and efforts to counteract them in 2016, Natalia Yudina and Vera Alperovich, SOVA: Center for information and analysis, http://www.sova-center.ru/en/xenophobia/reports-analyses/2017/05/ d36995/, accessed 29 May 2017.

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inter-ethnic tension (Rybakovsky & Ryazantsev, 2005, p. 16). Research suggests that xenophobia tends to be stronger in Moscow (as compared with other regions with high concentration of migrants, such as the Far East; see A. Larin, 2012, p. 43). Local residents’ hostility as well as police abuse are attributed to migrants turning inward and isolating themselves from mainstream society, restricting their lives to the ‘cultural bubbles’ that substantially replicate their environments back home. Hostility is especially directed to migrants from outside the CIS. While it is believed that anti-migrant rhetoric in Russia is essentially anti-Muslim and largely targets Central Asian migrants (Davé, 2014a, p. 2), Chinese and Vietnamese migrants are more likely to be targeted by xenophobic youth gangs. The fact that they do not speak Russian and come from distinctively different racial and cultural backgrounds renders them alien ‘others’ who threaten the cultural identity of local populations and the social harmony of Russian society. Chinese migrants are generally viewed as distant, socially undesirable, and reluctant to assimilate (Alexseev, 2006, p. 117). China, with its swelling population and an insatiable hunger for resources, is seen as posing an imminent threat to Russia’s territorial integrity. Negative attitudes to Chinese and Vietnamese migrants are also closely related to their association with the shadow economy, which is perceived to undermine Russia’s formal economy and a source of crime and social problems. Prior to its closure, the notorious Cherkizovsky market was often portrayed by Russian media as one of the most glaring manifestations of the dark sides of Russia’s shadow economy. Social distance between non-CIS migrants such as the Chinese and Vietnamese and local Russians is exacerbated by the former’s poor language skills, raising doubts about their ability and willingness to integrate into mainstream Russian society, adopt Russian ways of life, and develop loyalty to the Russian nation-state (Alexseev, 2006, p. 120). There is a sense of superiority over East Asian migrants among Russians (V. Larin, 2012, p. 73). In public discourse, they are represented as either criminals or opportunistic individuals who engage in shady economic activities at the expense of Russian interests. As commonly observed in Eastern and Central Europe, xenophobia leads to the isolation of ethnic enclaves, which further deepens the hostility against them (see also Pieke et al., 2004, p. 146). In other words, migrant communities are compelled to become withdrawn and inward-looking when they feel threatened by negative attitudes of host populations. Yet the lack of daily contact and knowledge about each other only widens the social gap between different groups, perpetuating distorted stereotypes and entrenching irrational fears about the alien ‘others’. Contact theorists have shown that interpersonal contact is one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice

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between majority and minority group members (Allport, 1954; Williams Jr, 1947). In this line of thought, the less contact local Russians have with foreign migrants, the more fearful of and hostile toward them they become. Chinese and Vietnamese migrants routinely emerge in quantitative surveys as the least popular ethnic groups, but the level of tolerance towards the Chinese (73 percent) was almost twice as high as that towards the Vietnamese (Yudina, 2005, p. 598). The tendency of Vietnamese and Chinese migrants to cluster together in isolated ‘ethnic enclaves’ in and around suburban wholesale markets is frowned upon. It somehow convinces local Russians that migrants are both unable and unwilling to integrate into the host society, and thus represent a major threat to social harmony and stability. Public attitudes to Vietnamese migrants in Russia are somewhat similar to those found in the Czech Republic, where surveys indicate that the Vietnamese are among the least popular immigrant groups in the country (Drbohlav, 2000). Bayly (2004, p. 335) and Nožina (2010, p. 230) remark that Vietnamese migrants are now widely represented in Eastern European racist discourse as criminals who allegedly run the drugs trade, human smuggling rings, and other rackets that have pathologized post-socialist economic life. They are commonly referred to as criminalized former guest-workers (Bayly, 2004, p. 335) or ‘cigarette mafia’ (Bui, 2003) across the region. The Russian public’s attitude to migrants from East Asia, however, changes across space and time. Several studies on Chinese migrants in Russia and Eastern Europe suggest that local reactions have shifted from mistrust to grudging acceptance, indifference, and even tolerance (Chang & Rucker-Chang, 2012; A. Larin, 2012). Many local Russians have come to the realization that migrants such as those from China and Vietnam simply fill in the abandoned niches that locals are unable or unwilling to service (A. Larin, 2012, p. 52). Despite the widely held belief of Vietnamese migrants’ criminality, evidence seems to suggest that they are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime. There seem to be distinct differences in attitudes toward Chinese and Vietnamese migrants in some regions, as the former tend to be seen through an ethnopolitical lens while the latter, due to their home country’s geographical distance and insignificant status in global geopolitics, are not generally treated as a threat. Research in the Russian Far East, for example, notes that public opinions toward the Chinese have been stagnating or worsening for the last two decades (V. Larin, 2012, p. 70). The close geographical proximity to China and a recent influx of Chinese migrants, thanks to the visa-free tourism regime, have exacerbated locals’ fears of Chinese expansionism and illegality. Attitudes to migrants also vary widely across generations. Youths, especially those under 20, seem to

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harbor the most intense and categorical intolerance against the Chinese (V. Larin, 2012, p. 76). Compared to older generations, youths are subjected to greater degrees of economic insecurity and have more limited exposure to Chinese migrants and are therefore more likely to be influenced by anti-immigration rhetoric in the media. The rapid expansion of the skinhead movement and the surge in violence against foreigners in the 2000s dismayed Vietnamese migrants, who had always viewed Russians with deep affection and gratitude for the vital assistance the Soviet Union provided North Vietnam during the war and especially in the 1980s, when the country was shunned by the world because of its invasion and long occupation of Cambodia (see also Brown, 2010, p. 163). It also raised profound questions about their long-held belief in the legendary ‘Russian goodness,’ something that had been cultivated by the socialist schooling system through Russian language teaching and the adoption of a wide array of Russian education materials, and later fostered further by the enthralling migrant tales told by returned students and workers, as well as the material enchantment of their much-valued Russian goods. Of course, it was not all myths and fantasies. As illustrated by the narrative provided by a 39-year-old man named Tùng below, virtually every interlocutor had something nice to say about the ‘kind-hearted,’ ‘honest,’ ‘trusting,’ and ‘civilized’ Russians they came into contact with: We Vietnamese can never become as civilized as Russians, I must admit. I adore Russian people. They are gentle and honest, not lưu manh [thuggish or crooked] (like us). Those who come to the market on Saturday and Sunday are so gentle and polite.

While experiences of post-Soviet migrants like Tùng could be easily dismissed given their limited exposure to Russian mainstream society, similarly positive narratives from those who came to Russia before 1990 can hardly be discredited. Former students and contract workers, like 46-year-old Linh below, never missed a chance to adulate the kindness and generosity of the Russians they interacted with on a daily basis at school or in the workplace: Russians are genuinely kind. Oh, how I miss the good ol’ days! They [local Russians] were really kind to us, at least in my city [Bryansk]. We Vietnamese are generally unruly people, you know. We were so young, childish. The hostel caretaker looked after us like her own children, always knocked on our doors in the morning so we would not miss breakfast and came to every room at night to make sure we went to bed early.

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Contrary to what has been reported by some quantitative surveys (Yudina, 2005, for example), my research participants find that Russians seem to look on them more favorably than they do the Chinese. Nhung, a 50-year-old mother of two, told me that local people always asked her whether she was from Vietnam or China before declaring: ‘Вьетнам хорошо!’ (Vietnam good!). The surge of skinhead movements, as such, does not make sense to my interlocutors, many of whom start pointing the finger at themselves when searching for answers. Migrants, they believe, have only themselves to blame for any negativity in the way they are treated in Russia. Đức, a 50-year-old Sadovod trader, came to Russia in 1987 as a contract worker and had been granted permanent residency not long before we first met in 2013. Having gone through the ups and downs of Russia’s turbulent transition from the core of a decaying socialist federation to a ‘neoliberal autocracy’ (Kagarlitsky, 2002), Đức was convinced that Vietnamese migrants, including himself, had imported all the ‘vices’ from their homeland to Russia, polluted their society, corrupted all the bureaucrats, and were now having a taste of their own medicine: Some Russians have become what they are because of us Vietnamese. Here, the environment is propitious, the nature is kind, and people are very hospitable. Elderly Russian ladies ask me all the time: ‘Where are you from?’ I say: ‘Vietnam.’ ‘Oh, Vietnam, khorosho, khorosho [хорошо; good].’ Then they talk about Hồ Chí Minh, the war, so on. Some even tell me that they have been to Cam Ranh for holiday. They like it so much because Vietnamese people are really friendly. There are not many racist people in this society. Most are nice. They are very fond of us Vietnamese.

Đức’s statement expresses a common sentiment I gathered from daily conversations with migrants at the market. Contrasting ‘Russian goodness’ with ‘Vietnamese ugliness’ (Người Việt xấu xí) was the migrants’ way of explaining and justifying the radical shift in locals’ attitude to migrants as well as to vent their anger at the way their compatriots treat each other. The Vietnamese, many believe, have to catch up to the Russians in numerous respects, especially in terms of their social comportment, hygiene standards, eating habits, and respect for law and order, if they want to gain the respect and affection of local communities. As my study does not involve local Russians, it is not possible to confirm whether the views of the Vietnamese are accurate, but they reveal interesting insights into intra-ethnic dynamics and the notion of Vietnamese-ness as perceived and acted on by migrants. This will be explored in greater depth in Chapters IV and V.

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Migrants are made discursively (Pécoud, 2013, p. 11; Tyner, 2004, p. 3). Poststructuralist and feminist studies have shown how the ‘making’ of migration, mobility, and the mobile subject is embedded in the discourses and interpretations purposively constructed by various actors, including the state, media, private sector agents, activists, and migrants themselves (Constable, 2007; Hiemstra, 2010; Hoang, 2017; Lan, 2006; Tyner, 2004). The acknowledgement of the multiplicity of subjectivity and corresponding symbolizing systems in poststructural analyses allows us to see the fluidity and diversity in the relationships between a particular phenomenon or object and the meanings it denotes. The same migrant subject could be seen as an innocent and vulnerable person needing care and protection by some, and a criminal, terrorist, or, at best, opportunist illegal trespasser by others. The deployment of particular labels, signifiers, and categories generates specific meanings for social relations, producing and reinforcing social boundaries between groups of people. Discursive and institutional categorizations of migrants are tools of biopower (see Foucault, 2003) that serve to justify the disciplinary and control measures enacted by the state and its proxies to produce the so-called ‘outsiders within’ (Lan, 2008) and to institute and sanction the moral orders that normalize the ‘interior frontiers’ (Balibar, 1990) within territorial borders of the nation-state. In Russia, mainstream media play a crucial role in cultivating public anxieties about foreigners and propagating the anti-immigrant rhetoric. Media materials relating to foreign migrants and immigration are heavily biased toward crime, fraud, and violence, which is exacerbated by journalists’ penchant for clickbait and sensationalized and exaggerated headlines. An article on the state-owned ITAR-TASS,49 for example, reports the number of ‘illegal’ migrants in Russia as three million in 2014, but adds the highlighted subhead ‘Migrants committed 47,000 crimes last year.’50 The same article also cites a report commissioned by the Institute of National Strategy that highlights ‘three main characteristics of migrants since 2000’, including cultural backwardness, poor skills, and a demographic imbalance in the areas of their residence. This, it speculates, poses a high risk of domestic violence and ethnic conflicts within Russian society. Such a rhetoric deliberately ignores the fact that foreign migrants are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators, and dehumanizes their lives and experiences. Inflaming anti-immigration sentiments and the passion of nationalism, 49 ITAR-TASS is the Russian News Agency “TASS” (Информационное агентство России “ТАСС). 50 Source: http://itar-tass.com/en/russia/743702 , accessed 2 February 2015.

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scholars claim, is one of many ways the state and media seek to distract the public’s attention from the inequitable transition out of communism (Chang, 2012, p. 5). Without access to alternative sources of information or perspectives, the Russian public’s knowledge of and feelings about foreign migrants are mainly shaped by the illogical, biased media coverage. For example, research shows that the so-called ‘yellow peril’ is grossly exaggerated: public estimates of Chinese populations in the Russian Far East tend to differ from actual figures by a factor of ten (Alexseev, 2006, p. 109). Because of the illicit nature of the migrant-based economy, migrants’ activities and movements are shrouded in fear-producing doubts (Alexseev, 2006, p. 53). Having lived through a turbulent time following the Soviet Union’s collapse, citizens approach the rapid changes in Russian society with much anxiety, caution, and apprehension. Given that most of them have never had any direct personal contact with migrants, migrantophobia is, to a large extent, about Russians’ sense of uncertainty and vulnerability in their own lives. These sentiments are mirrored by the restrictive migration regime. As Gordon and Arian (2001) explain, ‘the more threatened people feel, the more incendiary the policy choice is – and vice versa.’ Realizing the risks of rising migrantophobia in Russia, the federal government has started to take measures to address it, especially in Moscow where low-waged irregular migrants concentrate (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 74). The Federal Tolerance Development Program was launched 2001 and has been adopted by all provinces in their regional tolerance development programs. It led to an unprecedented, large-scale effort to introduce tolerance to schools, but the actual impact still remains to be seen.

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Photo 1 Moscow Trade Complex (Tоргово-ярмарочный комплекс Москва), which is often referred to as Liublino market (Chợ Liu) by Vietnamese migrants

Photo 2 Yuzhnyie Vorota (Южные ворота – Southern Gates) market (also known to Vietnamese traders as Km 19 market)

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Photo 3  Inside Yuzhnyie Vorota market

Photo 4 Sadovod market (Садовод рынок), which is often referred to as Birds’ market (Chợ Chim) by Vietnamese migrants

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Photo 5 Sadovod market at 5am in November 2016; traders arriving to set up their stores for the day

Photo 6 Sadovod market at 5am in November 2016; northern car park facing Verkhniye Polya Road

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Photo 7 Sadovod market in November 2016; stores on the eastern side of the pavilions

Photo 8 Sadovod market in November 2016; a Vietnamese itinerant vendor apprehended by market security guards for working without a permit

III Navigating Russia’s shadow economy Legality for sale What makes the Russian migration regime unique is the blurred boundary between legality and illegality in the status of migrants, which is the principal source of uncertainty and precarity in their everyday lives. Despite possessing a valid visa, work permit, and residence registration, many Vietnamese in my study do not consider themselves documented migrants. Without exception, they all have entered Russia legally, with a tourist, student, business, or dependent visa. Illegality often presents itself in three main forms: overstaying the original visa; living at a place different from the registered address; and engaging in paid employment without a work permit/patent. In situations where the migrant is able to acquire a valid document, such as a work permit or a long-term dependent visa in Russia, it is largely obtained via informal channels with the assistance of commercial go-betweens. The possession of these documents, however, does not guarantee legal status because the migrant is neither sure about their authenticity nor able to demonstrate that they are currently living at the registered address. Document forgery is common across the brokerage networks catering to Vietnamese communities. Migration documents, as such, do not necessarily protect migrants from abuse, money extortion, or arbitrary detention by police or FMS officers. The complex and corrupt bureaucratic system dealing with migrants’ right to work and residence in Russia opens up lucrative income-generating avenues for commercial brokers as well as Russian bureaucrats. The migration industry thrives on the lack of transparency, red tape, and increasingly restrictive regulations regarding migrants from outside the CIS. The most common channel for acquiring a work permit is through a legally registered business with a quota for foreign workers. The introduction of a foreign labor quota in 2002 created an additional source of profits for small and medium enterprises, who could sell their quotas to migration brokers instead of granting them to their workers as required by law. Liva of the Lion Group – once the largest and most successful Vietnamese garment company in Russia – became the subject of a police investigation in 2013 due to such violations. Liva had been employing thousands of Vietnamese workers prior to the investigation and, as a result, was entitled to a sizeable quota for foreign labor. This meant the company was able to provide the visas, work permits, and residence registrations for their foreign workers at

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no cost. However, these entitlements were not conferred on Liva’s workers but sold to migration brokers, who would charge their clients an average of USD 3,500 each for a three-year visa and work permit. When police raided the factory compound in 2013, it was discovered that the majority of the Vietnamese workers employed by Liva possessed no work permit or visa. The incident led the boss and founder of the Lion Group, Trịnh Viết Ngọ, to close down Liva and flee to Germany. At the time of my fieldwork in 2014, Liva’s garments were still being traded at the market, but under unregistered brand names. Trịnh Viết Ngọ’s son had managed to keep the business afloat with dozens of loyal former workers. Prospects for restoring its past glory, however, were rather bleak, given the company’s track record of fallacious dealings and its financial breakdown following the investigation. In 2005, the federal government introduced penalties for violations relating to the hiring of foreign workers under the Code of Administrative Offenses. Violations were punishable by an administrative suspension of activity or a monetary fine. Yet the lack of a detailed and clear framework for law enforcement rendered such provisions ineffective. There was, for example, no specific timeframe for the suspension of business activity, resulting in arbitrary interpretation and nominal penalties, further fueling corruption within the judicial system. The amendments introduced in 2007 prescribed much harsher disciplinary measures, including the largest possible fine of RUB 800,000 for illegally employing a foreign national.51 Nevertheless, the incidence of work permit violations has increased consistently since 2007. In 2011, 650,000 work permit offences and 12,400 cases of temporary business suspension were recorded by the FMS.52 By October 2014, almost a million migrants had been barred entry into Russia for three years for alleged ‘criminal activities,’ which are often violations of immigration laws (Davé, 2014a, p. 2). Most of these people are from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.53 Among offenses relating to irregular migration, the most common are the production and use of forged immigration-related documents, including invitations, visas, migration cards, and work permits. Such offenses are subject to criminal charges under Article 327 of the Russian Criminal Code (the forgery, manufacture or sale of falsified documents, government awards, stamps, seals, and forms). However, success in enforcing these laws has been 51 Source: http://russiancouncil.ru/en/inner/?id_4=2195#top, accessed 31 August 2015. 52 Source: http://russiancouncil.ru/en/inner/?id_4=2195#top, accessed 31 August 2015. 53 Source: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/65000-foreigners-deported-fromrussia-in-2013/492843.html, accessed 20 October 2015.

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limited. In 2012, about 7,120 people were caught carrying forged documents, of whom only 830 were prosecuted. The organization of illegal migration became a criminal offence in 2004 with the introduction of Article 3221 to the Criminal Code, but there are still significant gaps between the legislation and law enforcement. In an attempt to fix the ineffective quota system and ease growing public discontent, an important legislative change was introduced in January 2015: work permits were replaced with work patents, which would have an initial validity of one year and be renewable for another year. Patents are issued by the regional office of the FMS and, unlike work permits, do not require a corporate sponsor. Work patent holders are free to work for any employer in the region for which the patent has been issued. There are, however, restrictions with regard to the nationality of the patent holder. The fact that only CIS citizens are eligible to apply for patents leaves the non-CIS migrant population in a state of limbo. The privileges conferred on CIS migrants reflect both Russia’s geopolitical ambitions and more a subtle racialized discourse about what constitutes a desirable immigrant. The process for a non-CIS migrant to acquire a work permit is hamstrung by excessive red tape. Their employer must obtain a permit from a local branch of the FMS for hiring foreign worker(s) of definite professions and skills, which is not possible without a positive endorsement of the FMS itself. This cumbersome procedure at the corporate level is then duplicated by the application for an individual work permit for each non-CIS worker and their registration at the local tax office. In total, the employer has to submit about 30 documents, including certified copies of the company registration certificate, state license, company charter, tax registration certificate, bank certificate showing the company account balance, balance sheet for the latest quarter, etc. (Ivakhnyuk, 2008). The lengthy administrative process, which might take up to half a year, is compounded further by multiple types of taxes, including a permission tax for every foreign worker, 40 percent ‘social tax’ to contribute to the foreign labor force wages fund, and 30 percent income tax (compared with the 13 percent income tax rate for national workers).54 These financial and opportunity costs combined contribute to driving non-CIS migrants into the shadow economy, inflating their migration costs, and fostering illegal practices in the transnational migration industry. Surveys conducted in 1994 and 2002 by Russian scholars indicated that the Chinese and Vietnamese migrants in the sample were more likely than other ethnic groups to rate their wellbeing as ‘very poor,’ 54 Source: http://fmsrf.ru/, accessed on 16 October 2015.

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something that is directly related to the way they are treated by the Russian migration regime (Ivakhnyuk, 2008). For many, market trade is not a choice or preference but the only livelihood option available.

Chợ Chim – Sadovod market The incongruity between an exclusionary migration regime and the insatiable demand for foreign labor and goods creates particularly lucrative conditions for the development of sophisticated and extensive brokerage networks in Russia (see also IOM, 2008, p. 56). In the contemporary world, notes Lemke (2002, p. 58), what appears to be a reduction of state sovereignty and territorial integrity is actually a fundamental transformation in statehood, whereby state and non-state actors co-exist on the scene of government and there is both formality and informality in techniques of government. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, former leaders of the Soviet regime used their superior positions within powerful networks to preserve, and even enhance, their material advantages after market transition (Gerber, 2002, p. 630). The emergence of powerful oligarchs in the post-Soviet era has enabled the so-called ‘subpolitics’ (see Beck, 1996, p. 18) to flourish and even bypass or contravene the law and state jurisdiction in certain economic sectors. In exchange for their support and alignment with the government, Presidents Boris Yeltsin and, later, Vladimir Putin have granted the oligarchs privileged, albeit ad hoc, access to federal politics and turned a blind eye to their irregular, sometimes illegal, business practices. Moscow wholesale markets including Chợ Vòm (Cherkizovsky), Sadovod, Liublino, and Yuzhnyie Vorota are prime examples of how such subpolitics shape Russian society and the economy from below. Thanks to their strong connections with the political elites, market owners are able to acquire or rent land at a trifling rate and then lease it to migrant traders at an exorbitant one. Because of their irregular migrant status that severely restricts their options and mobility, most traders have no choice but to accept the exploitative terms set by market owners. By paying hefty ‘protection fees’ to local authorities, market owners are able to keep their businesses away from public scrutiny and the police’s pestering and operate them as exclusive spaces, exempt from the rules and regulations that govern mainstream society. This system, however exploitative, provides migrants with some sense of security that is not always possible outside the market walls. The market, as such, grew out of irregular migration flows, but also functions as the key driver of further migration into Russia.

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The market trade model is common to transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe, absorbing a majority of Vietnamese and Chinese migrants across the region, although the degrees of state regulation and control vary greatly. While multi-ethnic markets in Central and Eastern Europe – such as Four Tigers Market in Budapest, Sapa market in Prague, Wólka Kosowska (formerly Jarmark Europa on the 10th-Anniversary Stadium [Stadion Dziesięcioleciat]) in Warsaw, and Đồng Xuân market in eastern Berlin – are a relatively well-regulated part of the formal economy (see Hüwelmeier, 2008, p. 140; Pieke et al., 2004, p. 133), Moscow markets effectively lie outside the purview of government regulation and taxation. Being able to participate in such an organized, yet extralegal, economic system is vital to the low-skilled foreign migrants who have no access to formal employment opportunities. Their undocumented status renders any spontaneous, unorganized, and disparate economic activities extremely risky, even dangerous. Market owners’ ability to run them by their own rules creates a paradox: migrants appreciate the protection they provide (from both predatory police and opportunistic criminals) while languishing under their exploitative regimes. Sadovod, my primary fieldwork site, is a typical ‘open-air’ market in post-communist Russia, supplying a wide range of affordable (and sometimes counterfeit and contraband) consumer goods to retail and wholesale customers from all over the country. Retail traders come from as far as Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, which is nine hours away by air, to acquire merchandise from Sadovod on a weekly or monthly basis. The affordability of merchandise sold at the market is made possible not only by low manufacturing costs, but also the evasion of taxes and custom duties (see also A. Larin, 2012, p. 63). Sadovod occupies an area of more than 38 hectares in Kapotnya District, 21 kilometers southeast of Moscow city center, bordering the MKAD in the east, Verkhiniye Polya Road in the north, and asphalt concrete and car assembly factories in the west and south. The main part of the market (also known as the pavilions) consists of 33 vertical linias (lanes) crosscut by three horizontal linias. There are between 100 to 135 units (côngs – stores) in each vertical linia and about 200 sale spaces (pa láts – places) in each horizontal linia, which amounts to about 4,000 sale spaces in the pavilion section. Côngs along vertical linias are wooden cabins secured by a glass door on the inside and an aluminum roller shutter on the outside, while pa láts along horizontal lines are just small spaces on the sides of cabins, each with about three to five square meters of storage secured by an aluminum roller shutter. Pa lát traders have only a narrow frontage to hang their wares and sit on low stools by the side of the linia to trade. Pavilion sections are

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roofed, yet not heated or sealed with doors or walls. Those manning pa láts are therefore exposed to piercing icy gusts throughout Russia’s brutal winter, which have proved fatal in several instances. The market was extended in 2013 with the construction of a two-story concrete building named AN to the south of the pavilions. AN is the only section of the market with central heating, although sales in the building are generally slower than in the pavilions. It comprises four linias named A, B, D, and G, with 70 stores in each, mostly specializing in low-end garments. East of AN is a small cluster of wooden cabins specializing in textile and sewing accessories. About a dozen grocery stores are organized into a separate section to the southeast of the pavilions, catering exclusively to market traders and laborers. Being of such enormous size, Sadovod provides employment to tens of thousands of traders, shop assistants, itinerant vendors, security guards, cleaners, porters, caterers, and taxi drivers, not to mention those working outside the market space in subsidiary ventures such as garment factories, imports businesses, transport services, and brokerage agencies. The vast majority of people dependent on the market for a living are foreign migrants. Sadovod sells any consumer goods there is a market demand for, but garments predominate. The garments traded at the market are diverse in source, price, and quality, varying widely from low-quality T-shirts and lingerie that cost next to nothing to high-end genuine leather and fur coats worth up to USD 15,000. The wares are mostly sourced from China, Turkey, and local suppliers. Typically, each công is occupied by one trader, but there has been an increasing trend toward co-tenancy – many côngs are shared by two traders who find it difficult to sustain the rent by themselves. The highest rentals in Sadovod are in the much sought-after CT6 and CT7 – two opposing sides of the f irst horizontal linia on the northern edge of the market, where the main gate is. A typical monthly rental in this part of the market is around RUB 550,000-650,000, which was about USD 18,000-20,000 in 2014, comparable to an average công at Liublino market. Each công along vertical linias costs between RUB 300,000 and 400,000 (USD 10,000-13,000) per month, while traders renting pa lát along the other horizontal linias pay around RUB 150,000 (USD 5,000). A typical công is around 15-20 square meters, often with an additional story or two above the shop where traders store their merchandise. The market administration may kick tenants out of their rented space at any time if there is a higher offer from another trader. Weary of extortion and disruptions, some traders decide to purchase use rights for a công of their choice, the cost of which varies between USD 30,000 and USD 200,000 depending on the time of purchase and location of the

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công, so they can have some stability and autonomy over the space. The investment does not exempt them from paying the standard rent, but only gives them the right to remain in the công. Should they decide to rent it out to a fellow trader, the market administration will collect rent from the latter and pay them a paltry share of about RUB 50,000 from the typical rental of RUB 350,000 (rate as of April 2017). This payment is often referred to as tiền kênh (difference money) by Vietnamese traders. Because trade spaces can become scarce, especially in high season and in popular parts of the market, traders are also expected to pay brokers, if any are involved, a fee of around RUB 50,000-100,000, which is referred to as ‘tea-coffee’ (чай- кофе) money, to secure a spot. The rapid expansion of the retail sector in the formal economy in recent years has led to a significant decline in market trade. The ubiquitous presence and aggressive promotional campaigns of international brands such as Levi’s, H&M, Esprit, and Zara have made brandless and counterfeit market wares much less desirable to Russian consumers. The middle-class Muscovites that I came in contact with during my fieldwork were not even aware of the existence of markets like Sadovod. A fellow academic at a local university was astonished when I first mentioned the market to him: ‘Who would shop in the market nowadays?’ This is exacerbated by the fragmentation of market trade. As discussed earlier, the closing down of Cherkizovsky market led to the scattering of market trade over multiple sites across Moscow. Sadovod is also disadvantaged by its poor connections with Moscow’s underground network – the nearest station, Kotelniki, is six kilometers away, while bus routes are not well established and subject to daily traffic congestion. Dwindling sales notwithstanding, the market’s administration has always been able to come up with new reasons to increase rental rates, with only marginal, infrequent, and isolated concessions when sales drop below a sustainable level for an extended period, and only for those who are able to bargain with them. As the ethnic group with the lowest level of Russian language proficiency and the highest rate of irregular immigration, Vietnamese migrants do not have the necessary cultural capital or social leverage to gain the upper hand in negotiations with the market’s administration and often accept whatever rate is dictated to them. Yet rent is only one of many revenue sources for the men who own Sadovod. They control and collect hefty levies for every income-generating activity within the market boundaries and punish those without a valid permit (a.k.a propusk) harshly, sometimes with force. Everyone from itinerant vendors to shop helpers, laborers, and porters has to obtain a permit and pay the appropriate levy in order to work at the market. There is very little chance

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of getting away with working without a permit, given the extensive CCTV coverage across the market and the strong presence of security guards. Yet many Vietnamese vendors still take their chances and come up with various tactics to avoid paying the exploitative levy. I experienced Sadovod’s aggressive security guards first-hand, when I came face to face with them while carrying a bag of fruit for an unregistered Vietnamese itinerant vendor who had already been on the guards’ watch list, and was only able to bail myself out of the ill-boding situation after showing my valid business visa and explaining my status to them in Russian. My interlocutors were not as lucky. All the itinerant vendors I talked to had been detained by the market’s guards multiple times, and some had been subjected to violence and even sexual assault while in detention. Forty-seven-year-old Nha below is one of them: He (the guard) twisted my arm and grabbed me by the neck as if I was a criminal. The guard in linia 26 is particularly ruthless. Once I complained: ‘You are a scoundrel! I make only 400 roubles [USD 12] a day. How can you take that much money from me?’ He dragged me to the detention room and tore my clothes to pieces.

Market traders are further required to pay RUB 800 (about USD 22 as of June 2014) for a permit that is valid for only one month, on top of the exorbitant rental discussed above. A more trivial but no less burdensome expense is the toilet fee. Every visit to the toilet costs RUB 15 (about 50 US cents), which is not an insignificant amount of money for struggling traders and waged laborers, particularly given that they spend 12 to 14 hours in the market every day. It is common for people to refrain from drinking and visiting the toilet to cut down their daily expenses. Some cash-strapped shop helpers I know even resort to relieving themselves into a chamber pot or recycled water bottle as the accumulated toilet fees account for a large proportion of their monthly income. The market bosses pass up no opportunity to exploit migrants’ irregular status for money. Shortly after traders relocated to Sadovod en masse, following the closure of Cherkizovsky market, a five-story dormitory was built on the eastern edge of Sadovod’s compound, near the grocery section. Known as Ốp Tàu đỏ (Red Chinese Dormitory) among Vietnamese – a name deriving from its red-colored façade and the current Chinese management – the dormitory charges premium rates in exchange for ‘protection’ from Russian authorities. On each floor, there are about 40 en suite rooms of two main sizes: 1) a 15 square meter single room with two bunkbeds for four tenants; and 2) a twin room unit (also known as a ‘block’) with four bunkbeds for

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eight tenants. There are also some odd-sized single rooms in the corner of each floor, which are a little larger than the standard ones and contain three bunkbeds for six tenants. There is one big communal kitchen on each floor for all tenants to share. Each room is leased to one individual who is responsible for finding enough roommates to fill up the beds, each of which could be occupied by one person or a couple. As of June 2014, a standard single room cost RUB 55,000 (USD 1,600), an odd-sized single room RUB 70,000 (USD 2,000), and a twin unit RUB 100,000 (USD 2,900) per month, exclusive of utility bills. Based on these rates, the average rent is RUB 11,000-12,500 (USD 340) per person per month. If tenants own a washing machine, they pay an extra RUB 3,000 each month for electricity and another RUB 3,500 if they have a car. While I could not obtain exact figures from the management, the dormitory houses between 1,600 and 1,800 tenants and generates a staggering revenue of RUB 11 million (USD 314,000) each month, by my rough estimate. The market owners also make copious profits from a Chinese restaurant and a club-style entertainment establishment on the ground floor (both of which reputedly supply drugs and commercial sex). Hefty ‘protection’ fees are paid to local authorities so the dormitory can be exempt from police raids and routine investigations. The building is tightly guarded by armed security men and entry is only granted to tenants with a valid permit (propusk). Unauthorized access and violations of the dormitory rules are subject to harsh, potentially violent, discipline by burly and unsympathetic Russian guards. It is mandatory that all tenants at Ốp Tàu đỏ are in possession of legal migration documents, which, technically, should allow them to be more mobile and provide them with cheaper accommodation options beyond the market compound. Yet many still prefer to pay more for a bed and less privacy in Ốp Tàu đỏ, not only because of the convenience afforded by its proximity to the market but also because they know very well the documents are meaningless to Russian authorities. This accommodation also allows tenants to avoid other security risks, such as robbery, kidnapping, and physical assault by racist gangs. Just outside Sadovod’s compound to the west is another migrant dormitory named Khách sạn Mê kông (Mekong Hotel). Formerly a factory workers’ dormitory, Mê kông became another lucrative source of income for Sadovod owners. They acquired it for a paltry amount of money and put the building under Vietnamese management. There are two main types of accommodation in Mê kông: 1) en suite studio flats, each with a kitchenette and four bunkbeds for eight tenants; and 2) large rooms, each with six bunkbeds for 12 tenants, with access to communal bathrooms and kitchens shared by the whole floor. The average rent is RUB 7,000 per bed per month, slightly

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cheaper than Ốp Tàu đỏ, but living quarters are more cramped and run-down. It is not uncommon for 20 people to share a room and up to 300 people to share a few bathrooms and a communal kitchen. Because the tenants mostly work at the market and tend to have the same daily routines, the hallways, kitchens, and bathrooms are almost empty during the day, but become overcrowded, noisy, and chaotic in the wee hours of the morning and late afternoon, making ordinary chores onerous and stressful. Squalid living quarters become breeding grounds for both disease and conflict, sometimes with heartbreaking consequences. While Mê kông shares a common management structure and security system with Ốp Tàu đỏ, there are some differences in the way it is operated that make migrants’ lives both easier and more difficult at the same time. It is not mandatory for tenants to have valid migration documents, but those without papers have to pay a ‘protection’ fee of RUB 2,000 per month on top of the rent. If migrants choose to live in private accommodation away from the market there is a high chance of them stumbling upon police and facing arrest or money extortion, so daily commute to the market, especially by public transport, is extremely risky. Mê kông’s flexibility with regard to tenancy requirements (in contrast with those of Ốp Tàu đỏ) makes it an ideal refuge for large numbers of undocumented migrants working at Sadovod. It is also occasionally used by garment factory owners as a temporary shelter for workers who are displaced by police raids while they search for a new site to relocate them to. The ‘protection’ fee, nevertheless, does not guarantee that the building is police-proof, as the money is only paid to local police who are routinely bypassed by federal security forces with regard to raids or spot checks. The most that bribed officers can do in many situations is to raise the alarm with the dormitory management if possible, albeit often at the last minute, so tenants can escape in time. Despite these occasional frights, Mê kông is still the only safe haven for many undocumented migrants and even for those with papers, as they all know the documents do not mean much to Russian authorities. Living next to the market and in a large Vietnamese community gives them a sense of security that is important enough to offset daily discomforts and disruptions. Those who choose to sublet a room in an apartment in one of the neighboring suburbs such as Kotelniki, Belaya Dacha, and Kapotnia generally pay an amount equal to what two beds in Mê kông cost, yet for more privacy and comfort. However, that option comes with an additional monthly expense of about USD 60 (RUB 30/trip) or USD 90 (RUB 50/trip if sharing the taxi with three passengers) for commuting to the market by public bus or taxi respectively. Daily commuting carries a greater risk of running into the

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police, with further financial implications. Many people in my study also pay a monthly ‘protection’ fee of about RUB 200-2,000 to local policemen if they want to keep them away. When I was in Moscow, I was told by my host to avoid coming face to face with anyone in police uniform or they would track down where I lived and not leave me and the host family alone until we agreed to a certain ‘protection’ fee. Sadovod market and its satellite businesses are governed with an iron fist. While the draconian system is crucial for maintaining a clean, orderly, and relatively safe environment for migrants, it leaves them with little power, freedom, and certainty. If I had not spent a substantial amount of time participating in traders’ daily routines, I would have never been able to understand the uphill battles they fight behind dizzying arrays of colorful garments and the constant murmur along packed linias. The market owners’ powerful connections, largely maintained by handsome amounts of hush money, allow them to run the vast market completely under the media’s radar. Any attempts to access the market by the media would be detected immediately and forcefully thwarted by an army of watchful security guards. When media crews came to cover a major fire that broke out in the middle of the market in early 2014, they were viciously attacked and their cameras smashed by market security before they could reach the site. To avoid unwanted attention from Russian authorities and the media, the market administration prefers to put out their own fires even when they do not have the capacity to do so, to the detriment of market traders. Deals and transactions are often made under the table, with little transparency or predictability of the process and outcomes. Things are even hazier with regard to Vietnamese migrants, most of whom do not speak Russian or have connections beyond their ethnic bubble. There are evident differences in the way they and traders of other ethnic backgrounds are treated by the market administration. For example, it is impossible for my Vietnamese research participants to fall into arrears on their rent, even by a few days, while it is not uncommon for Russian-speaking white Ukrainians and ‘smooth-tongued’ Azeris to do so. On my third fieldwork stint in 2016, I was amazed to witness an unfolding debt crisis involving an Ukrainian trader sharing the công with my host, Trang. Forty-five-year-old Irina from Luhansk was facing imminent bankruptcy, having been in arrears on her rent for four months and accumulated a massive debt of over RUB 1 million (about USD 170,000 based on the exchange rate in November 2016). Her business was struggling – suppliers and moneylenders kept away from her and the little stock that remained did not sell. There was no chance she could get herself out of the deepening debt spiral and yet, somehow, she managed to

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keep her spot. On the other hand, Trang’s life fell into disarray shortly after I left Moscow, when she decided to pay USD 40,000 for use rights of a công in linia 15 only to have to suspend her business for months because the then tenant of the công that she ‘bought’, an Azeri man, refused to move out; the market administration did not allow her to cancel the deal or give her another spot. Being socially disadvantaged by her poor language skills and a lack of insight into the administrative system, there was nothing Trang could do to change the situation apart from finding a new công to rent while waiting for the recalcitrant tenant to change his mind. Despite their high rate of undocumented migration, the Vietnamese are generally seen as harmless by fellow migrants as well as Russian customers and market staff, which is crucial for their survival in and beyond the market. Ethnic stereotypes about Transcaucasians (Georgians, Armenians, and Azeris) as ‘swindlers’ and Tajiks as ‘robbers’ and ‘rapists,’ for example, mean they are subject to higher degrees of police monitoring and control and a greater likelihood of altercation with local Russians (see Pilkington, 1998, p. 93, for example). Vietnamese migrants, on the other hand, are not known for the use of violence or involvement in serious crime. Although they have come to be seen as easy targets for harassment, pestering, and extortion by both the police and market administration, my research participants accept this with ease. They are no strangers to graft, bribery, corruption, and police harassment, having come from a country with an entrenched culture of corruption (see Gillespie, 2002; Vian, Brinkerhoff, Feeley, Salomon, & Vien, 2012). In fact, many participants in my study are appreciative of what they see as a ‘flexible’ regime where everything can be bought. As explained by Tâm, a 45-year-old vegetable supplier, below, many migrants see money extortion as a ‘fair’ way to redistribute income (to poorly paid police and market security guards): Everything comes with a price tag, you know. Each profession has its own perks. If you do not want to let go (of some of your income), they’ll hold a grudge against you and catch you. You could have sold ten bags (of groceries). But they hold a grudge … that’s why you sell five bags only. If you share some of the profits with them (market security guards), you can sell ten bags … that’s much better. They (itinerant vendors) can’t see the big picture … no macro vision.

However exploitative and unpredictable it is, the unregulated shadow economy offers migrants exceptional economic opportunities that would not have been available to them otherwise. As Harms (2011, p. 36) observes in suburban Saigon, being on the edge carries multiple risks, but also immense

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potential. Vietnamese migrants’ experiences in Moscow underscore Callon’s (1998) view that uncertainty is a necessary condition of market relations as it motivates actors to be more dynamic, resourceful, and proactive in their calculations. As a lens through which actors view the social world, uncertainty demonstrates both the power and limitations of calculation in enacting social life (Smith, 2013, p. 86). It makes migrants keenly alert to risks and opportunities at the same time and enables new forms of creative action.

The migration industry The lives of the migrants in my study revolve around the market in all aspects, be it physical, economic, psychological, or social. They take only one day off per year – albeit not by choice – when the market is closed on 1 January to celebrate the New Year. Fears of racist attacks, FMS spot checks, and police harassment deter any attempts to deviate from the daily route from home to the market. The main reason, however, is the exploitative store rental fee that makes every day off work, or even a reduction in trade hours, a luxury for many. When time becomes a currency, a day off means a loss of income. Any social outings, including visits to friends, barbecue picnics, sightseeing trips, and attendance at public celebrations or entertainment events, are the privilege of a few well-to-do brokers and garment workshop owners whose livelihoods are independent of market rentals and who can afford private transport as well as the associated financial and opportunity costs. While opportunities to participate in such social gatherings were rare, they offered me invaluable access to key actors within the so-called ‘migration infrastructure’ (Xiang & Lindquist, 2014) that makes human movements from Vietnam to Russia possible. One of the events I was invited to was a barbecue party thrown by 52-year-old Mai, owner of a successful migration brokerage and money transfer agency based at Liublino market, during my second fieldwork trip in 2014. Mai had just returned to Russia from Vietnam with her partner and their teenage daughter after a failed attempt to emigrate to Canada under the Immigrant Investor Program. With a multi-million-dollar property portfolio in both Russia and Vietnam, Mai would have easily qualified as an immigrant investor (which required only CAD 1.6 million in 2014) had she been able to prove that the money had been ‘gained legally’55 according to 55 Source: http://www.cic.gc.ca/English/immigrate/business/investors/index.asp, accessed on 18 July 2016.

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the Canadian government’s requirements. Her migration history and that of her extended family is an abbreviation of the dramatic ups and downs in the history of Vietnamese migration to Eastern Europe, although with an ending much happier than the average case. Born into a working-class family of eight in Thái Bình, a provincial city 110 kilometers southeast of Hà Nội, Mai’s start to life reflected the clichéd example of the transnational migrant woman. After losing her husband to the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war just a few months after the wedding, the jobless single mother of one fought an uphill battle to make ends meet during the toughest years of the post-war economic stagnation. In the late 1980s, Mai’s younger sister Hồng, the only tertiary-educated member of the family, landed a much sought-after fixed-term job as translator for a team56 of Vietnamese textile workers in Kostroma, an industrial city 338 kilometers northeast of Moscow. Hồng’s husband Tùng secured a similar job around the same time and, upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, the couple quickly embarked on market trade, which was particularly lucrative in the early years of post-Soviet Russia. In a move typical of Vietnamese students and skilled professionals during that twilight period, Hồng and Tùng then capitalized on their Russian language skills and connections with Russian bureaucrats to set up a successful migration brokerage service catering to increasing flows of Vietnamese spontaneous migration into the country. The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern European countries in the early 1990s and the social mayhem that ensued rendered their national borders particularly porous (see Nožina, 2010, p. 242). This coincided with the Đổi mới reforms in Vietnam, which opened the ‘doors’57 of the national economy to foreign investors and relaxed mobility restrictions for citizens. With the expert knowledge and assistance of her sister and brother-in-law, in 1992 Mai and her younger brother Văn flew from Hà Nội to Warsaw, Poland, on tourist visas and crossed the border to Germany on foot. They chose Germany, rather than Russia, where Hồng and Tùng’s business was 56 Team or brigade (Đội) refers to a group of Vietnamese contract workers deployed to a specific factory or production unit in Eastern European countries. It was typically headed by a Team Leader (Đội trưởng) and a Deputy Team Leader (Đội phó), and assisted by a Translator (Phiên dịch), who tended to have previous experience working and/or studying in the host country and be proficient in the local language. They acted as mediators between Vietnamese workers and local supervisors and co-workers, and supervised the workers in their day-to-day living and workplace discipline. 57 ‘Mở cửa nền kinh tế,’ which literally means ‘opening the doors of the economy,’ refers to the liberalization of foreign trade and investment and the permission of private sector. It is sometimes used interchangeably with Đổi mới.

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thriving, because in postwar Vietnam, Germany (or more precisely, the former German Democratic Republic) had been envisioned as a ‘socialist paradise’ (see Schwenkel, 2014, p. 248). East Germany was considered the most developed country in the communist bloc, where material resources were abundant, the cities modern, and the people civilized. Mai and Văn lived in Germany for four years, making a living from selling contraband cigarettes in the street – a common livelihood for Vietnamese migrants in East Germany in the early 1990s (Nožina, 2010). In 1996, facing the intensification of the German government’s crackdown on Vietnamese criminal and illegal activities and growing brutalities in gang violence that culminated in the execution of Mai’s boyfriend by a rival gang leader, Mai and Văn fled to Moscow. Taking advantage of Hồng and Tùng’s established networks in Russia, Mai quickly established herself as one of the most successful brokers in Moscow, specializing in migration and money transfer. Her mini brokerage empire received a major boost in 1997 when Hồng and Tùng had to flee to Vietnam (their illegal dealings having been exposed by Russian police), leaving all their business connections and opportunities for Mai. With over one million US dollars at their disposal, Hồng and Tùng acquired an impressive property portfolio when the Vietnamese real estate market was still in its infancy, and saw their financial worth skyrocket ten years later. They continued their brokerage business at the Vietnam end for some years until profits declined significantly due to increased competition. At the time of my first fieldwork trip in 2013, Hồng and Văn, together with their nuclear families, had successfully emigrated to Canada, where Hồng and her husband established a catering business that employed members of both families. Unlike Mai, Hồng and Tùng did not have any trouble emigrating to Canada under the investors’ scheme thanks to their higher education qualifications and credible proof of their business activities in Vietnam. Văn and his family had joined them in Canada a few years later under the family sponsorship scheme. Mai owned so many properties that she lost count of them. When I asked about her investments in Vietnam on our first meeting in June 2014, she had to consult her notebook to check the total number of properties and their addresses. At the time, she owned three apartments in Moscow and a dozen properties in Thái Bình, Hà Nội, and Vũng Tàu, a seaside city in the south of Vietnam where her son was living. Given that Mai, Hồng, and Văn were just three among many brokers facilitating migration from Vietnam to Russia, their wealth revealed the enormous scale of the migration industry. I had first-hand experience with them in Hà Nội in 1998 when collecting a remittance of USD 200 from my sister, who was living in Moscow at the time, on

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behalf of my sick father, and was amazed to see how much trust was placed in what appeared to be an extremely slippery practice. First, my sister gave me a Hà Nội landline number, upon calling which I was instructed to come to a house a few kilometers north of Hà Nội’s city center to collect the money. By the time I arrived at the agent’s house, USD 200 had changed hands in Moscow and the man had been informed of my name, identity card number, and the amount of money I would receive. After seeing my identity card, the agent – Mai’s uncle – produced two crisp hundred-dollar bills from his shirt pocket, meticulously recorded the bills’ serial numbers in a thick notebook, requested I sign my name next to them, and checked the numbers a few times before handing them over to me. The whole transnational remittance process took no more than an hour. Although it fluctuates by days, or even hours, the fee for this service is usually in the form of a marginal difference in the exchange rate. The remittance is benchmarked against the US dollar at both ends, regardless of the currency used in the transaction. Typically, the remitter gives the Russia-based agent cash in Russian roubles, which is then converted to US dollars at a rate slightly higher than the market rate, with the recipient choosing to receive the money in US dollars or Vietnamese dong (based on the exchange rate used in the informal economy – jewelry shops – which is higher than that used by banks). For example, the rate used for the money transfer transaction would be USD 1=RUB 31 if the market rate at the time of transfer is USD 1=RUB 30. Even though a small difference in the exchange rate does not amount to a large fee in insignificant transactions such as mine, it is not uncommon for hundreds of thousands of dollars to be transferred in one single transaction. At one point during my fieldwork in 2014, Trang, my host, sent USD 200,000 to her family in Vietnam to invest in a property in Hà Nội. In good years, Mai handles multiple transactions of similar or greater value every day. Since the majority of Vietnamese migrants in Russia have little knowledge of either the Russian language or the formal banking system, informal money transfer services have become the main, if not the only conduit of remittance to Vietnam. In the face of daily uncertainties and insecurities, people often send any savings they have to Vietnam, most likely to invest in real estate, rather than keeping it with them. Operating in a strictly cash economy and handling large amounts of money on a daily basis, migrant traders and market-related business owners are well aware of the grave risks of taking cash beyond the walls of the market, where police ‘protection’ duties end. Therefore their cash often stays and circulates within the market only, which is made possible by an intricate intra-market network ensuring frictionless money circulation along the commodity chain. Every

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node in the commodity chain, from customers to retail traders, wholesale traders, garment factory owners, long-distant merchants, textile traders, money lenders, and brokers, is present in the market. Billions of dollars are transferred between Vietnam and Russia in this manner, without the money actually crossing the border, be it in physical or virtual terms. While money transfer is extremely profitable, it is only a sideline activity for Mai and similar brokers. Their core business is the brokerage of migration documents, which unlike money transfer is a niche market, reserved for a select few who possess privileged connections with and working knowledge of Russian bureaucracies. As discussed earlier in Chapter II, obtaining a legal migration document of any kind in Russia is an extremely costly, complex, and treacherous endeavor that would be ‘mission impossible’ for most Vietnamese, should they decide to bypass brokerage services. The most common and basic type of document is a tourist visa, which is valid for a maximum of 30 days. In order to obtain a tourist visa, the applicant must submit a visa support document known as ‘confirmation of reception and tourist voucher (podtverzdeniye) from a licensed Russian travel agency.’58 By ‘licensed Russian travel agency,’ the policy refers to a select number of travel agencies or hotels that have been authorized to invite foreign citizens to the Russian Federation and registered with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The podtverzdeniye carries the reference number of the hosting company (which confirms that this company is allowed to receive foreign tourists), personal data for each tourist, the dates of the trip, itinerary in Russia, and services as paid. These details cannot be changed upon the tourist’s arrival in Russia. On their arrival, tourist visa holders must register their ‘residence’ (propiska) within seven working days (which was changed from three working days on 25 March 2011). Because most of her first-time clients have never had any overseas travel experience, Mai’s agency arranges not only podtverzdeniye, visa, and propiska for them, but also flight booking and airport pickup on request. None of the Vietnamese in my study knew how much each individual item actually cost because they paid for the whole package, but I was astonished to discover from my own experience that brokers often charged their clients around ten to twenty times more than the actual price. On my second field trip in 2014, for example, I paid RUB 3,000 (about USD 86) to a Vietnamese broker at Sadovod to arrange my propiska, while the hotel where I stayed in 2013 charged me only USD 5 for the same document. Likewise, a podtverzdeniye (visa support letter) cost only 58 Source: http://vietnam.mid.ru/web/vietnam-en/tourist-visa, accessed 21 July 2016.

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USD 29.90 if obtained from a Moscow hotel (as of July 2016),59 but a similar letter was sold to Vietnamese migrants at Sadovod for USD 370 at the same time. Additional brokerage fees and charges vary widely depending on the client, based on a simple formula: the less you know, the more you pay for the trip. For example, it is not uncommon for garment workers from rural areas to pay up to USD 3,500 for what they believe to be a legal fixed-term labor contract in Russia, but which turns out to be just a tourist visa60 and a one-way ticket to Moscow. Travel costs tend to be inflated in their case because they encounter an extra layer of ‘scroungers’ – the garment factory owners who send for them, set the price, and arrange travel documents on their behalves. Below is how 29-year-old market trader Lê recounted how she first migrated to Russia to work in a garment factory: In those days, other people paid only USD 500-700 (to migrate to Russia) but I was charged USD 2,200. I was conned. So many people from my village migrated to Russia at that time. [When we realized we had been conned], those from families with means were able to fight back [against the factory owner] and return home. But my family was poor and powerless. I had no choice but to stay and work. Then I got used to life here. They paid me USD 150 in the first year. One hundred and fifty dollars for a whole year of hard work! They withheld the rest of my wages. My husband and I ran away. They caught us, cajoled us, beat us. Then we ran away again. USD 150 was not enough to pay the interest on my bank loan. But we lost everything (when we ran away): passports, any sorts of documents. They kept everything.

The tourist visa is, however, valid for only 30 days. While it is common for Vietnamese migrants to overstay their tourist visas and live in Russia for years or even decades without any legal documents, those who can afford it are willing to fork out a substantial amount of money to pay for a work permit61 that allows them to live legally in Russia for up to three years. In 2014, a three-year work permit cost my host Trang USD 3,500 – a small fortune that was beyond the means of many other traders and most waged laborers. Yet it did not protect her from police harassment and money extortion, 59 For example, Godzillas Hostel charged only USD29.90 for a visa support letter or visa invitation as of 21 July 2016. Source: http://godzillashostel.com/visa/, accessed 21 July 2016. 60 Examples: ‘Vỡ mộng đổi đời trên đất Nga: Cuộc trốn chạy thảm khốc,’ [Dreams shattered in Russia: a fatal escape] http://baonga.com/nguoi-viet-tai-nga.nd173/vo-mong-doi-doi-tren-datnga-cuoc-tron-chay-tham-khoc.i51806.html, accessed 29 December 2014. 61 The Vietnamese referred to the work permit as ‘quyền lao động’.

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partly because no one could be sure if the documents were genuine. When I asked them about the reliability of the service that they used, Trang’s husband Trung exclaimed, ‘Only God knows if their stamps are genuine or made of potato!’ [‘Có giời mới biết được dấu của chúng nó là thật hay dấu củ khoai!’].62 Even if the work permit was proven to be genuine, she could still be subject to arrest and deportation for not living at the address identified in her propiska. It is not uncommon for brokers to register thousands of migrants to a single residential unit, referred to as an ‘elastic apartment’ in the Russian media,63 a practice that seems to be prevalent across Vietnamese communities in Eastern Europe (see also Nožina, 2010, p. 237). Despite the federal government’s recent introduction of heavy fines and criminal charges for violations of propiska regulations, there is no evidence of stricter and more efficient law enforcement in this regard. As discussed earlier in this chapter, work permits are often sourced from the businesses that have been granted a quota for foreign workers. The great demand for work permits has led to the phenomenon of ‘ghost companies’ (công ty ma), which are inoperative Vietnamese businesses registered in farflung places under Russian citizens’ names solely for the purpose of obtaining a work permit quota. In a vast country like Russia, geographical distance from the center of power is a boon for local authorities and businesses. Beyond the watchful eye of the federal government, provincial authorities are afforded a great deal of leeway in running the local economy. They allow ‘ghost companies’ to register and provide them with a foreign labor quota in exchange for generous financial rewards. Political fallout occasionally provides the public with glimpses of the extraordinary scale of the matter. In 2013, the head of the FMS in Voronezh Province, Nicolai Polukazakov, became the subject of a major criminal investigation for allegedly accepting a Volkswagen Touareg worth RUB 2.5 million from a local entrepreneur as a bribe. It was suspected to be one of many gifts he had received for helping local businesses obtain permits for hiring foreign labor and facilitating related processes of propiska and permanent residency.64 Yet many people cannot afford to pay USD 3,500 for a three-year work permit, especially when several members of a family are dependent on 62 ‘Dấu củ khoai’ (potato stamp) is a sarcastic term for a fake stamp. Document forgery is common in Vietnam. 63 Source: https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/the-propiska-sends-russia-back-to-theussr-20668, accessed 21 July 2016. 64 Source: http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=1586604 or http://baonga.com/xa-hoi-nga.nd129/ voronezh-sep-co-quan-di-tru-bi-tinh-nghi-nhan-hoi-lo-quy-mo-lon.i44108.html, accessed 16 May 2014.

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a single công for a living. This is not to mention low-waged laborers and garment workers, for most of whom USD 3,500 is equal to an annual income. Oftentimes, trader families invest in a work permit for only one person (usually male) who is charged with high-risk and high-mobility duties outside the market, such as merchandise acquisition from Liublino (if they are based at Sadovod or Yuzhnyie Vorota) and shopping at the local mall. If they live in private accommodation outside the market compound, the work permit holder is also responsible for commuting to the market in the wee hours of the morning to set up the store for the day, as well as visiting the family left behind in Vietnam. In the heyday of Chợ Vòm (2005-2009) the work permit was much more affordable, costing about USD 400 a year, so most Vietnamese migrants had one, but possessing a work permit became a rarity in the years between 2013 and 2016. The tightening of control over ‘ghost companies’ in the 2010s made it increasingly difficult to obtain a work permit. However, there is always an alternative. A cheaper way to stay ‘legal,’ at least temporarily, is to ‘buy’ a paper named spravka (справка) – a statement confirming that the named person is having their passport renewed by the Vietnamese embassy. Like other migration documents, the spravka does not protect migrants from predatory police or FMS officers, but it may at least prevent arrest and deportation. As of 2014, the spravka was valid for three months and cost around RUB 800-1,000 (USD 23-30), depending on the broker and time of ‘purchase.’ It is particularly easy to obtain a spravka because, unlike other documents, it is issued by the Vietnamese Embassy in Moscow, the staff of which are those who call the shots in the migration industry. As Xuân, a 38-year-old trade representative, put it: ‘The folks at the consulate … there are five of them … they would say they have had a bad month [móm] if each makes only USD 10,000. USD 50,000 is more like their average monthly income.’ Disgusted by their greed and graft, Xuân added: ‘I do not mingle with the consular folks. They have no conscience.’ A position in the Vietnamese consulate in Moscow, I was told, has one of the highest price tags (i.e. the bribe required to secure the appointment) within Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so the officials must make sure to bring home an amount of money commensurate to the investment by the end of their term. The spravka is just one of many documents on which the Vietnamese embassy’s staff build their fortunes. They charge premium rates for fast tracking notarial services and for the issuance of passports, birth certificates, and marriage certificates if migrants do not want to face excessive delays, which are most likely to be deliberate. Participating in a high-risk, treacherous niche of the shadow economy is not for the faint-hearted. In a situation comparable to the one Nožina (2010,

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p. 254) observes in the Czech Republic, the success of Vietnamese migration brokers is largely dependent on their ability to move judiciously between legal and illegal spheres, and to occasionally cooperate with the criminal underworld. Brokers must not only be savvy, gutsy, and well-connected, but also stay vigilant at all times. Risks are inherent in the illicit nature of their business, the enormous amount of cash they deal with on a daily basis, the uncertain and transient clientele, and the lack of recourse to formal support systems and justice. Brokers like Mai, therefore, keep a low profile both inside and outside of the market and are very selective about the people they associate with. Without strong connections with members of the inner circles of her social networks, it would have been impossible for me to gain access to Mai and for that access to snowball to other brokers. In 2013, when Mai and her family were in Vietnam to prepare their emigration application to Canada, I was introduced to her cousins Cương and Vân, who ran the business at the Moscow end with Mai at the distant helm, and spent many days doing participant observation at their Liublino market headquarters. Having heard about Mai’s successful brokerage network for years, I was baffled by what I saw when visiting the ‘office’ for the first time. This transnational business that had handled millions of dollars and brought countless irregular migrants to Russia could not have appeared more inconspicuous – an old-fashioned desktop computer, an all-in-one scanner, copier, and fax machine, and a plastic stool crammed into the deepest corner of a long, narrow jeans store, completely hidden from the view of customers shopping in the front. With all this paraphernalia, it would have been difficult for both Cương and Vân to fit into the less than two-square-meter space at the same time, so they took turns to run the office. One of them would be stationed there while the other was out and about, collecting orders from and delivering completed paperwork to their clients. With their mobility severely circumscribed by the onerous market regime and an unwelcoming environment, Vietnamese migrants have everything delivered to their doorstep, a habit that shapes the practices of all the businesses catering to them. The weekend was an ideal time to be in Mai’s Liublino office. While retail activity can still be observed among a small number of traders who cannot afford to turn away haggling bargain hunters, Liublino is by and large a wholesale market. Their weekly routine is therefore the reverse of those of Sadovod and Yuzhnyie Vorota, where retail is the predominant activity. During the week, when Sadovod and Yuzhnyie Vorota hibernate, Liublino is abuzz with wholesale customers, most of whom come from regional cities and towns as far away as Vladivostok. Yet it becomes blissfully

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quiet on weekends. The people visiting Mai’s off ice on weekends were mostly Liublino traders and an assortment of go-betweens, who arrange paperwork and money transfers for individuals who have little mobility, such as manual laborers, farm workers, construction workers, garment factory workers, and nannies. Mai’s transnational brokerage business has only one hub at the Russia end but dissipates into an extensive network of agents at the Vietnam end, covering most of northern Vietnam, the primary source of migrants to Russia. Hồ Chí Minh City is the only city in the south of Vietnam where Mai has a representative – a well-known jewelry business. Jewelry shops (hàng vàng) are the main foreign exchange points in the informal economy of Vietnam and some well-established businesses also serve as conduits of transnational remittances for those without access to formal channels. A large part of the remittances goes through Mai’s offices in Hà Nội and Thái Bình – her hometown – which are looked after by her trusted family members, who receive monthly salaries. Her agents in other cities and towns are jewelry shops, who are given a commission for every remittance transaction. In a clandestine industry, trust is critical, yet highly volatile. Over the years, Mai has learned that even the tiniest slip may cause serious damage. At the time of our barbecue party in June 2014, Mai was deeply distressed at the prospect of losing a major lawsuit in Vietnam. Her uncle – the Hà Nội-based agent – had made the dreadful mistake of handing over USD 100,000 to a recipient without asking her to sign her name in his cash daybook as proof of receipt. Shortly after the transaction, the old man went out on errands and his son, who co-managed the office with him, made a phone call to the recipient to alert her of the transfer and ask her to come collect the money, having found no proof of receipt. The woman headed straight back to the man’s house to collect this fortuitous windfall. What ensued was a string of intense disputes and even death threats, which culminated in a lawsuit in Vietnam. Her wealth and connections notwithstanding, Mai was pessimistic about her chance of winning the case because of the lack of evidence and the illegal nature of her business. While her relatives stood as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, any financial loss would ultimately be hers. However elusive it is, trust is decidedly a requisite element in every quotidian matter. During the days I spent at Mai’s Liublino office, I was amazed by the seemingly imprudent and casual manner in which business partnerships were established and important transactions were handled. Large amounts of cash (which reached up to RUB 5 million on several occasions when I was present in the office) came and went through the door in supermarket plastic bags and backpacks, with trust as the only form of

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bond guaranteeing the transaction’s success. No receipts were exchanged, no documents signed. On several occasions, complete strangers became business partners after only a brief chat and a couple of phone calls. In one instance, for example, a man came to have a Russian SIM card couriered to his wife in Hồ Chí Minh City so she could contact him on her arrival in Moscow a few days later, and we learned from a brief conversation with him that he owned a legally registered garment factory (also known as a ‘white factory’ – xưởng may trắng) in Tula that had a quota for foreign workers. The small talk swiftly progressed to a serious business negotiation: the entrepreneur would ‘sell’ his work permit quota to Mai, who would ‘resell’ it to her clients, most of whom were market traders. Russia’s exclusionary migration regime has engendered a uniquely propitious environment for the brokerage industry. While it has been widely acknowledged in the scholarship from various contexts that the commercialization of transnational migration, regardless of its nature or direction, is a global trend (Hoang, 2017; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a; Lindquist, Xiang, & Yeoh, 2012; Pécoud, 2013; Phillips, 2011; Xiang & Lindquist, 2014), in no other place has the migration industry grown to such an impressive scale as in Russia, leaving no legal and institutional barriers intact and shaping the national economy and society in the most profound manner. What I found in Russia underscores the fact that brokers do not operate as distinct profit-making entities independent from other structures and institutions. They work closely with or, in many contexts, overlap formal economic entities or even government institutions. In the UK, for example, there is evidence of law firms assisting Chinese irregular migrants in fabricating stories of persecution and submitting false asylum claims (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 79). In Hungary, the lack of transparency in the legal framework allows many middlemen to reap copious profits thanks to their insider knowledge of the system, gained in their former careers as immigration officials (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 85). Academic research in Indonesia and the Philippines has also revealed that successful informal brokers tend to be government officials or those with strong connections to the government (Goss & Lindquist, 1995; Lindquist et al., 2012). In Russia, irregular migration from Vietnam could not have reached the remarkable scale we see today without the complicity and crucial assistance of Russian bureaucrats and police officers, as well as Vietnamese consular staff. Indeed, broker networks are not external to state power but integral to new forms of governance and governmentality (Xiang, 2012). The brokerage industry thrives because, in Mai’s words, ‘there is nothing money can’t buy in Russia.’ On one of my visits to her place in 2014, for

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example, her guests commented that no one would be able to pass the newly introduced Russian language test as a requirement to obtain Russian citizenship or permanent residency, to which Mai calmly responded: I’d need to pay only RUB 20,000 for a language certificate. No fuss. What can’t we buy here? If you want a pension, I can obtain a ‘bảng lương’ [payslip] for you. We can cater to every demand.

To explain the endemic nature of corruption in Russian bureaucracies, Heyat (2002, p. 29) points out that there is a price tag attached to every civil servant’s job, generating the need to raise an income from such employment to compensate for the financial loss, especially because the legitimate remuneration is inadequate. This explanation resonates with my research participants’ justification of corrupt practices by the Vietnamese embassy’s staff. Such a system is therefore seen by Vietnamese migrants not as a bane but a boon of post-socialist ethos. Mai’s social circle comprises mostly of veteran guest workers from the Soviet era, many of whom had naturalized through sham marriages to Russian citizens. Marriage is the easiest, if not the only, naturalization path for Vietnamese migrants, not least because there is an abundant supply of impoverished rural Russians who would find it difficult to resist a financial reward of about USD 20,000. Sometimes it costs next to nothing when, a 43-year-old broker named Tuyết explained, ‘crooked’ Vietnamese are able to dupe ‘naïve’ Russians into marrying them for ‘love’: Who marries Vietnamese men? They [the women] are poor, uneducated village bumpkins. Vietnamese men court them, bring them food from the city, and give them some cash, and they feel they have won the lottery. Then they get pregnant, have a baby. Once the husband gets a Russian passport [from the sham marriage], he’d leave. He’d sleep around with Vietnamese women.

Naturalization under the foreign investors’ scheme is out of the question for most Vietnamese migrants because it requires their Russia-based business to generate RUB 10 million in taxable revenue each year for three years. Neither are they eligible to apply for naturalization as skilled immigrants – the majority of Vietnamese people in Russia are rural migrants without tertiary education. Russian permanent residency65 has become more expensive in 65 The colloquial Vietnamese terms for Russian citizenship and permanent residency are ‘bát đỏ’ and ‘bát vít,’ respectively. Bát is a mispronounced Vietnamese equivalent for passport. ‘Bát đỏ’

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recent years. To qualify for the permanent residency that must be renewed every f ive years, the applicant must have passed an advanced Russian language test, paid taxes, and been able to provide a bank’s financial statement proving that their net worth is at least RUB 2 million (if they are not a skilled immigrant with regular income). While other types of migration documents are relatively easy to obtain from corrupt FMS officials at local levels, citizenship and permanent residency applications are more complex because they involve various institutions and are subject to more intense scrutiny by the federal FMS. In that context, naturalization as a spouse of a Russian national has become the most viable and affordable route. Upon marriage to a Russian citizen, the foreign spouse is eligible to apply for a permanent residency permit that can be acquired through a simple, expedited process regardless of whether the annual quota has been filled or not. Once the permanent residency permit has been granted, the foreign spouse pays a local business a certain amount of money in order to have their name listed as a tax-paying employee. After three years of marriage and tax residency, the foreign spouse is eligible to apply for naturalization, which is a straightforward process, involving no financial requirements. In a migration regime that is restrictive yet porous at the same time, boundaries between legality and illegality are oftentimes blurred, allowing opportunistic racketeers to proliferate and prosper, without restraints. As in the situation Liu-Farrer (2010b, p. 9) observes among Fujian migrants in Japan, crimes can be seen as by-products of the legal system itself, committed to make migration possible. Brokerage, especially when involving document forgery/counterfeiting, is often viewed with distrust and even contempt, yet brokers in Russia are generally seen as ‘entrepreneurs proper,’ not unscrupulous criminals, as in other contexts (see Hoang, 2017; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a; Lindquist et al., 2012; McKeown, 2012). With the exception of opportunistic conmen who bring tourist visa holders to Russia under the pretense of contract labor migration, most migration brokers operate like legitimate businesses rather than hardened mafia or organized crime networks. These ‘migration institutions’66 have privileged access to ‘specific bundles of allocative and authoritative resources,’ particularly the control over information, which allows them to have the upper hand in transactions means ‘red passport’ (the cover of the Russian passport is red). Vít is the Vietnamese phonetic transcription of вид in ‘вид на жительство’ (vid na zhitelstvo) – permanent residency. 66 Migration institutions are defined by Goss and Lindquist (1995) as ‘knowledgeable individuals and the agents of organisations,’ (e.g. multinational corporations, migrant associations, and other institutions [from kinship to the state]) who ‘“stretch” social relations across time and space to bring together the potential migrant and the overseas employer’.

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with migrants (Goss & Lindquist, 1995). The industry rests on reciprocal relationships between the shadow economy and Russian bureaucracies, which overlap at times. Policemen routinely moonlight as protection racketeers, their role shifting from disciplinary to predatory depending on the context. Custom officers confiscate contraband goods only to siphon them off to black market dealers through the back door. The tighter immigration policies are, the higher the rates gatekeeping FMS staff can charge brokers and their clients for papers traded under the table. It seems like a win-win situation for everyone involved. The case of Vietnamese migrants in Russia underscores the vital role of meso-level actors in the so-called cumulative causation of migration (see Massey, 1990). Each new act of migration from Vietnam to Russia further reinforces the structures underpinning the migration brokerage industry, making additional migrations more likely. The contrast between Russia and elsewhere as regards the way brokers are regarded by their clients, especially in Asian contract labor migration regimes, is primarily due to the informal, fickle nature of the relationship between the Russia-based brokers and those vested with state authority. While it is common for brokerage networks in Asia to solicit the assistance of irregular, small-time middlemen at the grassroots level, the ultimate control over transnational migration flows lies in the hands of legally registered or even state-owned enterprises that have considerable leverage, sometimes even a monopoly, in their market segment (Hoang, 2017; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a; Lindquist et al., 2012; Rodriguez & Schwenken, 2013; Rudnyckyj, 2004). In Russia, the informal nature of the migration industry means trust is critical to brokers’ success. Yet this trust is particularly tenuous, not least because of the transient nature of migration to Russia. Most Vietnamese migrants in Russia are from the north, where social capital is grounded in close circles of kinship and village-based ties with a strong sense of apprehension about the unknown stranger (Dalton et al., 2002, p. 375; Hoang, 2016b, p. 700). This narrow radius of trust, in line with Fukuyama’s (2001) thinking, tends to produce negative externalities, decreasing the degree to which migrants are able to trust outsiders and cooperate with them. Trust becomes even more elusive in the context of uncertainty and insecurity that has come to define migrants’ lives in Russia, reinforcing the sense of moral anomie that commonly characterizes the Vietnamese perception of urban life (see Harms, 2005; Luong, 2006, p. 380). The relationship between migrants and brokers is thus a complex one. While brokers may have the upper hand in their dealings with migrants, thanks to their privileged access to information, they do not take their clients lightly. Brokers invest heavily in building a loyal client base that

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sometimes turns into friendship or even fictive kinship over time, expressed and cemented through regular phone communications, occasional social gatherings, and gift exchange. Mai, for example, never forgets to bring her loyal clients and friends something from the homeland every time she travels from Vietnam to Russia. Whether it is a pack of dried shiitake mushrooms, a couple of dried squids, or a small plastic bag filled with stir-fried shrimp, it is a highly valued token of appreciation, given how much migrants treasure food from ‘home’ and that every kilogram of baggage allowance may generate an income. She regularly throws generous parties, which are the only social events busy, frugal market traders like Trang are able to attend. In most situations, trust and respect are mutual. With no formal social security systems to rely on, migrants are keen to maintain good relationships with well-resourced and well-connected brokers like Mai. Developing a loyal patron-client relationship is one of many important strategies brokers and migrants pursue to buffer themselves against risks and uncertainties. While this does not rule out the possibility of deception, the abuse of trust tends to be much less common and blatant than what has been observed in Asian contract labor migration regimes (Hoang, 2017; see Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a).

The Go-between I sent for her [daughter] after my father died. There was no one to take care of her after his death. Of course, I had to figure out how to enroll her in a local school when she came to Moscow. I just went to a random school near my place and met a teacher who told me to send her to a Russian language class first. I looked high and low and finally found a language class. Then I was told to obtain a medical test for her. I was just beating about. Had absolutely no clue where to look. When people heard how I managed to get my daughter into a local school, they asked me for help. Then they spread the word. That’s how I became a ‘dịch vụ’. Then another day, a guy was visiting my next-door neighbor when he developed acute appendicitis. He was a factory worker. I called the ambulance. Guess what? His employer was not around at the time. I took him to the hospital. He had no cash with him. No documents either. I called his employer. He told me to help out and he would pay me later. One thing led to another.

Above is how Tuyết – a single mother of one from Hạ Long City – recounted the fortuitous circumstances that led her to carve out a relatively successful career in brokerage. Tuyết’s experience is a typical ‘career’ trajectory for

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those I call ‘go-betweens’, to distinguish them from established brokers like Mai who specialize in immigration and money transfer. Although they are both referred to as dịch vụ (which literally means ‘service’, but is used as an equivalent for any commercial intermediaries in the Russian context) by their Vietnamese clients, ‘go-betweens’ work on a more casual and spontaneous basis than brokers, often by themselves, and provide a wide range of services, which exclude immigration and money transfer and most likely involve some direct communication with Russians. Like Tuyết, they often start out by chance but decide to make a career out of it after recognizing the great demand for such a service. Vietnamese nationals in post-Soviet Russia, especially those employed in market trade, agriculture, construction, and manufacturing, are predominantly irregular migrants who arrived after the fall of the Soviet Union. While they make every effort to restrict their lives to the ethnic bubble, it is not always possible. No matter how many medical supplies they bring along from Vietnam, from over-thecounter vitamin supplements to prescription antibiotics and cardiovascular drugs, they cannot avoid reaching out to the Russian healthcare system for important medical emergencies such as appendicitis and stroke, as well as childbirth. I was at the receiving end of frantic phone calls more than once during my fieldwork when Vietnamese migrants and Russian paramedics could not understand each other in situations of medical emergency and combed the whole neighborhood for a bilingual person. Living and working in isolation from mainstream society for the entirety of their Russian lives, migrants have minimal, if any, knowledge of Russian language, culture, and society, which has a crippling effect on their ability to deal with medical crises, legal issues, or even children’s schooling. In those situations, they turn to anyone who can speak Russian for help, often in exchange for a mutually agreed fee. Those people are either migrant students or a small number of former contract workers from the Soviet era who are still in Russia because they have not ‘made it.’ While the latter, unlike the former, have not had any formal education opportunities in Russia, short-term language courses were often a part of their pre-departure training and they had more opportunities to interact with Russians at work and in public places during the Soviet era. Students tend to treat the job as a temporary source of income during their studies, but many go-betweens, like Tuyết, consider it a long-term livelihood. A savvy, quick-witted, and straight-talking woman in her early forties, Tuyết personified the quintessential broker: warm yet downright intimidating; friendly yet unmistakably sly; easy-going yet constantly on her toes. She was one of a few migrant contract workers from the Soviet era that I came

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across during my fieldwork. Her father, a senior state employee in Quảng Ninh Province, agreed to early retirement in exchange for a prized labor contract for his then 18-year-old daughter to work in a garment factory in Kazan, the capital city of the Republic of Tatarstan, 816 kilometers east of Moscow. Tuyết arrived in Kazan in 1989, only to watch the Soviet Union crumble and eventually disintegrate in 1991. By the time Russia formally became a sovereign state in December 1991, large numbers of Vietnamese workers had been repatriated on a voluntary basis, but some had become lưu vong (which literally means ‘exile’ but is broadly used by the Vietnamese to refer to the students and workers who quit their studies and contract jobs, respectively, overstayed their visas, and now participate in the shadow economy), capitalizing on the so-called ‘tranh tối, tranh sáng’ (half-dark, half-light or twilight) conditions that rendered market trade particularly lucrative. Tuyết returned to Vietnam in 1991, albeit not for permanent resettlement like her fellow workers but to give birth to her daughter, the unwanted outcome of a brief relationship with a Vietnamese factory worker she met on a short visit to friends in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan. She headed quickly back to Russia after giving birth, intending to reunite with the man, and was distraught to find out he had already moved on to the next woman, a young Russian girl. With no job to go back to and the massive burden of providing for her newborn daughter, the young mother joined thousands of fellow workers to migrate to Moscow, where market trade was rapidly expanding. When we first met in 2014, Tuyết was living in a rented apartment in Moscow with her daughter, who was attending a local university as a self-funded student. While she was nowhere near Mai in terms of wealth and economic security, Tuyết was able to maintain a relatively comfortable life for herself and her daughter and had developed a well-resourced clientele who were prepared to pay to make their lives easier. At the time of my third fieldwork stint in November 2016, the typical fee charged by go-betweens for a short doctor’s consultation was RUB 1,500-2,000 (USD 23-30), which mainly covered translation of the conversation between the doctor and the patient but also helped with the latter’s spatial and social navigation and queries, if required. Tuyết was never forthcoming about her earnings and kept her cards close to her chest, so I could not gauge her exact income. It might have been difficult for her, too, to come up with an accurate number due to the variable and somewhat haphazard range of activities she engaged in, including, but not limited to, education brokerage, translation for doctor’s consultations, any dealings with Russian authorities, mediation for business transactions, and, more recently, exporting Russian cats to Vietnam. Tuyết accepted any job offer that came her way, regardless of its

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nature, as long as the money was good, while also proactively seeking out new opportunities for herself. She charged variable rates depending on the person she dealt with. Conversations with other people at the market, however, gave me an idea of roughly how much money go-betweens make. For example, a market trader at Sadovod – a 52-year-old mother of one named Liên – told me that her daughter, who had graduated from a Moscow university in the summer of 2016, was making about RUB 70,000 (USD 1,000) each month from ‘helping’ people with their doctor’s consultations and hospital visits, and the demand for her service was so high she had to turn many clients away. In a context where the typical salary for Russian schoolteachers and university lecturers is between USD 500 and USD 1,000 a month, it is a decent income for a less skilled and more flexible job. Based on what I observed and heard during our multiple encounters, Tuyết, with her more established networks and longer experience in Russia, seemed to be earning much more than Liên’s daughter, despite her basic Russian and a shoddy track record. I came to know Tuyết at a communal parent-teacher meeting at School Number 6067 in late May 2014. Because of the onerous market regime, high costs of living, and a general sense of uncertainty and insecurity, most migrant parents leave their children with extended family in Vietnam, at least until they finish high school. However, trouble sometimes arises when, in the absence of a disciplinarian figure, children fall in with the wrong crowd and adopt bad habits such as skipping school, smoking, drinking, drug taking, computer game addiction, and even petty theft. In an attempt to redress the situation, the parents in this case sent for the troubled teenagers and approached Tuyết for help with getting them into one of the local schools. School 60, where Tuyết had enrolled 14 Vietnamese students aged between 15 and 21 (13 boys and one girl) in a Grade Eight transition class the previous year, is in the northwest of Moscow, 42 kilometers from Sadovod. The fourhour roundtrip from the market made the children’s daily commute both daunting and expensive and was a strong deterrent for parents to engage in the school’s activities. However, they had no choice but to accept whatever Tuyết could pull off. Even if they had made the effort to go all the way to the school, they would not have been able to communicate with the teachers. It was therefore just me and Tuyết at the end-of-school-year meeting with the class teacher and the head of the Russian language team. I represented Kiên, my host Trang’s 15-year-old son, and Tuyết was there on behalf of the rest of the Vietnamese students. She was initially hired to find a school for 67 Russian schools are identified by numbers, not names. The identification number of this school has been changed to protect the privacy of the teachers and students.

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the children but, given the parents’ invisibility, she did not have any trouble establishing herself as the legitimate guardian for all of them throughout the year – something that was gladly accepted by their parents at first but gradually came to be seen as a menace. Trang had lost trust in Tuyết after her recent blunders and asked me to attend the meeting on her behalf. School 60 is a public school, so neither local nor foreign students have to pay tuition fees or any other schooling expenses. Having no prior experience with the Russian education system, however, the Vietnamese parents did not know what to expect and had no idea that Tuyết had been cooking up one excuse after another to extract money from them. To enroll the children in the school, she charged each family between RUB 10,000 and RUB 27,000 (about USD 300-800 based on the May 2014 exchange rate) in brokerage fees, depending on how much she thought they each could afford. Then every once in a while, she would come to the market to collect extra money from the families, whether it was fees for extracurricular activities or contributions to the school’s furniture and teaching equipment, each time between RUB 3,000 and RUB 5,000 per family. As the only conduit of information between the school and the students’ families, she had complete control over what parents could hear about their young ones’ studies and took full advantage of their ignorance of the system and anxiety about the troubled youths. She ensured the children’s complicity by covering up their truancies, exam failures, and other shenanigans. Ironically, the parents thought they had ‘rescued’ their children from a bad crowd, but it was only to put them in another: they were now in the company of fellow ‘rescued’ school misfits, the bond among whom quickly developed through a shared loathing of school and an acquired taste for booze and smokes. It was a win-win situation for both Tuyết and the children under her wing. Tuyết’s flagrant swindling was only exposed when the children told their parents that the school was asking for a contribution of RUB 3,000 from each of them toward the acquisition of a new set of lockers, which incidentally had been one of many excuses already used by Tuyết to extract money from the families only a couple of months back. Piecing things together, the migrant parents realized that it was not the first time they were conned by Tuyết. Enraged, they bombarded her with calls and text messages, demanding she pay back all the money. Instead of facing them head-on, Tuyết blocked all their numbers to stop the communication and went into hiding for months. She resurfaced at the end of the school year when the anger had subsided and families were once again confronted with substandard school reports, causing them to revisit the dreadful question of what to do with the wayward children. Yet she had no intention of returning the money to the families.

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At the parents-teachers meeting, Tuyết and I were advised that the Vietnamese children, without exception, had failed to meet the entry requirements for Grade Nine, primarily due to their lack of progress in Russian language, and that they could apply to move to another school or repeat Grade Eight in School 60. The teachers also expressed concerns about the students’ disrespect for the school’s routines and unruly behaviors in the classroom. Svetlana, the class teacher, told me that at some points none of the children showed up at the school for weeks, but the staff had no way of informing the parents or finding out what they were up to. In short, they gave me a not-so-subtle hint that their school might not be the most suitable place to educate the children and that they could not wait for them to move on. The school’s announcement triggered a frenzy of phone calls among the distressed parents who did not know what to do, given some of the children had already repeated Grade Eight twice or become a little too old for secondary school. Three months later, I was told that the parents of the two oldest children had decided to discontinue their schooling and the rest had gone back to Tuyết and paid her another round of brokerage fees so she could enroll them in another school. Without adequate skills to navigate the Russian education system, they had no choice but to stick with her. By the time I returned to Moscow in 2016, two families had closed down their extremely successful jeans businesses at Liublino and gone back to Vietnam for good, hoping that their children would be able to continue their education in the homeland. The rest of the families had given up all hope of seeing their children finish high school after another failed attempt to move up to Grade Nine. Kiên and his friends had quit school and were already working at the market with their parents when I saw them again during my third visit. Tuyết, however, was considered a small-time go-between in a vast and somewhat haphazard brokerage market, where there was an intermediary for virtually every need and brokerage tended to be a spontaneous, opportunistic activity rather than an established, regular occupation. Being pushed to the edge by structural conditions beyond their control, as Harms (2011, p. 30) observes in Hồ Chí Minh City, can be beneficial rather than detrimental sometimes, as people are able to turn this into a strategic position for acquiring economic gains. Go-betweens are particularly crucial for long-distance merchants and garment workshop owners. Tariffs for shoe and clothing imports are not only high but also volatile, while customs systems and procedures are chronically plagued by excessive corruption and red tape, considerably inflating commodity prices and disrupting commodity chains. It is not uncommon for a shipment to take months to pass customs clearance and by the time it does, the season is already over, clothing styles

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are no longer in vogue, foodstuffs are past their use-by dates, or the true value of the goods has exceeded their market value when excessive transactional costs are added (see A. Larin, 2012, p. 62). Without the right connections and adequate bribery, it is nearly impossible for long-distance merchants to obtain customs clearance for their imported goods. They thus turn to dịch vụ for help. Russian customs officers also require dịch vụ’s assistance in dispensing with a massive backlog of confiscated and abandoned goods, which generates a lucrative source of income for them. The partnership between dịch vụ and Russian customs officers thus works both ways: they either collect bribes and brokerage fees from long-distance merchants to smooth the customs clearance process or, if the money is not right, confiscate their shipment and sell the gratis merchandise to traders at their market value and split the proceeds. In other words, corrupt officers and their partner brokers are sure to turn a profit whichever way the deal pans out. Ly, a 40-year-old textile trader at Sadovod, told me that her ex-partner was one of those dịch vụs who made so much money from ‘hàng hải quan’ (goods supplied by Russian customs officers) that he did not realize that, since discovering he was having an affair, she had been purloining VND 1.5 billion (around USD 60,000) from him, little by little, and had used it to buy a home for herself in Vietnam: He bought confiscated goods from Russian customs officers. It was very profitable. Easy money, you know. He bought whatever they had: clothing, shoes, and so on. He bought so much from them … we were at Chợ Vòm [Cherkizovsky market] at that time … he had to rent a whole row of warehouses. He sold the wares to market traders in bulk.

It would be impossible, too, for garment factory owners to secure a production space without dịch vụ’s assistance, particularly if their businesses are illegal (xưởng may đen), in which case trust and secrecy are of paramount importance. Often hidden away in rundown, abandoned state-owned factories or public buildings as far from residential areas and main roads as possible, a xưởng may đen’s survival depends heavily on dịch vụ’s ability to locate a safe spot and to successfully negotiate a protection ‘package’ with local police. However, the risky nature of the endeavor means the brokerage process is multifarious and covert, often involving various individuals acting in different capacities, most of whom do not know anyone other than those they deal with directly to maximize each other’s anonymity and security. Tài, the owner of a xưởng may đen on the outskirt of Moscow, told me that a string of people were involved in brokering his lease of a production space

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on the second floor of a derelict factory, which also housed three other Vietnamese xưởng may đens and a Tajik fake alcohol factory. Typically, those dealing directly with the xưởng may đen owners (i.e. the leaseholders) are Russians or, on rare occasions, Russian-speaking Vietnamese dịch vụ specializing in brokering production spaces for Vietnamese factories. The rental fee charged by the broker includes not just the amount payable to the ‘owner’ of the property but also the brokerage fee and protection money to be paid to local police. The broker’s share of the proceeds varies widely, depending both on their adroitness in striking the best deal possible with each stakeholder and their ingenuity in keeping the process as discreet and obscure as possible so that, without them, the whole scheme would fall apart or never have materialized in the first place. Tài did not know either the policeman who provided ‘protection’ for his site or the owner of the place. The only person he dealt with directly was a Vietnamese broker and he had no way of finding out who else was involved and where his rental went. The lack of transparency was the key to a successful deal, which was a common experience for the xưởng may đen owners I came into contact with, one of whom, 38-year-old Hoa, struggled to explain the whole thing to me: I don’t really know who this deal [lease of a production space] was made with. We [a group of xưởng may đen owners] teamed up [to find a shared space]. They [one of her fellow leaseholders] must have known someone who spoke Russian and had the information [about a suitable spot]. Then they just arranged it and split the money. My previous lease was secured with the help of a Vietnamese intermediary. They have their own ways of making such deals. All I knew was that I gave them my share of rent as requested. I have no idea where the money went.

The size of the property is not an important factor in setting rental rates for xưởng may đen in Russia. Because xưởng may đen workers live and work in the same space, it is common practice for brokers to set rental fees based on workers’ headcount. That is, the greater the occupancy, the higher the rental fee, although the property size stays the same. As of June 2014, Tài paid USD 20,000 each month for a shared production-cum-residential space for his 35 workers, which covered both rent and utilities. Hoa’s narrative aptly captures the obscurity and unpredictability characterizing the modus operandi of the powerful brokers who call the shots in the shadow economy. Without adequate cultural and social capital, however, migrants like Hoa and Tài have no choice but to place their trust in such a fickle system where delinquent behaviors are the norm. In spite of the significant investment in

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securing a lease and setting things up, xưởng may đens do not tend to stay on one site long because police protection is usually provided at the local level while raids are organized by federal police. Tài told me the longest time his factory stayed in one place was two years; protracted stays became even rarer in 2014 when Russian authorities intensified their crackdown on irregular migrants. Tài nearly lost his life during a police raid in early 2016. He was spending the night at his factory when the police descended on the compound, ransacked the place, and locked him and his workers up inside the building while waiting for additional vans to ferry them to the detention center. The workers managed to run away during the night but Tài decided to stay, hoping his work permit and valid visa would keep him safe and that he would be able to save his car and some of the machineries and fabrics. Things did not turn out the way he anticipated, however. Infuriated by the workers’ escape, the police beat Tài so badly he had to be hospitalized for months. The obscurity and anonymity of the brokerage process means there is no accountability when things go wrong, rendering workers’ lives highly precarious. In April 2010, a deadly fire engulfed a Vietnamese xưởng may đen in Noginsk in Moscow Oblast, killing seven of the 20 workers present at the workshop at the time.68 Two years later, in September 2012, 14 Vietnamese workers lost their lives when their xưởng may đen in Yegoryevsk, 100 kilometers southeast of Moscow,69 caught fire. The incidents bear a striking resemblance: the only door was locked, preventing workers from escaping the fire, and no individual could be held accountable for the disaster because those who managed to escape had vanished from the scene when the authorities arrived. Xưởng may đens are extremely prone to fires because workers work, sleep, cook, and eat in the same space, which is filled with inflammable materials such as fabric, paper, cardboard, plastic, and wood. Often locked up in derelict buildings with no fire exits, alarm, sprinklers, or any types of extinguishers, they have very little chance of escape, while getting help from local communities or the local fire brigade is most likely out of the question because of the remoteness and isolation of their factory. To avoid unwanted attention from local populations and authorities, employers generally prohibit their workers from venturing outside the building for the entirety of their time at the factory. Traffic into and out of the site is kept to a minimum, often exclusively restricted to the 68 Source: Cháy xưởng may của người Việt ở Nga [Vietnamese garment factory in Russia destroyed by f ire] http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/2010/04/100414_factory_f ire. shtml, accessed 7 May 2014. 69 Source: Russian garment factory fire kills 14 Vietnamese workers. http://ca.reuters.com/ article/topNews/idCABRE88A0YU20120911, accessed 7 May 2014.

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delivery of supplies and transportation of products to the market in the early hours of the morning or the late evening. On several occasions, Tài and Thanh – one of my key informants, who shared a production site with Tài – allowed me to accompany them to their xưởng may đens and left me behind for the night, and I would return to Moscow the next day in the van delivering garments to the market. To minimize risks caused by unexpected police raids, xưởng may đen owners visit their factories only when they have to and leave the site as soon as they can. On my very first trip to Tài’s factory, I was completely taken aback by what I saw on arrival. After driving nearly 40 kilometers on a highway southeast of Moscow, our car turned onto a nondescript overgrown path and drove for another ten minutes before reaching what appeared to be a deserted industrial estate and stopping in front of a tall, decrepit wooden gate, on top of which an unassuming security camera was perched. Our driver stopped the engine and before long the gate slowly opened, bringing into view a run-down brick building surrounded by a vast compound strewn with garbage and overgrown grass. The landscape was so empty, eerie, and desolate that no one would be able to tell there was life behind the broken, mud-caked glass windows haphazardly patched with cardboard, wood planks, and an assortment of construction rubble. My first impression did not shift even after entering the building to find the entire first floor dark, dilapidated, and half-buried under rubble. Yet, the moment I reached the top of the flight of stairs that was hidden from view, I could smell onion frying in the kitchen and hear voices, laughter, and the constant whirring and buzzing of a multitude of sewing machines. Roughly 100 workers, employed by four different factories, lived and worked on the second floor of the building, sleeping in bunkbeds just a cardboard divider away from the sewing machines over which they toiled for up to 20 hours a day. Kitchen, sleeping quarters, makeshift toilets, and workspace were separated from one another by flimsy plywood or cardboard walls, all with access to a single fire exit route, which was the front door through which I had entered. The door was always locked and securely guarded by a Russian watchman who kept the key. Such squalid, cramped, and prison-like conditions explain why fire in xưởng may đen is often deadly. Fire is not the only thing that could claim workers’ lives, at least in a direct manner. Workers escaping from police raids, I was told, risk dying of hypothermia when hiding in the woods in sub-zero temperatures, and several have actually lost their lives in those situations. When the alarm is raised, they must run out instantly with whatever clothing items they have on while the temperature can drop to as low as minus 35 degrees Celsius in winter. In

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December 2014, for example, Báo Nga, a Vietnamese language electronic media outlet, reported that three Vietnamese undocumented workers had run from a police raid and lost their lives to hypothermia in a nearby field.70 Some more fortunate workers had their frostbitten legs amputated after dunking them in snow for hours. Thái, a 29-year-old market trader at Sadovod, started out as a garment worker for various xưởng may đens for two years. Three years after making his career change, Thái still shivered when recalling the brutality of the Russian winter that he came face to face with during police raids: The first time I ran away from the police, I nearly died. I had been locked inside a basement for six months from the first day in Russia, then moved to the fifth floor of the same building for another year, still locked up. I had never been out since the day I arrived at the airport for one and a half years. How could I know how cold Russian winter could be? Then one day the police came, without any warnings. I sprinted out. It was freezing! I stood and waited in the snow for more than one hour. It was minus 30 degrees Celsius. I had never worn winter clothes since I arrived in Russia; never needed to as I had never left the building. I did not know it could be so cold outside. Then I suffered from pneumonia for a month, drifting in and out of high fever in bed and coughing my lungs out. I still count myself lucky. I could have lost my legs had I stayed outside a little longer.

While factory owners are not subject to the same bodily security risks because they do not live at xưởng may đen, every police raid leads to a major financial crisis or, in many situations, bankruptcy. Below is how Hoa recounted a series of police raids in 2013-2014 that had devastating financial consequences for her family: I moved my factory six times last year [2013]. It cost me RUB 100 million.71 On several occasions, we had just moved into a new place and installed the machines when the police came. They ransacked the factory, confiscated everything, and arrested the people who did not manage to escape. Those who did escape were so terrified. Many decided to go home [Vietnam] afterwards. It’s devastating. I had to pay RUB 30-40,000 per head to bail 70 Source: Vỡ mộng đổi đời trên đất Nga: Cuộc trốn chạy thảm khốc ,, [Dreams shattered in Russia: a fatal escape], http://baonga.com/nguoi-viet-tai-nga.nd173/vo-mong-doi-doi-tren-datnga-cuoc-tron-chay-tham-khoc.i51806.html, accessed 30 December 2014. 71 Based on the 2013-2014 exchange rate of USD 1=RUB 35, RUB 100 million is around USD2,857,143.

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out detained workers. That’s not to mention the initial advancement of USD 1,600 each to twenty of them [the workers] to cover their travel expenses to Russia. They left before they could pay it back. How can I recover the money? No way!

The first thing xưởng may đen owners do in the aftermath of police raids is to reassemble their workforce. It is not easy to find replacements in Russia, while flying back to Vietnam to recruit new workers would incur substantial financial and opportunity costs. Yet bailing out detained workers is no ordinary feat. Xưởng may đen owners, with rare exceptions, are post-Soviet migrants who go down this path because they do not have the required capital, social connections, language proficiency, and knowledge of Russian polity and society to establish lawful businesses. It is inevitable that they have to turn to intermediaries for assistance. Generally, the bailout costs are borne by the workers themselves, often recovered in the form of future wage deductions, but some xưởng may đen owners are prepared to foot the bill if they feel the workers are worth it. Brokers are often demonized in the media and academic research, portrayed as unscrupulous villains who are both deeply loathed and gravely feared by their gullible clients (see also Lindquist et al., 2012; McKeown, 2012). In the chaotic and unpredictable context of Russia, where brokerage tends to be a spontaneous and opportunistic rather than an organized activity, brokers do not always emerge as wretched scoundrels or elated winners. Many can easily fall victim to their own devices, especially when they do not speak fluent Russian or do not have strong connections with Russian authorities. I got to know Hương, a 30-year-old mother of two, while hanging out in a playground in the suburb of Belaya Dacha where migrant mothers, nannies, and children congregated every morning. Having lost her first husband – the family breadwinner – to a tragic accident when she was 23, Hương decided to leave her baby son behind with his paternal grandparents and migrate overseas to work. Unable to afford hefty brokerage fees for other destinations (her first choice was Taiwan, which would have cost her VND 110 million or USD 5,500 for a two-year factory work contract), she decided to try her luck in Russia, which required ‘only’ USD 2,500 in exchange for a one-way ticket, a tourist visa, and a job in a xưởng may đen. In Moscow, the pretty young widow quickly caught the attention of the factory’s van driver, a Vietnamese man one year her junior, and they soon got married. When I first met her in April 2014, Hương had quit her xưởng may đen job, borne her second son, and was hoping to send him to his paternal grandparents in Vietnam so she could help her husband with

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his business. Hương’s husband had quit his driver’s job and engaged in what was referred to as ‘làm mặt bằng’ (production space dealership). The business was profitable, yet extremely high-risk: He is a production space dealer. You know, he acquires spaces and sublets them to xưởng may đens. If things go well, it [the money] is very quick … just three – four months … [to recover the investment]. But too much investment goes into those places, and then all goes down the drain when the police strike. He could rent a two-story townhouse from local Russians and add toilets and bathrooms. Or he could just squat in an abandoned factory, adding toilets and bathrooms, partitioning it, and subletting sections to factories. It’s good money, sis. He can easily set aside USD 10,000 per month [as savings]. He does not speak any Russian. But he hangs out with a group of former students who have connections. He did very well the year before the last but last year was bad. He lost everything. He hasn’t recovered. No money. When a site was discovered by the police, he lost a few months’ deposit [paid to the property owner] and a month’s advance payment of protection fees [to the local policeman]. Roughly RUB 1 million. But he did not lose just one site and one million roubles. A few of them at the same time. That is not to mention the money he had invested in making them habitable. One of the xưởng may đens was ours. We lost all the machines and fabrics too. Our tenants never paid rents in advance. We couldn’t collect rent before they collected their money from market traders, which often took months.

The spontaneity and opportunism in brokerage networks, research shows, are common where the deregulation of economic activities and decentralization of state governance intersect with strong ethnic networks at the micro level (see Chee, Yeoh, & Vu, 2012; Lindquist, 2012, for example). In the age of neoliberal globalization, the role of the state is reconstituted (yet not diminished by any means), allowing new economic actors and entities to emerge and take over what has been vacated (Hoang, 2017; Rodriguez, 2010). In other words, brokerage networks work like an alternative form of governance and governmentality, ensuring that formal and shadow economies can run in parallel in a productive and well-articulated manner. As the case of Russia demonstrates, illegality is ultimately the product of state governance. The disenfranchising of foreign migrants is not merely a disciplinary measure, but another biopower technology to keep them vulnerable, fearful, and therefore exploitable. Irregular migration is indeed beneficial for the Russian economy at all levels (Davé, 2014a: 2). Everyone seems to have something to gain from the

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abundant supply of cheap labor and goods: employers generate greater profits from casual and cheap labor; intermediaries proliferate and prosper from migrants’ illegality and vulnerability; Russian bureaucrats are able to supplement their meager salaries with lucrative under-the-table dealings; and the Russian public have access to low-cost merchandise and services that would not have been possible otherwise. The FMS estimated that over 93,000 employers were using the services of irregular foreign workers in 2004 (ICMPD, 2006). Despite a restrictive legal framework and anti-immigrant sentiments in society, both the Russian state and public know all too well that irregular migration is inevitable and necessary for the transitional economy of post-Soviet Russia. What has been characterized by Russia scholars as a train wreck, bureaucratic chaos, and a typical example of post-communist helter-skelter (e.g. Davé, 2014b; Malakhov, 2014; Perevedentsev, 1999) is actually, in Foucault’s (1991) words, an art of government. Illegality is an instrumental government technique that helps the Russian state achieve its economic goals, while at the same time justifying its disregard for human rights in the treatment of foreign immigrants. Maintaining the status quo in the migration regime ensures that Russia’s economic interests are maximized while what is imagined as a racially and culturally homogeneous society remains intact. Irregular migration is a self-perpetuating process. It undergirds Russia’s booming shadow economy, which, as it continues to expand, fuels the demand for further irregular migration. In this chapter, I have demonstrated that illegality is not necessarily the antithesis of the state or something occurring externally to it. The case of Russia reveals wry contradictions in the way the state identifies itself as a guardian of its citizenry’s lawful interests yet is, at the same time, complicit in the unlawful practices that make irregular migration possible (Fassin, 2011, p. 217). However, such an approach cuts both ways. The Russian state’s crucial role in the creation of a vast irregular migrant population and the normalization of the shadow economy in Russia undermines the very processes and structures it seeks to protect (see also Beltrán Antolín, 1998, p. 234). Illegality, as I demonstrate in the next chapter, not only draws a sharp line between locals and ‘illegal aliens’ (see Chock, 1991; Mehan, 1997; Nevins, 2002), but also divides the latter themselves, disintegrating core elements of what would have brought them together as a community. In my analysis of market ethos and social anomie in Chapter IV, I depart from the common tendency to victimize irregular migrants (Ivakhnyuk, 2009, p. 44; Tishkov et al., 2005; Tyuryukanova, 2005) and focus instead on their agency as well as the sociocultural forces that enable or constrain it.

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Photo 9 A room shared by a family of three in an apartment in Belaya Dacha suburb; between the mattress and the bed is an ancestors’ altar

Photo 10 A living room converted into a bedroom shared by a couple (mattress in far left corner) and three single men, in an apartment in Belaya Dacha suburb; in the right corner is a Thổ Địa (Spirits of the Place) altar

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Photo 11 A room shared by two families (four adults, two young children) in Rybak hostel. A couple and their two children sleep in a bed in the left corner while the other couple sleep on a raised wooden platform (about 3m2) above the woman’s head.

Photo 12  A room shared by eight people in Mekong hostel

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Photo 13 A nanny feeding a little girl on a landing inside Mekong hostel. This is as much of a glimpse of Russian society as they can get.

Photo 14 An en suite room shared by six people in the Red Chinese Dormitory (Ốp Tàu đỏ)

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Photo 15  Communal kitchen in the Red Chinese Dormitory (Ốp Tàu đỏ)

Photo 16 The inconspicuous façade of a building housing several illegal garment factories (xưởng may đen)

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Photo 17  An illegal garment factory compound

Photo 18  The night shift at an illegal garment factory

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Photo 19  Sleeping quarters inside an illegal garment factory

IV Market ethos and the volatile radius of trust Uncertainty and market moralities Life at the market is plagued by intense competition, rivalry, and distrust. Ironically, trust is more tenuous among Vietnamese fellow countrymen than between them and members of other ethnic groups, even though co-ethnic networks are their vital source of support, information, and social security. In a volatile and highly competitive market environment, secrecy is key to traders’ ability to survive and thrive. If the word gets out that someone’s business is doing well, its stability will most certainly come under threat: the công owner will immediately demand a rent increase and rivals will seek to outbid them to secure the công or start trading the same wares. If someone is struggling, suppliers will stop selling them merchandise on account and moneylenders will be more likely to refuse requests for loans. Yet trust is vital in a context where the commodity chain is also a credit chain running from the original source of textiles and accessories to textile and accessories retailers, garment factory owners, garment workers, garment wholesale traders, and then garment retailers at the market. Garment retailers rarely pay for their stock upfront, but rather in installments or even at the end of the sale season. Therefore one must trust and be trusted by one’s partners along the commodity chain in order to establish and develop a business. The distrust for Vietnamese compatriots is so deep and routinized that it has become a new modus operandi for market traders, informing their choices and practices in every aspect of their transnational life, from business conduct to intimate relationships. A similar observation has been made among Chinese market traders elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 33). While intra-ethnic misgivings could be explained by the fact that Chinese and Vietnamese migrants’ social interactions rarely go beyond their respective ethnic bubbles (hence the greater chance of friction) due to a lack of local language proficiency, the time-intensive nature of market trade, and the ethnic segmentation of the market in both spatial and mercantile terms, they are often seen by my research participants as something deep-seated in the Vietnamese ‘culture’ and integral to what they see as Vietnamese personhood. Studies of contemporary Vietnamese society suggest that marketplaces are often held in suspicion and contempt by the general public because

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market traders are seen as self-interested and greedy individuals prepared to do anything to turn a profit, even if it means going against the most basic moral norms or betraying one’s own conscience (Leshkowich, 2015, p. 5; Truitt, 2013, p. 44). In other words, market trade and morality are mutually exclusive. In the marketplace, economic success is, indeed, a zero-sum game, compelling many traders to scramble for every opportunity and tread on one another’s toes if necessary. This is particularly true for Vietnamese traders in Moscow, who mostly specialize in clothing and thus face intense competition from their compatriots. The ability to eliminate competition is critical to traders’ success. Therefore, one must stay tight-lipped about the conduct of their business and be constantly vigilant against potential competitors. It is a self-perpetuating cycle: distrust encourages lies, which breed further distrust. ‘Обман, сосед умер!’ (If I cheat, my neighbor dies) – a witty phrase commonly used by traders in a half-joking manner – sums up market common sense: trust no one. In the market where money is a central concern, it seems logical that ‘Have you sold much today?’ (‘Hôm nay bán được không?’) has become the most common way to greet each other in the market lane. Every time such a greeting was exchanged, I saw an identical manufactured expression of disappointment on the other person’s face, accompanied by an unconvincing headshake and a predictable response: ‘Impossibly stale!’ (‘Đuội lắm!’). Such a phrase has become a default response, and to say something else would potentially trigger suspicion and unease. Even friends, relatives, and intimate partners are not entirely immune to lies. Fifty-year-old Thái, for example, has given up inquiring about fellow traders’ business, whether as a form of social etiquette or out of a genuine concern for their welfare. When I asked him if he knew his best friend Mạnh had been doing well recently, he crudely responded: ‘I don’t know. I don’t even ask him. Even if I did, he would never tell me the truth. Why should I bother then? I am myself not honest with him, so how can I expect him to be honest with me?’ Since no one expects to obtain information directly from fellow traders, snooping around other stores becomes the only way to do market research, which is often met with hostility and occasionally leads to open and violent confrontation. Unexpected visits or even chance appearances near each other’s stores almost always arouse suspicion, while the act of initiating friendly small talk along the market lane might easily be taken as an attempt to pry into people’s business affairs. True to the motto ‘better safe than sorry,’ people even lie to each other about trivial and seemingly harmless details of their lives, such as their grocery spending. Telling lies, keeping one’s cards close to one’s chest, and staying

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constantly vigilant of other people’s intentions are not only crucial ways to improve the chances of business success but also a matter of survival in its literal sense, especially for those whose jobs require them to handle large amounts of cash on a daily basis, such as brokers, garment factory owners, moneylenders, and foreign exchange dealers. Although they try their best to minimize risks by, for example, hiring bodyguards, investing in private means of transport, and avoiding travelling outside the market with too much cash, keeping themselves and their money safe is not an easy feat. Armed robberies in areas around Liublino and Sadovod markets are routinely reported in the national media,72 with perpetrators most likely to be identified as migrant men from Central Asia or the Caucasus and their victims – fellow migrants from China and Vietnam. It is common for robbers to ambush migrants when they leave or enter their residential buildings, forcing the victims to take them to their apartments so they can take whatever is valuable. I was often warned by my host not to enter the building or the lift with strangers for that reason. Vietnamese migrants are seen as easy targets, I was told, because they are ‘thấp cổ bé họng’ (which literally means ‘low neck, small voice’ – weak and small in both physical and social terms). In many high-prof ile cases that involve hundreds of thousands of dollars, my Vietnamese interlocutors believe that certain victims are targeted because someone they know has leaked information about their habits, routines, and identity to robbery gangs so they can have a share of the proceeds. As shown below in the casual chat I had with Tuyết the go-between and the owner of a café in Rybak (Fisherman), the migrant hostel where I often conducted participant observation, all the robberies seem to be carefully planned and well executed, and the victims are clearly not random people: Café owner: Now this is what I heard directly [from the victim]. Hà [her brother], his friend and the friend’s uncle went to a [Vietnamese] foreign exchange service to change money. They got USD 50,000 from the shop. When they were leaving the place in their car, another car rammed theirs and forced them to stop. Not sure what he [the robber] was holding in his hand, but the car window broke into pieces the moment he pressed his fist against it. Before they could realize what was happening, a gun was already pointing at them. 72 For example, Bắt băng nhóm cướp tiền gần chợ Sadovod [Armed robbery suspects arrested near Sadovod market], Báo Nga, http://baonga.com/xa-hoi-nga.nd129/moskva-bat-bang-nhomcuop-tien-gan-cho-sadovod.i44669.html, accessed 2 June 2014.

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Lan Anh: What did they look like? Café owner: Central Asian ‘black heads73’ [Trung Á đầu đen]. They took all the money. In another situation, my friend Hậu was driving home after borrowing money from a moneylender. She was on the way from Km 19 market [Yuzhnyie Vorota] to MKAD when another car rammed hers and pulled her over. They took everything – money, her car, and all her belongings – then shoved her down to the roadside. It was two months ago. The police have found the car thanks to its built-in GPS. Tuyết: Do you remember the airline agent named An? It was the Vietnamese who tipped off the ‘black heads about him.’ He was killed because he had only RUB 1 million with him that day. Usually he left the market with tens of millions of roubles, but that’s all he had on him that day. The boy who worked for him said that only the money transfer people knew he carried so much cash with him.

In the early, turbulent years of post-Soviet Russia, armed robberies tended to involve violence, often with deadly consequences, but things seem to have shifted recently and the victim more often than not escapes the incident unhurt. Although the countless tales I heard at cafés and along the market lane varied greatly in terms of time, place, scale, and the manner in which the robbery was conducted, they had one thing in common: my interlocutors were convinced they had always happened with the assistance of a Vietnamese ‘rat.’ How, they asked, could the ‘black head’ robbers have been able to identify their potential victims otherwise, given that the latter’s business dealings were strictly with their fellow countrymen and given how discreet they had been? Tuyết, for example, firmly believed Vietnamese people were the principal culprits in all the crimes against their compatriots. She explained: Vietnamese do not dare rob people. They just snitch. Rats are everywhere at the market, you know. They spy on money transfer folks. They take photos of their car number plates and take note of their outfits and physical appearances, record their daily routines and habits. Then they Viber 74 the information [to the robbery gang] … In short, Vietnamese are best at backstabbing their own people. 73 People from Central Asia and the Caucasus are referred to as đầu đen (black heads) by the Vietnamese to distinguish them from Russians with fair-colored hair. 74 Viber is an instant messaging and voice over IP application developed for smart phones. It is the most common way to communicate among Vietnamese migrants in Moscow.

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For this reason, I was told, Vietnamese dịch vụ have become more discreet and vigilant in the way they conduct their business. For example, they no longer advertise their addresses in Vietnamese language newspapers, as they used to do, and they keep changing the location where they meet with their clients. I myself experienced the same sense of fear felt by those who might easily be targeted by robbers when travelling to a xưởng may trắng (white/legal garment factory) with its co-owners, Thanh and Tú. Thanh, a 38-year-old divorced mother of two from Nghệ An, was running a xưởng may đen when I met her in 2013 and 2014. In 2016 she had acquired a xưởng may trắng with her boyfriend, 30-year-old Vũ, and their mutual friend, Tú, after a particularly successful year that allowed them to accumulate a substantial amount of savings, having become weary of the constant disruptions caused by police raids. The acquisition cost them USD 100,000, with another USD 100,000 spent on machinery and materials; they were in command of a medium-sized factory employing 50 Vietnamese workers. Thanh told me it was a bargain, as the former owner of the xưởng may trắng had gone bankrupt after the rouble lost half its value in 2015. Thanh and her business partners did not visit the factory, which was 200 kilometers south of Moscow, every day, but operated it from afar with the assistance of a dedicated site manager and a small team of van drivers, who transported supplies from the market to the factory and finished products from the factory back to the market. Workers’ salaries were paid once every three months and Thanh allowed me to accompany her on one of the occasions when she was due to pay the salaries. Thanh texted me her car’s number plate and instructed me to meet her in the car park on the southern edge of Sadovod market at 3.00pm one Sunday afternoon. It was an unusually cold November day in 2016. It had been snowing for days and the temperature had dropped to -12 degrees Celsius by the time I reached the car park. I searched high and low, but Thanh’s car was nowhere to be seen. After failing to reach her on her mobile phone multiple times, I decided to take up a conspicuous spot in the car park (so she could easily see me when she arrived) and wait. Thanh did not call me until 4.15pm, by which time I had become numb with cold and nearly given up hope of finding her. I was instructed to go find her in another car park east of the pavilions instead. I was dismayed but not irritated, knowing how busy and stressful her daily routine could be, having known her for four years and traveled with her to her xưởng may đen many times in the past. I did not find out until the end of the trip that the delay was deliberate. In the strictly cash economy of Vietnamese migrants in Russia, even salaries are paid in cash. Thanh brought with her no less than RUB 3 million (USD 50,000) every time she made the trip to the

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factory and, for that reason, the 200-kilometer drive in heavy snow became even riskier. As it turned out, no one apart from Thanh, Tú (who drove the car), and myself knew about the trip and the long wait in the cold that I was subjected to was part of the plan. When I asked Thanh where Sergey – a young Ukrainian van driver who used to work for her – was, she responded: I’ve made him redundant. He has not found another job since then. He is still a good friend and visits me from time to time. But he does not know about my new xưởng may trắng. He had been working for me too long and knew more than he should have.

Surviving Russia is essentially about being able to maintain a delicate balance between trust and distrust. One’s business success is dependent on the ability to develop trusted and close relationships with employees and business partners, while at the same time keeping a safe distance from them so they cannot become a potential threat. It is not uncommon for highly mobile Vietnamese businesspeople like Thanh to employ Russian and Ukrainian bodyguards and drivers whose strong physique, cultural capital, and racial background are important advantages on the road. Ironically, the same qualities that render Caucasian men competent are also a source of anxiety and vulnerability for their Vietnamese bosses, who are not only significantly smaller in size, but also severely socially and culturally disadvantaged. Whenever possible, therefore, they go for fellow countrymen when it comes to hiring. ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,’ Thanh affirmed, ‘At least I can guess what they [Vietnamese] may be up to.’ Without recourse to either formal criminal justice systems or informal networks of social protection, Vietnamese migrants have only themselves to rely on in troubled situations. As 29-year-old market trader Thái acknowledged with much sadness: ‘Human life is worthless here. No one would care if you die. No family, no relatives. No one to turn to.’ Migrants are thus caught in a quagmire: the constant urge to be vigilant to others’ intent and to pre-empt rivalry and competition has a crippling effect on social relationships, while the failure to do so risks devastating business failure. The fragility of social relationships is illustrated by the following narrative provided by 45-year-old trader Sắc, who bitterly recounted the intensifying rivalry between his wife and her sister, which subsequently led them to disown each other: We brought her [his wife’s sister] here. We advanced her some money to cover the initial expenses. She worked for us for nearly two years. We

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rented two stores; I was in charge of this one and my wife and her sister looked after the second one. As soon as she [his sister-in-law] had saved enough money, she moved out and rented a store only a few doors away, selling exactly the same T-shirts sourced from the same suppliers. She is now in direct competition with us. Without a doubt they got into fights. They are no longer sisters. It’s tough when money is involved, right? Money is impersonal. Sisterhood does not matter.

As my fieldwork progressed, I came to the realization that Sắc’s embittered fallout with his sister-in-law was by no means an isolated experience at the marketplace. Opportunistic, self-interested behaviors seemed to be encouraged and easily justified by a common sense of uncertainty and precarity among migrants. Foul play, however, does not always go without retribution. Bad behavior, especially involving violent confrontations, is ungraciously punished by the market management. In the narrative below, 32-year-old Nguyệt recalled with much sadness how she and her sister Linh helped a neighbor from Vietnam set up his own business at Sadovod, only to see him quickly stab them in the back: I helped him lease the công next door. I even gave him 10,000 roubles to set it up. I told him not to source the same type of kids’ clothing from the same supplier or it would be difficult for both of us. But that’s exactly what he did. On many occasions, he saw people buy things from me and stopped them when they passed by his công to offer a lower price. Then the customers came back to return the wares to me. One day, when I was still at home, my sister and a cousin became so angry, they hit him and it escalated to a big fight. He was merciless. He used a hammer to hit the girls. They got bruises all over their faces and bodies. My husband was furious. He battered the guy badly the following day. The market security sealed off his shop for two days and made him pay my sisters 20,000 roubles as compensation for the injuries. He was then beaten up by the security guards. It got so brutal we had to beg them for mercy on him. Two days out of business – it cost him a fortune, you know.

The guards’ corporal punishment, indeed, paled in comparison to the temporary closure of the store. With the staggering rental fees ranging from RUB 330,000 to 600,000 (USD 10,000-18,000) per month for a fifteen or twenty square meter store as of April 2014, stores must be kept open long hours every day, rain or shine, or traders would not be able to sustain such exorbitant rental rates. Trang, my host, cried out when I asked her

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why she was not taking a day off to recover from a severe bout of flu: ‘How can I afford it? I wake up every day to the thought, “I must make at least 500 dollars today to break even!”’ While a small number of traders, especially those working at Liublino market, are relatively successful, most manage to generate just a small margin of profit, and many count themselves lucky if they earn enough to get by. With their lives and businesses perpetually on the line, migrant traders are compelled to redefine their values and priorities to keep risks and uncertainties at bay. The lax morals observed in Moscow markets are not simply driven by traders’ perception of marketplaces as amoral or immoral, as those indoctrinated by Marxist and Leninist ideologies might suppose (Humphrey & Mandel, 2002, p. 2; Kaneff, 2002, p. 34; Leshkowich, 2015, p. 5). They are an inevitable outcome of a political and economic system in which vulnerabilities and uncertainties are legitimated and routinized. In such a precarious situation, people’s preoccupation with money and the deviant behaviors that this emboldens seem to be easily justified. According to Clifford Geertz (1993), there are three kinds of situations in which taken-for-granted tenets of social life are breached and chaos threatens to erupt: when we find ourselves at the limits of our analytic capacities, at the limits of our powers of endurance, and at the limits of our moral insight. This is precisely the situation in which Vietnamese migrants are trapped. The transient, precarious, and uncertain nature of life in Moscow impairs their ability to make informed choices and sound moral judgments in their day-to-day living. The erosion of trust is commonly observed across immigrant communities in transitional economies of Eastern and Central Europe, where changeable legislation and inadequate law enforcement deny individuals the accountability, rights, and protection that they require (e.g. Benton & Pieke, 1998; Bui, 2003; Chang & Rucker-Chang, 2012; Davé, 2014a; Feige & Ott, 1999; Nožina, 2010). Commitments are breached and laws are broken with impunity, occasionally compelling individuals to take the law into their own hands: factory owners suddenly disappear without a trace, taking with them months of unpaid wages; debtors cut and run when loans are due; unscrupulous brokers charge a fortune for forged documents or run away with advance payments; and business partners swindle one another out of their lifetime savings. Seeking legal redress in such situations is out of the question for many migrants because of their irregular status. Even if they have recourse to legal processes, the corrupt justice system would be strong enough a deterrent to prevent them from pressing ahead with their quest for justice. In most situations, the only two options available to them are to hire criminal gangs to settle the affair on their behalf, or to accept the damages and move on.

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I find Merton’s (1938) theoretical work on social structure and anomie particularly useful in understanding traders’ social conduct. Merton argues that deviant behavior is intrinsically sociocultural in nature. Specifically, he points out that some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct by generating the circumstances in which infringement of social codes constitutes a ‘normal’ response (ibid., p. 672). Two central elements of cultural and social structure are a frame of aspirational reference and the moral and institutional regulation of permissible and required procedures for attaining these goals. Aberrant conduct is viewed as a symptom of disassociation between culturally defined aspirations and socially structured means. Put simply, anomie ensues when conformity to roles and adherence to status obligations is not adequately rewarded or when there are differential emphases on goals and regulations. With an existential angst caused by their social exclusion and vulnerability in Russia, Vietnamese migrants see their time in the country as a temporary existence. With only a few exceptions, they mostly leave their children with extended family in Vietnam and invest any money and time they can afford in consolidating their social and economic security back home. The primary goal in Russia is therefore to make as much as money as possible while they can; life can start once they return to the homeland or, in some cases, when they are able to settle in one of the developed Western countries. Symbolic capital – that is, honor, prestige, and recognition (Bourdieu, 1986) – is more likely to be convertible to other forms of capital when one lives in a stable and established community on a long-term basis. In the transient and volatile context of Russia, the accumulation of symbolic capital not only lessens material gains, but also promises very few social benefits. The respect for communitarian values and fulfillment of social obligations, which are crucial in the social life of the Vietnamese back home, are less likely to be rewarded or reciprocated in Russia. With few incentives for conformist conduct, the success of the migration endeavor is construed strictly in terms of material wealth. The emphasis is then placed on the most technically efficient means, rather than institutionally prescribed ones, to achieve economic success.

Each person for themselves Trung, my 48-year-old host in Moscow, comes from an established market trader family in Thái Bình City with a long history of migration to Russia.

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By the early 1990s, Vietnam had miraculously transformed itself from a rice importer to the world’s third largest rice exporter (Glewwe, 2004, p. 2), but nearly 60 percent of the population still lived in poverty and wage employment rates remained low (23.9 percent as of 1993) (Gallup, 2004, p. 57). The nascent private sector and sluggish industry were still hamstrung by significant barriers to trade and investment. Without the right connections or higher education qualifications, Trung’s access to formal employment was limited, while market trade, which had been keeping his family afloat throughout the war and post-war years, was declining rapidly. His family’s economic prospects were grim, especially because Trung’s young, unemployed wife was expecting their first child, upon whose arrival household expenditure would increase. After several failed attempts to earn a living by smuggling homeware from China, he decided to invest the little cash he had left in a one-way ticket to Russia. At the time of his departure in 1993, one of Trung’s stepbrothers was completing his PhD in agronomics in Moscow and several of his neighbors had already migrated to Russia. Trung was convinced he was going to make it. He planned to work for a few years in Russia and return to his family in Vietnam as soon as he had saved enough money to set up a small business in his hometown. Life and work in Russia proved more challenging than Trung had anticipated. Without start-up capital, language skills, and support networks, he could hardly make ends meet. His stepbrother, as it turned out, did not know much about life beyond the university’s walls, while his neighbors were also struggling. For four years, Trung toiled in the open-air markets that had sprung up spontaneously all over Moscow. These markets are often referred to as chợ cầm tay (ware on arm market) by my Vietnamese interlocutors, as traders had no stalls or tables to display garments. They hung the wares on their arms instead. He could not afford to send home any money or visit his family before a chance meeting with the President of the Sông Hồng (Red River) Company, which was in control of several commercial đôm (дом – residential block) and ốp (общежитие – student hostels) in Moscow, led to a major breakthrough. The company’s president happened to be an avid table tennis fan, while Trung excelled at the sport. He was offered a salaried position within the company and, after a short time, he was able to send for his wife (leaving their son behind with his brother’s family). They rented a room in one of the more successful ốps and used it for both living and trading. Things took off quickly for Trung’s family during the golden years of ‘apartment trade,’ and soon they were able to purchase the use rights of several rooms in the building, which were rented out to fellow traders.

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News of Trung’s prosperity quickly traveled to Vietnam. By that time, two of his siblings – an older sister named Ánh and a younger brother named Cường – had already returned home after unsuccessful attempts to settle down permanently in the Czech Republic and Germany respectively. Ánh, a market trader and a mother of three, had traveled to Prague, where their stepbrother was living with his family, on a tourist visa, hoping to obtain permanent residency with his help. However, she quickly realized that it would not be as easy to make big money in the tightly regulated Czech economy as she had thought and decided to go home. Cường, on the other hand, had paid USD 3,600 to a gang to be smuggled to Germany from Russia. He first flew to Moscow; from there he was driven to Kiev, then to the Ukraine-Slovakia border, which he crossed on foot, and escorted by local guides from Slovakia to the Czech Republic and, finally, Germany. Upon his arrival, Cường lodged an asylum application and was sent to a refugee camp in Munich. He was provided with a monthly allowance of EUR 500, but still worked illegally as a kitchen hand. While his income was decent compared to what he had earned as a long-distance merchant in Vietnam, Cường realized it would be impossible to achieve his ambition of becoming a wealthy ông chủ lớn (big boss) in Germany. By the early 2000s, the economic and political situation in unified Germany had stabilized and the underground economy, in which Vietnamese migrants thrived in the 1990s, was shrinking. Cường’s asylum application was rejected and although he was not to be deported, he decided to return home voluntarily. He cited the lack of prospects for mobility in Germany as the main reason for leaving: I worked there (in the restaurant) for over two years. But I did not like it there. You see that I am the boss here. I am my own boss at the market. But I was just a waged laborer there, right? I don’t like that kind of life. I have got used to trading in the market since forever. I only did manual labor there because I had no other alternatives. Money is another matter. Here in Russia we may not make any profits for the whole year but we may make tens of thousands of dollars the following year. The more important thing for me is that I am my own boss in Russia.

Inspired by Trung’s success in Moscow, Ánh and Cường followed in his footsteps. With Trung and his wife’s help, they quickly settled in and were soon able to ‘buy’ (use rights of) their own rooms. Confident about her economic prospects in Russia, Ánh started to expand her business to Chợ Vòm (Cherkizovsky) and even traveled to China to source her wares directly from the manufacturer. Overwhelmed by the amount of work involved,

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Ánh sent for her niece, 20-year-old Phương, and later her brother-in-law, 48-year-old Tiến (Phương’s father), to assist her in the ốp and at the market. By the time commercial đôm and ốp started to be closed down in 2002, six members of Trung’s family were living in Moscow. Trung, Ánh, and Cường suffered devastating losses when their ốp was closed down all of a sudden in 2002. Tiến decided to leave Russia for good. Trung and Trang – his wife – also left but made their way back in 2007 after finding no viable livelihoods in Vietnam and using up all their savings. Phương married a fellow trader and, together with her husband, set up her own business in Chợ Vòm (Cherkizovsky), where Cường and Ánh had relocated. When Chợ Vòm was closed down in 2009, they all suffered considerable financial losses again and, after a long, anxious wait for news about new market sites, they finally moved their businesses to Sadovod. By the time I visited them in Moscow for the first time in 2013, Cường had sent for his 36-year-old wife, Quyên. They left their eldest daughter with Quyên’s family in Vietnam and had two more children in Moscow – a girl in 2012 and a boy in 2017. Ánh had stopped trading at the market and focused on importing garments from China. She even instructed one of her daughters to learn Chinese and funded her postgraduate studies in China so she could assist her on her business trips to China. Trung and his wife and Phương and her husband were trading in the same linia at Sadovod, only fifteen côngs away from each other. Having lived through the distressing upheavals of market trade in post-Soviet Russia, Trung and his relatives now do everything they can to minimize risks in case another crisis befalls them. No one dares make long-term plans in Russia and there is a strong sense of transience in their day-to-day living. They work long hours, trying to make the most out of each day at the market, because no one is sure what might happen the following day. They all live as frugally as possible, reducing their daily necessities to a bare minimum and refraining from buying even the most essential things, such as a bed, a microwave oven to heat up leftover food, or a fan that would make life easier on hot summer days. Instead of investing their savings in properties in Moscow, particularly in the use rights of a công to ensure some degree of stability, they remit any money that can be put aside to Vietnam and by 2016, each couple had been able to buy a house back home. Minimizing risks also means they keep a distance from each other, financially and socially, after the bitter failure of several joint business ventures in the past and the tension that ensued. They no longer live together, but in separate rented apartments near Liublino and Sadovod markets. As I know the whole extended family, Trung and Cường’s families co-hosted a welcome dinner for me at Cường’s place on my first visit in 2013.

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It was a pleasant evening with friendly chatter and light-hearted laughter, and I was flabbergasted to find out three years later that it was the only time the two brothers and their wives had shared a meal together since they moved into separate apartments in 2009. They have not got together again since. On one occasion in 2014, Ánh invited me to her place for dinner but, for some reason, did not extend that invitation to her brother Trung and sister-in-law Trang, with whom I was staying. Trung and Trang have severed the relationship with Trung’s niece Phương and her husband, who run a công only about 50 meters away, after the young couple decided to sell the same type of garments sourced from the same Chinese merchant, thereby making themselves direct competitors of their uncle and aunt. In early 2017, I received news that Cường and Quyên had just welcomed their third child into the world, a precious son that they had been longing for. I asked Trang on Skype if she and her husband had paid the newborn baby a visit, which is, to borrow Di Leonardo’s (1987) term, an important ‘kinwork’ practice in Vietnamese culture. She responded: No, it [visiting Quyên and her newborn baby] would just bring bad luck. They [Cường and Quyên] don’t even want to call us to know how we are. They scrimp on every cent. Why should I visit them?

What Trung’s family has been going through is not out of the ordinary, but a common experience among the people participating in my research. I saw the same story repeat itself over four years of fieldwork in Russia. With only a few exceptions, migration always starts from family networks that are, paradoxically, rendered particularly fragile by migration. This contradicts the common perception that the family is central to Vietnamese people’s social networks and that trust occurs only among a relatively narrow circle of family and close friends (Turner & Nguyen, 2005, p. 1704). In the fight to survive the unscrupulous, unpredictable market regime and the inhospitable social environment of Russia, migrants are aware that they would be left to fend for themselves, should something happen. The sense of uncertainty about life demands that they are strategic in every respect, even if it is at the expense of kinship networks and might potentially deprive them of vital support in situations of crisis. This underscores my observation in previous research in Taiwan that the political economy of migration holds the key to our understanding of how human relationships are reconfigured in the context of migration and mobility (Hoang, 2016b, 2017). The disenfranchised migrant finds his or her agency strictly circumscribed by the inability to predict or shape the future. Yet by cutting down what seem to be burdensome

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social obligations at present to focus on building economic security, one inadvertently renders one’s life even more precarious. One is a person of consequence, James Ferguson (2013, p. 227) contends, only when one is a social member of a certain ‘dependence network,’ which defines one’s personhood and belonging. Without dependence networks, there is no unified code of moral conduct that regulates behavior, creating a social condition in which people operate as atomized individuals with little or no social attachments or common sense of purpose. Social membership in a dependence network entitles one to make claims of assistance on other people in the network, while the lack of it renders one isolated and vulnerable. This is aptly illustrated by an incident I happened to be involved in at Cường’s place one evening in 2013. Cường and Quyên rented a one-bedroom apartment in the working-class suburb of Belaya Dacha, which was about four kilometers east of Sadovod market. They and their two-year-old daughter occupied the bedroom and sublet the living room, a small open space connecting to a shared kitchen, to three fellow market traders, all of whom were married women in their mid-forties whose families had stayed behind in Vietnam. Kiều, Đào, and Linh were seasoned traders with almost identical migration trajectories: they first came to Russia as contract workers in the late 1980s and stayed on to earn a living from trade after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. They married fellow Vietnamese migrant traders, had children in Moscow, and traded first in ốps, moving to Chợ Vòm in the 2000s after the former were closed down. Disheartened by the closure of Chợ Vòm in 2009, the three families decided to return to Vietnam for good. Linh was the only person who stayed on and was trading at Liublino at the time of our meeting in 2013. Like many other return migrants, Kiều and Đào could not find any way to earn a living in Vietnam, having lost touch with the homeland after twenty years in Russia. They come back to Moscow for four months each year in the summer, when rental rates in winter garments sections at Liublino and Sadovod are reduced to a minimum, co-let a công in one of the markets, and try to make as much money as they can before it is time to go home. The three women slept on the same mattress, which I shared with them when I stayed overnight. I was sharing an apartment with Trung and Trang in the suburb of Kotelniki, but spent a lot of time doing ethnographic observation and interviews in Belaya Dacha, where foreign migrants congregate. I slept in Kiều, Đào, and Linh’s room if it grew dark before work finished because, although Kotelniki was only two kilometers away, there was no safe way to get home. Public transport options connecting the two suburbs were not available, while taking a taxi, whether licensed or not, in that

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part of Moscow after dark would put me at risk. Except for a lucky few who own a car, Vietnamese migrants go out after dark only if it is absolutely necessary not only because of a high risk of xenophobic attacks, but also because they fear opportunistic criminals who specifically target vulnerable migrants. Routine reports of robberies against Asian migrants perpetrated by Central Asian migrant men lead many to impose a curfew on themselves. The suburbs with heavy concentrations of migrant tenants near Sadovod are poorly served by Moscow’s public transport system, especially if one wants to move around in the local area. The nearest metro station is at least six kilometers away and while there are privately run, permanently overloaded minibuses connecting major suburbs like Kotelniki and Belaya Dacha to the metro station and the market, they stop operating at 7.00pm. Even licensed taxis are few and far between. The most common way to commute to the market from surrounding suburbs is by taking one of the unlicensed taxis, which are old, shabby Ladas or Volgas driven by Tajik or Uzbek migrant men. They are also referred to as ‘jihad taxis’ because most drivers are Muslim.75 Typically, one pays only RUB 50 for a seat in a taxi shared with three more passengers, but it is extremely hard to find enough people to share the taxi in odd hours outside market traders’ daily routine. There have been notorious cases of Vietnamese migrants being mugged, sexually assaulted, kidnapped for ransom, or disappearing without a trace after taking unlicensed taxis, so the general rule is to avoid them when travelling alone or to not even venture out at all after dark. On one of the nights I stayed at Belaya Dacha, Kiều and Đào did not come home at their usual time (between 6:00-7.00pm). Sadovod closed at 6.00pm and it typically took them around 30 minutes to get home by minibus or ten minutes by taxi. Even the nearby shopping mall Mega, an after-hours visit to which was the only pastime for many Vietnamese market traders, closed at 9.00pm. As seasonal traders with only four months in Moscow each year, time was precious for Kiều and Đào. They kept a strict daily routine with absolutely no distractions, including entertainment or even short breaks. They got up at 4.30am every morning to eat breakfast and pack lunch and left for the market no later than 5.30am. They worked for the whole day at the market and returned home just before it closed at 6.00pm. The women were usually in bed at 9.00pm, after shower and a simple dinner, so they could have enough sleep before another early start the following morning. 75 Source: Central Asian migrants change the face of Moscow, The San Diego Union Tribune, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-central-asian-migrants-change-the-face-ofmoscow-2012dec29-story.html, accessed 9 October 2017.

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Staying up late was not even an option because of the lack of space and privacy – lights had to be turned off when other people in the apartment wanted to sleep. It was therefore rather odd, even alarming that Kiều and Đào had not come back past their usual bedtime that day. I got really worried by 10.00pm and asked Linh if she had her roommates’ mobile phone numbers so I could call them in case they needed help. As it happened, migrants sometimes got detained by the police on their way home and, because they did not dare bring much cash outside the market, they would not be able to bribe the police and would have to stay in the police station until someone came to pay the bribe for them. I thought this might have happened to the two women. However, Linh said that she did not have the numbers and, seeing how surprised I was, explained: We just share the mattress and this room, you see? I have never felt the need to contact them so I’ve never asked for their numbers. In this place, each person is for themselves [Ở đây thân ai người ấy lo]. Sorting out our own troubles is more than enough already. We have no time or energy to take care of other people’s affairs.

The response was deeply perplexing to me, because the three women seemed to get on well and even ate together sometimes. Kiều and Đào did not come home until midnight that day, drenched by rain, hungry, and tired. As it turned out, the market administration had decided to install additional fire sprinklers and a plumbing system in their linia and made them keep their công open until the work finished. They then had trouble finding a reliable unlicensed taxi to get home and had to wait a long time for the driver they knew and could trust. My Vietnamese interlocutors have a habit of comparing themselves to their Chinese rivals at the market, especially when searching for reasons why they fare much more poorly than the Chinese in both economic and social terms. The relationship between Vietnamese and Chinese migrants is a complex one. On the one hand, Vietnamese market traders are heavily dependent on their Chinese peers for access to China’s abundant supply of manufactured goods. On the other hand, they are the bitterest rivals in the market, where competition has been intensified by the rapid expansion of the formal retail sector. In the casual conversations I had with Vietnamese traders, their Chinese peers were viewed with mixed feelings of admiration, envy, and wariness. Chinese migration to Russia is a centuries-old phenomenon, largely due to the long border they share with each other (Datsyshen, 2012). The Chinese population in Russia is currently estimated

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at 400,000-500,000 (A. Larin, 2012, p. 41). They are distributed across a wide range of occupations and locations and are more likely than Vietnamese people to have been naturalized, which nevertheless is not the main reason for their economic prosperity. The remarkable success of Chinese long-distance merchants and market traders, my interlocutors believe, is attributed to their tight social networks and strong sense of ethnic solidarity. A Chinese person is never left alone when confronted with trouble, they said. To illustrate the contrast between Chinese and Vietnamese people, they routinely used the example of a fistfight, which is a common occurrence at the market. For example, Chinese people would not hesitate to jump into a fight to protect their fellow countrymen, even when they do not know them, while Vietnamese people would rather stay away for their own safety in a similar situation. This concurs with the anecdotes recounted by De Tinguy (1998, p. 305), where even Russian police and security forces were targeted by Chinese nationals in an attempt to retaliate against a crackdown on their compatriots. Pieke et al (2004, p. 29) also attribute the success of Chinese migrants in Europe to both their individual entrepreneurial spirit and strong, supportive social networks. Chinese ethnic solidarity and the lack of it among the Vietnamese are believed to translate directly into their respective levels of success in market trade and resilience in economic downturns. A high level of trust in a community or society, Fukuyama (1995) points out, is positively associated with economic development and prosperity, as it reduces risk and opportunity costs and fosters cooperative work among people. Studies on Vietnamese migrants in Eastern Europe tend to assume their inward-looking attitude is an expression of ethnic solidarity (e.g. Gelbras, 2002; Nožina, 2010). Ethnic solidarity is linked to the creation and development of highly hierarchical crime networks among Vietnamese migrants in the Czech Republic (Nožina, 2010), which is similar to what has been observed in Chinese communities in Hungary (Pieke, Nyíri et al. 2004, p. 164). The urge among Vietnamese immigrants to cluster together is seen by some scholars as deriving from the ‘village mentality’ that denounces individualism and encourages individuals to see themselves as components in a system of relationships and members of a collective entity (Hickey, 1964; Nožina, 2010). My research in Russia shows that what appear to be expressions of ethnic solidarity are merely migrants’ coping mechanisms, developed in response to the social exclusion, uncertainty, and insecurity they are confronted with in the host society. The differences among Chinese and Vietnamese migrants are most pronounced in the way their respective hometown associations are organized and operated. With an established

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culture of migration and substantial demographic size in many countries, Chinese hometown associations, which are often headed by wealthy and powerful tycoons, are able to exert considerable political clout both overseas and in the homeland (Pieke, 1998, p. 12). In Russia, Chinese hometown associations tend to have broad membership bases and act as efficient intermediaries between migrants and Russian authorities (see Datsyshen, 2012, p. 36). Vietnamese hometown associations are, on the other hand, much less significant in membership size and scope of influence. None of the people I came into contact with in Moscow participate in hometown associations, whose main activities are limited to annual gatherings. Like Fujianese traders elsewhere in Europe (see Pieke et al., 2004, p. 106, 157, 174, for example), Vietnamese market traders do not see any immediate benefits of investing their time and money in the associations reputedly run by self-serving, wealthy businessmen whose main purpose is to gain privileged access to political elites and business opportunities, rather than to represent members’ interests as they claim. Nazli Kibria (1995, p. 27), who also observes the lack of political cohesion and participation in Vietnamese communities in Philadelphia, USA, attributes this to a deep, historically rooted suspicion of and antipathy toward formal institutions as a result of French colonization, followed by the long years of war, and finally a period of Communist rule. While this might be a plausible explanation in many contexts, the lack of interpersonal trust is the main reason for migrants’ unwillingness to participate in hometown associations in Russia. They are skeptical about the intent and motives of those heading hometown associations, as well as the extent to which they might be able to represent and protect members’ interests within Russian society. The experience of Vietnamese migrants in Moscow supports some critiques of earlier works on social networks that have not paid adequate attention to the structural economic changes and institutional frameworks underlying an individual’s social agency (Kloosterman & Rath, 2003, p. 6; Rath & Kloosterman, 2000, p. 667; Williams & Balaz, 2005, p. 533). Social networks have always been seen as grounded in reciprocity transactions, bounded solidarity, and enforceable trust (Portes & Sensenbrenner, 1993). It is, however, impossible to explain why social networks of people from the same ethnic and cultural backgrounds operate differently in different contexts if the broader structural and institutional contexts around them are left out of the analytical framework. Here, the breakdown of Vietnamese social networks is brought about by a combination of economic, institutional, and structural elements in the transitional society of Russia, particularly the exclusionary migration regime and the exploitative shadow economy to which they are subjected.

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Chinese solidarity is, nevertheless, more likely to be a myth than reality. Research on the Chinese diaspora in Europe has consistently pointed out that what appears to host societies as a homogeneous and close-knit community is actually made up of highly heterogeneous, deeply divided, hierarchical, and even independent groups of people (see Christiansen, 1998, p. 50; Pieke, 1998, p. 12, for example). Chinese migrants tend to make a conscious attempt to distance themselves from their co-ethnics because of the competition and distrust, as well as the bad reputation they have created for themselves in the host society (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 68). The failure to establish mutual trust, formal organizations, and network ties among Chinese immigrants, Thunø (1998, p. 168) argues, explains their failure to branch out into new economic niches (beyond the traditional ones of catering and commerce) and, by doing so, gain more recognition and acceptance in their host societies. Strife is seen as the essence of relations among the Chinese, while jealousy and envy are rife and barely veiled. The people who arrived early, she notes, look down on the later arrivals, and those with money scorn those with less money (Thunø, 1998, p. 169). These empirical observations are consistent with Fukuyama’s (1995) view of China’s Confucian society as a low-trust environment where social networks are centered on the family, hindering the development of productive non-family networks and institutions. While the links between weak social capital and migrants’ failure to advance and expand socially and economically within host societies observed in Denmark by Thunø (1998) are, to some extent, applicable to Vietnamese migrants’ experience in Russia, ethnic solidarity alone (or lack thereof) does not explain their social marginalization and immobility. The scholarship on Chinese migrants in Europe shows that there are distinct differences in the way Vietnamese and Chinese diplomatic corps deal with their migrant citizens, as well as the latter’s ability to obtain support from their government’s representative bodies overseas (Chang & Rucker-Chang, 2012; Pieke et al., 2004). The Chinese government has come to the realization that Chinese merchants in Eastern Europe play a critical role in expanding the market for Chinese manufactured goods and facilitating exports, which are central to the Chinese government’s strategy of economic development. Gradually, the Chinese foreign policy structure has become more aligned with the economic activities and living conditions of their citizens in Russia, and the embassy actively seeks to establish strong ties with diasporic communities and advocate on their behalf (Chang, 2012, p. 13). The Vietnamese embassy’s involvement in and support for Vietnamese communities in Russia are, on the other hand, minimal, where any exists at all. As discussed previously in Chapter III, the staff of the Vietnamese

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embassy in Moscow are crucial links in the transnational migration industry and seen by migrants as exploitative, unscrupulous thugs rather than a potential source of support to whom they could turn when they are in trouble. The lack of formal institutional support from their government, as I have shown in my previous research in Taiwan (Hoang, 2016b, 2017), heightens migrants’ sense of vulnerability and compels them to resort to desperate, even illegal, measures when facing problems at work.

Money matters In a context where a pervasive sense of transience and uncertainty shapes every aspect of people’s everyday lives, it is easy to understand why they place such a heavy emphasis on money-making. Because of its ‘unconditional interchangeability’ and ‘uncompromising objectivity’ (see Simmel, 2011), money seems to be the only steady element with the power to mitigate risks and ensure some degree of certainty and security in people’s transnational lives. Utilitarian theorists of money see it as an impersonal instrument that replaces personal bonds with calculative instrumental ties and distorts individuals’ sense of moral self (Habermas, 1991; Marx, 1975; Simmel, 2011). Money, it is argued, has the irresistible power to homogenize and flatten social ties, rendering social life cold, distant, and calculating (see Zelizer, 1997, p. 2). A fixation on money is seen as intrinsically immoral: moralities and market trade are therefore incompatible. While the behaviors and relationships I observed in Moscow may appear to confirm this utilitarian view, the fixation on money among Vietnamese traders in Moscow can hardly be characterized as money fetishism or commodity fetishism as explained by Marx (1990, p. 96; 1993, p. 222). Without exception, the migrants in my study maintain a frugal and minimalist lifestyle, even if they live in Russia for decades. They make every effort to scrimp and save, minimizing their economic investments in Russia, so that they can pack their bags and leave anytime without hurting their hip pocket. In this context, a preoccupation with money expresses a rational, conscious strategy of constrained agents to cushion themselves against risks and uncertainties. The ‘uncompromising objectivity’ (Simmel, 2011) and transferability of money make it an ideal anchor for those whose life is in a continual state of flux. Nevertheless, a preoccupation with money does not stop migrants from making efforts to socialize, establish alliances, and engage in intimate relationships. In my previous studies, I have shown that migrant networks can be both a curse and a boon for the Vietnamese, especially those in

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precarious and vulnerable situations (Hoang, 2011, 2016b). In this part of the chapter, I move away from the concern with the service and disservice of migrant networks to explore how money has emerged as a linchpin holding social ties together, changing the purpose and meaning of relationships. The monetization of relationships, I point out, enables migrants to establish new ties and nurture existing ones, creating new spaces of co-dependence, resilience, and personal autonomy. Yet, at the same time, it also works to replace trust, compassion, and empathy with impersonal, detached cost-benefit calculations, reproducing and deepening precarities and vulnerabilities in people’s transnational lives. On the surface, there always seems to be a convivial atmosphere and strong sense of camaraderie among traders at the market. On quiet days or late afternoons when the crowd begins to thin out along the linias, people bring out plastic stools, sit in front of their côngs, and gossip, joke, and laugh with fellow traders to pass the time. Despite the countless tales about nasty brawls, disputes, and confrontations narrated to me throughout my f ieldwork, I never came across one. Life in shared apartments and overcrowded migrant hostels seems impressively convivial in spite of a multitude of discomforts and nuisances resulting from sharing squalid facilities with many people. I was invited to dinner parties in Ốp Tàu đỏ and Mê Kông dorms on many occasions when roommates and friends celebrated birthdays and other special events, or simply because someone had just been sent delicacies from Vietnam, and I always left the place thoroughly impressed by my fellow countrymen’s hospitality and friendliness, not only to me but also to one another. It took me some time to find out that things were often much more complicated than they appeared. One day in late April 2014, I was invited to have dinner and stay the night in Ốp Tàu đỏ by Quỳnh, a friend of my host Trang. Trang used to run a pa lát next to Quỳnh – a quick-tempered and outspoken 49-year-old divorced mother of two from Nghệ An – and the two women seemed to get on well, dropping by each other’s place every now and then and even sharing lunch sometimes. Quỳnh had been friendly to me from the first time we met and insisted that I come over to her place in Ốp Tàu đỏ for dog meat that day, not taking ‘no’ for an answer when I struggled to turn down the invitation because I did not eat dog meat. Dog meat – a popular food in Northern Vietnam – was rare and expensive in Moscow because it was shipped clandestinely from Vietnam by air, and was thus considered a special treat by many. Not wishing to displease Quỳnh – one of my most important key informants – I decided to go after she promised to prepare some tofu for me. The dinner was a much-welcomed mini feast for Quỳnh,

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her roommates, and close friends and, as it turned out, the enjoyable evening led me to some important contacts for fieldwork. Until I saw Quỳnh pay the money on my behalf the next morning, I was not aware that overnight visitors to Ốp Tàu đỏ had to pay RUB 500 (USD 14 as of 2014) per person per night to the dorm administration, even if they were residents’ guests and did not require extra space for themselves. She, however, would not let me pay her back, even when I insisted. Concerned that my oversight could damage our relationship, I gave the money to Trang so she could give it to Quỳnh, but she would not waver. It was not long before we discovered that Quỳnh was expecting Trang to loan her daughter a significant amount of money so she could set up a gloves store at Sadovod when she came back from maternity leave in Vietnam, which Trang believed was the reason why her fellow trader was unusually kind and generous to me. Because of her straight-talking and competitiveness, Quỳnh had fallen out with most of her neighboring traders and had very few friends like Trang to turn to for help. Upon learning the truth, Trang exclaimed: ‘Now we know why she was so “kind” to you! See, people are not “kind” for no reason! Everything is about money here.’ In an edited volume on the transnational family, Bryceson and Vuorela (2002) coin two terms to describe the strategies that migrants pursue in their social lives, namely ‘frontiering’ and ‘relativizing.’ ‘Frontiering’ refers to ‘the ways and means transnational family members use to create familial space and network ties in terrain where affinal connections are relatively sparse’, while ‘relativizing’ is the manner by which ‘individuals establish, maintain or curtail relational ties with specific family members’ (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002, p. 11, 14). While both concepts are fitting in the context of Vietnamese traders in Moscow, the manner and means by which relationships are developed, sustained, or shunned in this context are fundamentally different from what has been observed in transnational studies elsewhere, including my own (e.g. Dreby, 2010; Gamburd, 2000; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015b; Thai, 2014). Like Trung’s family, as described in the previous section, most of the traders I came into contact with made a persistent attempt to distance themselves from familial connections because of the excessive obligations they would entail. Research on social networks in northern Vietnam, where most Vietnamese migrants in Russia come from, emphasizes the enduring influence of Confucian values that are profoundly anti-individualistic, accentuating communitarianism, mutual assistance, family ties, and neighborhood ties (Vandermeersch, 1986, p. 162). Traditionally, altruism and unconditional dedication are expected in family relationships, and it is the moral obligation of those with economic means to selflessly help their

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less fortunate relatives. Communitarian values are further reinforced by the ethical regime constructed by the socialist government, most notably through Hồ Chí Minh’s numerous treatises on the new revolutionary morality. Hồ encouraged people to place collective interests before individual ones and defined individualism as an enemy of socialism (see Gammeltoft, 2014, p. 69). For many years, making personal sacrifices for the collective and the nation was the sole mode of being for the Vietnamese and the defining element of what was seen as Vietnamese personhood. To many migrants in my study, these moral obligations and ethical codes of conduct prove excessive and unjustifiable in a highly uncertain and precarious context where they are left to fend for themselves, especially given the loose definition of the family, which typically includes all members of the extended kinship group. Thảo, a 46-year-old xưởng may đen owner, told me that one of the keys to her success in Russia was strictly following the golden rule of only doing business with non-family members. Dissociating oneself from relatives is a risk mitigation strategy and a matter of survival. Unreasonable expectations, unfair obligations, unpaid debts, and unreturned favors are common causes of tension and conflict among migrant kinsmen. This is compounded by the dislike of direct and open communication in the Vietnamese culture. On the surface this does not make sense, as irregular migration from Vietnam to Russia is for the most part based on family networks. Historical research describes the Red River Delta rural community as a ‘subsistence-oriented corporate unit with wealth-leveling mechanisms and a shared poverty ethos, a strong sense of identity, and barriers to membership’ (Rambo, 1973). This explains migrant traders’ preference for close relatives and friends from the same hometown or village as employees, even if it means they would have to sponsor the latter’s migration to Russia. The loyalty guaranteed by strong bonding capital76 is secured further by the employee’s financial and moral debt to the sponsor. Except for those who were sent to Russia by the Vietnamese government as students or workers during the Soviet era, most of my research participants first migrated to Russia with the help, and sometimes financial support, of a family member. The typical trajectory begins with the new (and young) migrant working for a relative for a few years, with minimal or no pay, to repay the travel debt and learn the trade, often with the hope that the free 76 The scholarship on networks divides them into two main sets of ties: intra-community (strong) ties (a.k.a. bonding capital) and inter-community (weak) ties that cross various social divides based on religion, class, ethnicity, gender, etc. (a.k.a. bridging capital; see Granovetter 1973; Gittell and Vidal 1998).

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labor will eventually be recompensed with assistance when they set up their own business. These expectations of reciprocity are, nevertheless, rarely made explicit for the fear that it would make the relationship between the two parties appear transactional, cold, distant, and not tình cảm (which means loving, sentimental, or compassionate, depending on the context). In Vietnamese culture, tình cảm has a premium value in social relationships and is the essence of what it means to be Vietnamese (Gammeltoft, 1999; Harms, 2005). The emphasis on tình cảm sometimes means the helper works for years without adequate remuneration. Silently putting up with or prematurely giving up on such an exploitative arrangement runs the risk of causing irreparable damage to the relationship. Twenty-five-year-old Danh, whom I first met in 2013, was caught up in one such unforgiving situation: I failed entrance exams to the university and spent two years jobhunting without success. Everyone [in the family] said uncle Thắng should help me [migrate to Russia], but he and his wife are very selfish. They don’t help anyone. Then his wife became pregnant with the second child [and could not work], leaving him with no choice. I’ve been here [Sadovod] for a year. I work from 5.00am to 7.00pm every day, seven days a week; never been anywhere except their apartment and the market; never seen the Red Square. They haven’t paid me a dollar in salary. I hope they will help me set up my own business in the future but … you know … I do not believe it would happen … it won’t.

Danh was not alone. Mạnh, a 19-year-old man working next door, was in an equally bleak situation: he had been working for a couple from the same village for two years without pay. Most migrants come from rural areas of Vietnam that have been plagued by severe under- and unemployment since Đổi mới, so the idea of returning home empty-handed only to face unemployment and poverty is not appealing. Countless rags-to-riches tales told and retold within the market give migrants hope and the strength to put up with exploitative work arrangements and inspire more to come. Uncertainty renders life unpredictable and precarious on the one hand and fills it with hope and desire on the other. The so-called ‘subjunctive mood’ of action (Whyte, 2005), which is characterized by a constant sense of doubt, caution, tentativeness, and provisionality, is evidently disruptive to relationships. The difficulties in establishing and maintaining trusted relationships hamper migrants’ ability to survive the brutalities of Russian markets and migration regimes. In the examples of Danh and Mạnh, the employer sent for a young and poor relative

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instead of hiring a locally available laborer – a common practice that is deeply rooted in the construction of social networks in rural northern Vietnam. A strong agrarian village culture and enduring Confucian traditions in the north, Dalton et al. (2002, p. 375) suggest, tend to encourage trust in a relatively narrow circle of family and close friends, and caution about the unknown stranger. The inward-looking spirit that is best illustrated by the popular saying ‘one drop of blood is more valuable than a water pond’ (Một giọt máu đào hơn ao nước lã) explains why out-migration from northern villages is primarily kin-based (Hoang, 2011, p. 423; 2016b, p. 10). Yet this social capital tends to rest on existing power hierarchies and inequality, potentially turning social relationships into baggage impeding social mobility (Turner & Nguyen, 2005, p. 1702). Danh and Mạnh’s employers exploited the hope of their junior kinsmen for free labor, while at the same time preventing potential competition. What has been described as a culture of judicious opportunism arising from perceived uncertainties in Cameroon (JohnsonHanks, 2005, p. 366) has an equivalent notion of văn hóa chộp giật (literally, a grab and snatch culture) among Vietnamese traders in Moscow. Because trust in co-ethnic networks is tenuous, money emerges to fill the void. Without money, as 38-year-old garment factory owner Thanh concludes below, one has nothing to depend on: I was completely broke [after Chợ Vòm market was closed down in 2009]. Did not even have a cent. No one helped. No one, even friends. You have a lot of friends when you have money. But they disappear as soon as you are in trouble. If you call them when you are penniless, they’d say “Sorry, I am busy right now. I’ll call back!” See? There is no loyalty in this place.

What Thanh experienced after she ran into financial difficulties is a recurrent motif in my interlocutors’ recollections of the trials and tribulations in their lives in Russia. Unlike her, however, many were never able to recover from the unfortunate crises in market trade in Moscow. A chance meeting with 43-year-old Phúc on one of my visits to Rybak migrant hostel offered me telling glimpses of how brutal life could be for those who had fallen spectacularly from glory, and who realized only then that without money, they had nobody to count on. Rybak is a run-down six-story dormitory in the northeast of Moscow that is widely known among Vietnamese migrants as a hub of illicit activities, including sex work, drug dealing, and gambling. In 2013, Russian police raided the building and discovered a brothel hidden in the basement, rescuing two Vietnamese women who had been subjected to sex slavery after being trafficked to Russia. Eight years earlier, newspapers in

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Vietnam had already reported Rybak as a hub of human trafficking and sex slavery activities in Moscow after three victims were rescued by Vietnamese police and repatriated home. Because of its squalid living conditions, social problems, and the significant distance from major markets (25 kilometers from Sadovod), market traders do not tend to live at Rybak. Once a vibrant and thriving ốp thanks to its proximity to the now closed Chợ Vòm, Rybak is now home to the most impoverished Vietnamese migrants without regular sources of income or travel documents of any sort. They are the ‘underclass’ within the Vietnamese diaspora in Russia. Tuyết the go-between and I were meandering in the front yard of Rybak one day in 2014, wondering how we could gain access into the building and take a peek at its residents’ lives, when a woman in her early thirties with an unkempt appearance and sleepy eyes pushed the main door open from inside. I immediately realized she was an itinerant vendor as she pulled along a small cart, which was loaded with black plastic bags full of mustard leaves. As it turned out, Phượng – the woman’s name – was an acquaintance of Tuyết from Chợ Vòm times and, after a brief exchange of pleasantries, she excused herself because she was running late for the market. Before taking off Phượng left the door open for us, inviting us to her room on the top floor of the building for tea. She was living there with her partner Phúc and their two young children, a three-year-old girl and five-year-old boy, who were home at the time. I was overwhelmed by the strong stench of fish sauce, mold, and urine the moment I stepped into the dark and narrow hallway on the first floor of the building. It was quiet at that time of the day, but there is no doubt the building was a very crowded place based on the copious amount of household items piling up along the hallway. We took the elevator to the sixth floor and walked down the damp, dimly lit hallway to find Phúc and Phượng’s place. A short, portly, and bald man in a bedraggled white undershirt and khaki shorts opened the door as soon as we knocked. Phúc recognized Tuyết straight away and gaily ushered us in. Phúc’s son was drinking Coca-Cola from a baby feeding bottle in bed while we sipped green tea and chatted at the tea table. The jam-packed, crumbling ten-square-meter room was home to two families: Phúc, his partner, and their two children slept in a double bed in the main space, while another couple occupied a raised wooden platform of about three square meters in the corner of the room. They shared a small plywood wardrobe, a tea table, a TV, and a couple of plastic chairs, as well as a small, basic bathroom across the hallway where they also cooked dinner on a gas stove. Phúc told me it cost the two families USD 600 a month in rent, which was split equally between them. While it

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is not significantly cheaper than renting a private apartment with better living conditions and more space, many people still prefer to live in Rybak because it is reputedly run by staff of the Vietnamese embassy in Moscow, which is believed to offer them some degree of security and protection. As it turned out, Phúc was actually still married to his wife, who stayed behind in Vietnam with his three grown-up daughters. Phượng – his former shop assistant at Chợ Vòm – and her two children were, in his words, ‘just accidents.’ The affair started when Phúc’s wholesale business at Chợ Vòm was thriving, but he lost everything when the market was closed down. After a couple of failed attempts to rebuild his business at Sadovod, he resigned himself to staying at home and waiting for fate to take its course. The family barely survived on the meager, irregular income Phượng earned from selling vegetables at a market next to Dubrovka metro station and Phúc’s occasional, albeit modest, wins from đánh đề (playing the lottery numbers). Đánh đề is a form of gambling in which the player (con đề) does not buy lottery tickets but registers their chosen number(s) with a bookie (chủ đề). They bet that a particular two-, three-, or even four-digit number will appear at the ‘head’ or ‘tail’ of the lottery’s winning number (see Truitt, 2013, p. 133 for a more detailed explanation). Phúc made bets on lotteries in Vietnam and spent all his time doing research on numbers. His million-dollar winning number, Phúc was convinced, would find him sooner or later. The most valuable lesson he learned from his past failures was that, without money, one’s social networks in Russia would soon die out: All my friends were gone as soon as my money was gone. Nobody wanted to do business with me anymore. The best friends took pity on me, but they did all they could to avoid doing anything with me. That’s life, you must understand. Here, people desert you as soon as you run into trouble. At home [Vietnam], sentimental roots [gốc rễ tình cảm] run deep [so it’s different].

People avoid doing business with struggling migrants, I was told, because there are no valued forms of collateral, social or financial, in Russia that might hold them accountable. Trust, which enables people to take risks (Porter, Lawler, & Hackman, 1975), is tenuous in this context. Sociological scholarship distinguishes two principal forms of interpersonal trust, namely: 1) cognition-based trust, which is grounded in one’s beliefs about the other person’s reliability and dependability; and 2) affect-based trust, which is grounded in emotional bonds between individuals, expressing care and concern for each other (Lewis & Weigert, 1985; McAllister, 1995).

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The overemphasis on interpersonal relationships in these studies, however, obscures the crucial institutional and cultural elements that provide the basis of trust. The institutional basis of trust, which comprises ‘the legal, political, and social systems that support the monitoring and sanctioning of social behavior’ (Zaheer & Zaheer, 2006, p. 22), is virtually nonexistent for undocumented, transient Vietnamese migrants in Russia, while a narrow radius of trust established by family-based social networks discourages the development of productive ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter, 1973). Without a sound basis for trust decisions, people are less likely to make leaps of faith and collaborate with cash-strapped traders or lend them money. As 40-year-old trader Quang plainly put it: ‘Support the strong and avoid the weak’ (Phù thịnh chứ không ai phù suy). Migrants are caught in a dilemma. Everyone recognizes the importance of money in Russia. It is a matter of survival, a linchpin for social ties, a vital key that opens many doors, and a much-needed form of security in a transient, uncertain context. Yet they are also deeply conscious of the downside of focusing too much on money. In one of many conversations I had with two aspiring garment factory owners, 30-year-old Giao and 32-year-old Hương, they gloomily acknowledged: ‘There are heaps of money around, but there is so little tình cảm [compassion]. Tình cảm has given way to money.’ The supremacy of money in market life and the individualistic behaviors that it fosters are clearly at odds with both the communitarian Confucian values that underpin Vietnamese personhood and the socialist conception of money as an anti-social, immoral force that promotes greed and selfishness (see also Humphrey & Mandel, 2002, p. 1; Leshkowich, 2015, p. 11). In Vietnamese mores, a good person is one who is modest and selfless, sensitive to the needs and concerns of other people, and aware of her/his place vis-à-vis others (Gammeltoft, 1999: 215). While there is growing empirical evidence of an unfolding process of individualization in Vietnamese society under the influence of the capitalist economy and consumerist culture (Gammeltoft, 2001; Ghuman, Vu, Vu, & Knodel, 2006; Nilan, 2012), communitarian values are still regarded as desirable and superior, while individualism is subject to denigration and vilification. Money is not just a matter of survival, but also one of social status and recognition in Vietnamese society. In Vietnamese popular culture, money is often portrayed as having the power to commodify status and prestige (Truitt, 2013, p. 25). As the economic provider and beacon of hope for the family, the migrant is under pressure to reaffirm and enhance the family’s status and recognition through conspicuous consumption and generous gift giving. Thai (2006, 2014), for example, has provided a sophisticated

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ethnographic account of how maintaining a constant remittance flow to Vietnam is an important ‘status strategy’ for low-waged men to develop and nurture social ties, an avenue to assert one’s sense of self-worth, and a duty to fulfill in the moral economy of social belonging. The causal relationship between migration and mobility is readily assumed in Vietnamese society. As aptly illustrated by the phrase Áo gấm về làng, it is expected that ‘one should return home from the wide world with the trappings of success’ (Carruthers, 2002, p. 439). It is shameful to be a failed migrant, the broker Tuyết said: ‘We are under an immense pressure to make money. It’s a disgrace to return home empty-handed!’ Driven by both personal goals and moral obligations toward the family, Vietnamese migrants stay away from anything that might distract them from money-making, an attitude best captured by the following metaphor used by 28-year-old Ngọc: ‘Money is the flame which we, the moths, dive into in our short lives. What would be the point of coming to Russia otherwise?’ As I observed in my previous research in Taiwan, moral values and social practices are aptly adjusted in response to an exploitative migration regime and the money economy of the city (Hoang, 2016b; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c). In the context of Russia, the meanings and values of money change as people’s radius of trust is disrupted by their sense of precariousness when living on the margin of society. Margins can be powerful as well as dangerous (Douglas, 2003). They constrain people’s mobility and limit their options, while at the same time enabling their creative potential. Margins mean social exclusion, but also the opportunity for people to gain a certain potentiality from their marginalized position (Harms, 2011, p. 69). In Moscow, being on the margins is also about being in a moral twilight zone where migrants have considerable leeway to redefine their values and reorder their priorities. What money means is, indeed, socially mediated and constantly re-negotiated (Zelizer, 1997). It is not merely a medium of exchange or an indication of status but has become a social instrument that replaces trust in regulating migrants’ social relationships and restores a sense of certainty to their lives. This chapter reveals complex, nuanced links between the economic and the social in the context of migration. It allows us to better appreciate the implications of post- and market-socialism for the political economy of personhood and the wider sociocultural landscape of countries in transition.

TÌNH ƠI LÀ TÌNH Bên Nga tình ngắn tình dài Về đến Nội Bài77 ta lại chia tay Tình nào mà chẳng đắm say Rượu nào mà chẳng men cay mặn nồng Gái ngoan lại về với chồng Trai khôn cắt đứt tơ hồng bên Nga Cũng vì cuộc sống xứ xa Tạm đành chấp nhận có ta có mình

LOVE, OH LOVE Brief or long, love affairs in Russia End the moment we land in Nội Bài Passion, romance, and desire As intense as the strongest liquor My lady is now someone else’s wife And I have severed all my Russian ties Life in a foreign land is no piece of cake We stick together or we break

Author: Thảo Át,78 a dry fish trader and market poet. He regularly publishes poems on infidelity in local Vietnamese language newspapers and on his Facebook page.

77 Nội Bài is an international airport in Hà Nội, Vietnam. 78 ‘Thảo Át’ is the nickname of a trader called Thảo who specialized in salt-dried vobla fish – a popular Russian delicacy – from the Astrakhan region northwest of the Caspian Sea. Astrakhan is commonly pronounced as ‘Át’ by Vietnamese people and salt-dried vobla fish is referred to as ‘cá át’.

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Provisional intimacies Among many garment factory owners I met in Moscow, 38-year-old Thanh was the most generous supporter of my research. Without her, I would never have been able to access xưởng may đens (black/illegal garment factories) or get to know other garment factory owners who subsequently became important informants. As discussed earlier in Chapters III and IV, the risky and illegal nature of their business compels xưởng may đen owners to be highly prudent, discreet, and vigilant in their everyday lives, and their factories are often hidden away in remote rural areas, accessible only by themselves and their trusted van drivers. Due to security concerns, Thanh did not go to her xưởng may đen every day or stay long when she did, but she was happy to bring me along and let me stay there overnight when she had to go. At the time of my fieldwork in 2014, Thanh and Vũ, her 30-year-old boyfriend, were employing 40 workers from North and Central Vietnam, 15 of whom were women. Their workers lived and worked in an abandoned, run-down warehouse about 45 kilometers southeast of Moscow that they shared with three other factories: another Vietnamese-owned xưởng may đen belonging to their friend Tài, a small garment print workshop also owned by a Vietnamese man, and a fake liquor workshop run by migrants from Central Asia. The site is described in detail in Chapter III. Given the security concerns and mobility restrictions due to the remoteness of the site, workers worked, ate, slept, and socialized in the same space in the old warehouse, which was shared with 60 other workers from the three neighboring workshops. The main door to the building was always locked and securely guarded by a Russian watchman who kept the keys. On rare occasions when the weather was good and the business was going well, Thanh and Vũ would treat their workers to a barbecue dinner in the backyard of the building, yet still within the gated compound and away from the prying eyes and ears of random onlookers, if any. The party was the sole opportunity for workers to leave their crowded and dusty work and living quarters, albeit for only a few hours, and enjoy the fresh air. Each factory/ workshop occupied a separate section of the vast warehouse, demarcated with flimsy walls made of cardboard and wood planks. Cardboard and wood planks were also used to divide each factory’s territory into different sections: a spacious, dust-filled production space strewn with fabrics and sewing machines; a tight, dimly-lit strip just wide enough for two rows

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of bunkbeds separated by a narrow passageway; a couple of makeshift bathrooms; and a small cooking area where three meals were cooked every day on a big gas stove. With their lives restricted to the locked warehouse, workers’ days were organized into two parts: working time and sleeping time. Except for a few people like the site manager, a skilled tailor in charge of cutting fabrics according to patterns, his assistant, a cook, and three male helpers, all of whom received fixed salaries, Thanh’s workers were paid on a piece-rate basis, so it was not uncommon for them to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week during busy times even though the standard shift was 12 hours long. On several occasions, I saw them work 20 hours straight, with only short breaks for meals. Workers, often those with similar levels of skill and productivity, organized themselves into groups (cạ) of three to five and divided the allocated work and wages equally among themselves. As of May 2014, workers in Thanh’s factory earned between RUB 1,000 (USD 29) and RUB 2,000 (USD 57) a day, depending on their skills and the number of their work hours, which was significantly higher than the monthly salaries of workers at xưởng may trắngs (legal factories) – between RUB 10,000 (USD 300) and RUB 17,000 (USD 500). Looking on the bright side, such an intensive work regime helped to relieve the pressure on the compact and stuffy sleeping quarters. Because there were only ten bunkbeds – that is, 20 single beds for 40 people – two people had to share each bed and they often arranged to alternate their working and sleeping times so that there would always be just one person sleeping in the bed. Even so, many workers I talked to complained of sleep deprivation because of the permanently bright lights and constant noise from the production space, which was only a layer of cardboard away from their beds. Most of Thanh’s workers were single men and women or, to borrow Shen’s (2005) terms, ‘situational singles’ who were married but had migrated to Russia on their own. With such a high concentration of young men and women in a confined environment, it was not surprising that gossiping about people’s love affairs and sex lives became everyone’s favorite pastime, and perhaps a necessary distraction from their otherwise depressing social lives and a grueling work regime. By the time I visited Thanh’s xưởng may đen for the second time, I had already obtained detailed accounts of all the love affairs as well as the related dramas and conflicts that were going on between the workers. As it turned out, every woman on site was in an intimate relationship with a male co-worker, either in the same factory or from one of the neighboring workshops. As Thanh put it: ‘There is no such a thing as being single in a garment factory. Everyone has someone else’s

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spouse to “look after” [laughing]’. The gender imbalance was a major source of frustration for the ‘left-over’ men, some of whom even considered quitting their job because of the bleak prospect of finding a partner if they stayed put. In garment factories, love and sex came easily, even matter-of-factly, to everyone, not only because of the crowded living conditions that facilitated physical contact and the lack of a social life that would have helped them balance out the backbreaking, never-ending work, but also because of the sense of freedom afforded by the remoteness and isolation of their factory. Sexual freedom and promiscuity were an open secret and an accepted practice in garment factories, as illustrated by a conversation I had with 38-year-old nanny Thương, who used to work at a xưởng may đen, and two other nannies, Cúc and Dậu: Thương: You’d always end up sleeping with someone even if you don’t plan to. That’s what everyone does. ‘Miss [Chị79 ơi], I like you [Em thích chị]. I’ll come sleep with you tonight,’ they [the man] would say. Cúc: Why did you not just push him away when he came? Dậu: You could push, but he would keep holding you so tight [laughing]. Thương: That’s right. You really know what it’s like. There were just older women like me but the boys were so young … Those born in 1975, 1976, you know, slept with boys born around 1989, 1990 … their children’s age. Lan Anh: So the boy would keep hugging and the woman would eventually cave in? Thương: One would cave in, eventually. You might say ‘no’ that night, but he’d come again the following night. Lan Anh: What if he’s not very attractive or …? Cúc: I guess you could keep pushing him away if he is not attractive. Thương: How could you keep pushing him away? He’d always come back [all laughing]. I saw it happen many times. One of the girls came here [to Russia] with her husband, but he worked at Sadovod. She joined the xưởng may with three other girls and they all had lovers as soon as they started. She had a lover in the xưởng may as well. She told her sister everything and her sister then told me about it. There was another girl … she kept two lovers at the same time. They [the men] worked different shifts so it kinda worked for her. 79 Chị means ‘older sister,’ but is also used as a common pronoun to address an older woman. Em means ‘younger sister/brother’ but is also used as a personal noun to address someone younger than oneself or used by a person to refer to themselves when speaking to someone older than them.

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What happens at garment workshops ostensibly def ies the restrictive gender and sexuality norms of Vietnamese culture, especially those governing and disciplining women’s bodies. In Vietnamese society, sex outside marriage is still frowned upon, despite significant socio-economic changes to people’s lives in the past decades (Gammeltoft, 2001; Ghuman, 2005; Rydstrom, 2006). Female sexuality continues to be seen primarily in terms of serving goals of reproduction and the fulf illment of wifely duties, while women’s expressions of sexual desire, passion, and pleasure invariably cast doubt on their moral integrity. In the Confucian world view of social harmony that remains arguably the most important frame of reference for people’s social conduct and moral judgment in Vietnam, women are expected to submit to their husbands in every aspect and their bodies are considered the latter’s properties (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c). As such, women’s sexual behaviors are highly consequential. Their ability to live up to social expectations regarding female sexuality has important implications for their social status, moral standing, and even long-term economic and social security. In the Vietnamese culture, heterosexual intimate relationships are predicated on a gender and age hierarchy between the man and the woman, which is reflected by the pronouns the couple is expected to use when addressing each other: anh, which means ‘older brother’, but is also used by a man to refer to himself when speaking to a younger woman, or by the woman to address an older man; and em, which means ‘younger sister/ brother’, but is also used by a woman to refer to herself when speaking to an older man, or by the man to address a younger woman. Recent research on Vietnam shows continuity in the gender ideologies concerning heterosexual intimacy, marriage, and family: the man is expected to be the leader and the protector of his woman, while women tend to look up to their intimate and marriage partners as ‘an older brother who will guide, protect, and pamper them’ (Hoang, 2008, p. 81; Long, Le, Truitt, Le, & Dang, 2000, p. 15). It is therefore a social convention that women marry or are romantically linked with men older than them. To do otherwise, especially when the woman is significantly older than her male partner, would attract social criticism and arouse suspicion about the man’s motives and the woman’s moral integrity. Social expectations about womanhood and femininity in Vietnam demand that the woman should be prepared 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, p. 205). According to this line of thinking, seeking sexual pleasure outside marriage, especially with a much younger male partner, is considered not just a selfish, shamelessly

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individualistic behavior on the part of the woman, but also a testament to her moral depravation and ‘failed womanhood’ (Hoang, 2016a; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c). However, the transgression of Vietnamese female sexual norms appears to be easily tolerated and justified in the context of garment factories in Russia. Concerns about what other people may say about one’s sex life are overshadowed by the constant fear of police raids, the anxiety about the volatile market and changeable immigration laws, and the pressure to make as much money as they can before the situation changes for the worse. As explained by 43-year-old Loan below, women working in illegal garment factories feel particularly vulnerable, hence the importance of having a man to ‘count on’ (để dựa vào): In this environment, a woman must always have a man to count on, to do all the heavy lifting for her, to help her out when she needs help, and to protect her when she needs protection. Garment workers are like the lowest class here. They have no networks of support, no one to turn to when needing help. So they would sleep with any man in order to survive. It’s just a survival matter.

In such a transient and insecure environment, moral judgments, if any, about one’s sex life do not carry the same weight they would in other contexts. In fact, my interlocutors found it amusing that someone could be surprised to hear about the love affairs at their factories. During one of the nights I spent at Thanh’s factory in 2014, I was meandering from one xưởng may đen to another in the vast warehouse when I bumped into a mini gathering in the sleeping quarters of the neighboring garment factory that belonged to Tài. Two male workers from the print workshop – 33-year-old Chiến and 24-year-old Kiên – were chit-chatting with 40-year-old Chuyên, Tài’s sister-in-law, who was married with two children but had migrated to Russia by herself to work. They happily invited me to sit down on Chuyên’s single bed that they were sharing and it was not long before I realized Kiên and Chuyên were a couple. This was confirmed by Chiến later when I chatted with him and some of his male colleagues back in Thanh’s factory. Chiến also revealed that Kiên was just a little older than Chuyên’s eldest daughter, who had recently got married in Vietnam. I was a little taken aback by the large age difference between Kiên and Chuyên and, upon seeing the look of disbelief on my face, the men laughed: ‘Come on, don’t you realize we are in Russia?’ When I asked whether people like Chuyên were worried about the gossip that

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might travel back to Vietnam and potentially ruin their reputation and marriage, Chiến replied: It would be wrong to say they are not worried but they just close their eyes and ears [chỉ biết nhắm mắt như vậy]. It’s the way things are in Russia. Here, people just care about their own lives [đèn nhà ai nhà ấy rạng vậy].

Migrant studies, including my own, have highlighted the importance of affect and sexuality in people’s decision to migrate and/or how they experience migration (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c; Liu-Farrer, 2010a; Mai & King, 2009; Shah, 2006). In some contexts, people decide to migrate when migration presents them with an opportunity to pursue romantic love and sexual freedom (Liu-Farrer, 2010a; Shah, 2006). In others, love and sex might not be a part of people’s original plans when they first leave home, but are subsequently sought during the course of migration as a strategy to cope with situations of social exclusion, precarity, and vulnerability in the host society (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c; Liu-Farrer, 2010a). In their call for a ‘political economy of sexuality,’ both queer studies scholars (Altman, 2001; Cantu, 2009) and those writing on heterosexuality (Andersen, 2005; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c) emphasize the interrelationship of political, economic, social, and cultural structures in shaping migrants’ sexual identities and lives. Indeed, the case of Vietnamese garment workers in Russia illustrates that sexuality and intimacy are not simply personal, private domains, but multifaceted, contested sites affected by and reflecting the precarity, disenfranchisement, social exclusion, and racial discrimination that characterize migrants’ lives. Below is how 49-year-old Bình, a married male worker from Tài’s factory, explained what is behind the ‘easy come, easy go’ love affairs at garment factories: She [Bình’s lover] is from Hà Tĩnh. Of course, she is married, but her husband and children stay in Vietnam. Here, we [live together to] share the hardships … [hesitating] … To tell you the truth, first it’s [driven by] basic emotional needs. Second, it’s to meet our sexual needs. We also need someone to rely on in tough times. We don’t pool money, but I help her out when she needs it. Here, men don’t usually do that. They behave like Sở Khanh80 [Vietnamese Don Juan], you know ‘I’m just having fun with you. Why should I give you the money? I can always move on to the 80 A character in ‘Tale of Kiều’ – an epic poem by Vietnam’s famous author Nguyễn Du (17661820) – a womanizer infamous for cheating on women.

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next girl.’ That’s not how I treat women. There must be some respect … Here in Russia, we never know when we will return home. We just rely on each other. No one can provide for their lover. It’s only for tình cảm [emotional care]. There are tough times like when we are sick or when the police raid the factory. We have each other to rely on. It is better now. OMON used to treat us horribly. They raped any women they could find. It still happens. Not long ago … in Dom [Building] 36 … they raped women. We Vietnamese are powerless, unlike the Chinese. They would beat us to death if we resist. They would fire the guns into the air the moment they arrive. All we could do is to lie down and put our hands behind our heads. No one would dare do anything or they would be beaten to death. OMON officers are all tough, burly men. They could easily kill us with one punch. We Vietnamese have no voice here.

Like Bình, other men and women at garment factories always spoke of ‘needs’ rather than love when inquired about their intimate lives. Given the high risk of police raids on illegal garment factories, workers live under the constant threat of violence, detention, deportation, and even death. None of the workers I came across at illegal factories had any form of migration documents, which would put them in a very vulnerable situation should they come face to face with Russian police. Unlike people working at markets, who often migrate to Russia with the assistance and even financial support of family networks, most garment workers (as well as construction workers and farm laborers) are recruited by brokers or employers who charge them an inordinate amount of money to arrange the trip. The financial pressure created by migration debt as well as the lack of social networks in Russia severely restrict their mobility – they cannot quit the xưởng may đen to move on to another job or return to Vietnam before the debt is paid. For example, Lam – a 29-year-old worker from Thanh’s xưởng may đen – paid USD 2,000 for a one-way ticket and a tourist visa to a local broker in her hometown Thái Bình, who promised that she would earn USD 1,000 a month as a garment worker in Russia. The first two years were brutal, as the different xưởng may đens where Lam worked were subjected to frequent police raids. She recalled the extreme anxiety and stress of having to be prepared to sprint out of the factory and run into the woods at any moment, day or night, in summer or winter, as soon as the alarm was raised. While Lam was lucky enough to avoid being caught and detained by police, she barely made enough money to pay for her daily maintenance, having to move from one factory to another after each raid and going through long stretches of unemployment between jobs. She did not have enough money to buy

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a ticket home even if she wanted to leave Russia. Lam had joined Thanh’s xưởng may đen two weeks prior to our first meeting in April 2014. She had just had a narrow escape from a police raid on a xưởng may đen and was hanging out at Sadovod looking for a new job when she bumped into Vũ, Thanh’s boyfriend and business partner, who offered her the job. Weary and dispirited, she told me she was hoping to be able to return home for good at the end of the year and start a new life there. Unlike market traders and laborers who, thanks to daily exposure to Russian-speaking people through work, are able to communicate in basic Russian when necessary and have at least some experience and confidence in dealing with the non-Vietnamese populace, garment workers do not speak any Russian or have the necessary social skills to deal with Russian authorities. As described earlier in Chapter III, most of them had been picked up at the airport by their brokers or employers upon arrival in Moscow and driven straight to a remote factory, where they live until it is time to go home or move to another factory. The mobile phone is the only thing that connects them to the outside world. The idea of coming up against a big, armed, and fearsome Russian police officer is therefore terrifying. Being locked up in a remote, dilapidated warehouse in the middle of nowhere in a land that they know nothing about adds further anxiety to their everyday existence. As exemplified below in a conversation I had with 26-year-old male worker An, it does not really matter who one is in a relationship with. The important thing is that one has a partner to go through life’s trials and tribulations with: An: This girl is new. My previous girlfriend has gone back to Vietnam. I got to know the new girl only after I moved here from another garment factory. My ex went home to get married. Lan Anh: How could she find a husband back home if she had been living in Russia for years? An: She married the man she dated before she came to Russia. She kept contact with him through the internet. Lan Anh: How lucky you are! You got what you wanted without any responsibilities attached! An: Not true! It’s reciprocal. I did a lot for her, especially when she was detained by police. It’s tough to be caught by police. They would not give you proper food. And it’s not just food … clothes and other stuff … it is freezing here. And when we went somewhere together, we took care of each other, keeping each other warm. It is so scary when police raid the factory. The last raid happened only recently. They caught 12 and put eight in the detention center.

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Lan Anh: Do you have any plans with the current girlfriend? An: We’re just going with the flow. I don’t plan things ahead because things never go according to plan. Here, in Russia … we just sit and watch our youth go down the drain.

While there is no doubt that physical attraction and even romantic love are present in many relationships at garment factories, it is more accurate to describe them as ‘survival intimacies,’ which are driven by the structural constraints and vulnerabilities migrants have to cope with in their everyday lives, rather than personal desires and aspirations. As illustrated above by the accounts provided by Bình and An, most couples, including unmarried individuals, do not pool resources or have long-term plans together and often part ways as soon as one person left the factory. Undoubtedly, there are exceptions, especially when the man and the woman were single at the time they met. One of the couples I met at Thanh’s factory in 2014, for example, left Russia during my fieldwork to wed in Vietnam. Mai, who was 32 at the time, fell pregnant as soon as she started cohabitating with 37-year-old coworker Phú. The affair was not meant to be a serious, long-term relationship, even though neither Mai nor Phú was married at the time. Dismayed and distressed, they decided to go for an abortion and asked Thanh for help with accessing medical services in Moscow. She advised them against the idea, as they were both getting ‘old’ according to Vietnamese reproductive norms and the abortion might affect Mai’s fertility and future pregnancies. After much hesitation, they decided to take Thanh’s advice, packed their bags, and headed home. Cases like that of Mai and Phú are very rare, nevertheless. When I returned to Moscow in late 2016, Thanh and Vũ had saved enough money to acquire a xưởng may trắng (white/legal garment factory) and they were employing a completely different crew, all of whom had work permits paid for by the workers themselves through the foreign labor quota system. I asked Thanh if any of her former workers from the now closed xưởng may đen had married their partners. She replied: ‘All the love affairs ended as soon as they arrived in Nội Bài. Each person headed to their own home. Most of them were married and had families waiting back home.’ Nevertheless, the sense of sexual freedom at garment factories is not completely harmless. I saw a few dramas unfold during my fieldwork in 2014, sometimes with heartbreaking consequences. The wife of 30-year-old Đạt, who worked for Thanh as a site manager, had worked in the factory with him until she became heavily pregnant and had to go back to Vietnam to deliver the baby. Đạt started to sleep with Hồng – a young and pretty woman who just joined

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the factory – as soon as his wife left. There is an unwritten rule at garment factories that ‘what happens at the factory stays at the factory’, but a couple of loyal friends decided to break the ‘code of silence’ and called Đạt’s wife to tell her about the affair, which led to nasty fights between the couple when she returned to Russia and, eventually, their divorce. Đạt’s story is almost identical to that of Thảo, a 46-year-old garment factory owner I befriended in 2014. Thảo and her husband first came to Russia in 1989 as contract workers and stayed on after the Soviet Union collapsed. They later got married in Moscow and both of their sons were born in the city but sent back to Vietnam at a young age to live with Thảo’s parents. They owned a xưởng may đen that used to employ 60 workers in its heyday, but had suffered significant financial losses after multiple police raids and changes of location in the two years preceding 2014, when I first met Thảo at Sadovod. By this time, the couple had separated and were seeking a divorce. In a turn of events typical to the marital breakdowns I came to know in Moscow, Thảo’s husband fell for one of their female workers and started living with her at their xưởng may đen while Thảo was visiting their sons in Vietnam. The affair led to a bitter breakup, which involved an excessive trade of insults and several physical altercations. The sexual-affective relationships I observed at Vietnamese garment factories illustrate the so-called ‘ethos of contingency,’ which is about the tentativeness but also flexibility of people’s actions when they feel they have no control over their lives or any ability to predict the conditions on which they are dependent (Whyte & Siu, 2015). In situations of uncertainty, men and women are open to trying out various possibilities and prepared to transgress social norms and moral boundaries in doing so. Yet they also recognize the provisional, undetermined nature of social relationships in this particular context. Uncertainty may constrain individual agency while at the same time opening up new possibilities for the creation of new sensibilities and collaborations (Simone 2005, p. 517). The accounts provided by workers in Russia show that uncertainty renders intimate relationships particularly fragile, but also creates a sense of freedom that would not have been possible otherwise. The case of Vietnamese garment workers speaks to the notion of ‘technologies of love’ that D’Aoust (2013) uses in her analysis of marriage migration management in Europe. Following Foucault’s (1991) idea of ‘governmentality,’ which broadly refers to the mentalities, rationalities, and techniques through which subjects are rendered governable, D’Aoust views love as a technology that not only shapes social conduct, but also simultaneously (re)creates subjects. In Foucault’s view, governmentality is not restricted to political

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government but, moreover, extends to forms of individual self-regulation, which are also known as technologies of the self. Defining it as ‘the conduct of conduct,’ he treats the term as encompassing both ‘governing the self’ and ‘governing others,’ which shows how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous individual codetermine each other’s emergence (Lemke, 2002, p. 51). In Russia, technologies of love concern the instrumentality and reflexivity in individuals’ conduct of their intimate lives so as to attain a specific goal and, in so doing, transform themselves in certain ways. The dependence on the intimate partner for love, care, and support does not necessarily mean trust, but represents individuals’ attempts to rework their bodies, emotions, thoughts, and way of being in order to survive.

‘Better safe than sorry’ I first met Thanh, the garment factory owner, in 2013 at Sadovod market, but it was not until a year later that I developed a close, trusting relationship with her through various visits to her xưởng may đen. Her life is a complex history of triumphs and struggles. A soft-spoken, mild-mannered, tall, and slim-built woman, she did not bear any resemblance to the stereotypical, essentialized image of a market-based businesswoman in Vietnamese popular discourse – uneducated, uncultured, self-interested, ravenous, aggressive, and loud (see Leshkowich, 2015, p. 5). Having arrived in Moscow six years earlier, empty-handed and dispirited by the separation from her gambling-addicted husband, Thanh went through the vagaries of an undocumented migrant’s life in Moscow before embarking on garment production, which later proved to be a particularly lucrative business. She left her two adolescent daughters with her parents and remitted money home regularly to pay for their education and living expenses. At the time of my fieldwork, Thanh co-owned a garment factory with Vũ, a lover eight years her junior who had never been married. They had been living together in the migrant hostel Ốp Tàu đỏ for four years, running the garment workshop together and splitting the profits. With complementary sets of skills, they made a perfect team: Vũ could drive and assumed a much-needed male protector’s figure in business deals, while Thanh, with her tailor’s skills and remarkable entrepreneurial acumen, proved extremely savvy in handling relationships with workers, fabric suppliers, and clients. When I met Thanh and Vũ again in April 2014, their business was thriving after recovering from a series of police raids in late 2013. Since their factory specialized in low-end, casual light clothing, April was the busiest time of

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the year, when market traders started to stockpile summer wares. Running an illegal garment workshop was an exceptionally lucrative, albeit highly risky and unpredictable, business, which my host, Trang, compared to the drug trade. ‘The illegal garment workshop folks … their lives would be sorted if they go without any police raids for a single season’ (Cái bọn xưởng may đen … chỉ cần một vụ không bị công an bắt là chúng nó nên người). Happy with the robust market, Thanh and Vũ and the other workshop owners in their close circle of friends often invited me to their nightly feasts. On many occasions, I heard Vũ address himself as ‘tao’ and Thanh as ‘mày’, the coarse, sometimes offensive pronouns – equivalent to ‘I’ and ‘you,’ respectively – that are commonly used among young children of the same age or between adults to ‘convey informality and intimacy between friends’ or to ‘signal contempt or disregard for the recipient’ (Sidnell & Shohet, 2013, p. 623, 625). This was instead of anh and em, a respectful and loving form of address by an older brother/man (anh) or the male partner and younger sister/woman (em) or his significant other, which is a conventional practice among couples, regardless of their age differences. In his meticulous analysis of the Vietnamese system of personal reference, Luong (1990) shows that terms of address, which enact a relational hierarchy between interlocutors in virtually every discursive exchange, profoundly influence the ways in which people view social relationships. Surprised by Vũ’s unconventional choice of pronouns, I asked him why they did not address each other as anh and em, Vũ bluntly responded: ‘Để làm gì? Đằng nào chả bỏ nhau.’ (What for? We’ll part ways sooner or later). The entire assemblage around the dining table where our conversation took place burst out laughing when hearing Vũ’s response. Thanh laughed too and continued to serve herself stir-fried beef as if nothing had happened. Clearly no one else around the table had been disturbed or surprised by Vũ’s words, which would have upset the woman and been met with disbelief and disapproval by the people present had we been in a different context. On our subsequent visits to their factory, Vũ confided to me that he was actually keen to push his relationship with Thanh to the next level, which meant registering their marriage and having a child with her, but had not had much success talking her into that. Thanh preferred to concentrate on money-making and fulfilling her mothering duties to her two teenage daughters back home, rather than committing herself to a long-term relationship. Although her adventure in Russia had no definite end date, it was uncertain how much longer she could safely stay in the country and whether she would have the same business opportunity when she had to leave. More importantly, she admitted to me, Thanh feared that a marriage

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certificate would not guarantee that her relationship with Vũ would survive Russia. The fragility of the social and intimate relationships of people around her had taught Thanh that, in such a transient and precarious situation, the only person she could trust was herself and the best way to preempt risks was to avoid being heavily invested in relationships. As seen in her explanation below, their relationship was expected to last as long as her business partnership with Vũ continued, while emotional and even sexual needs were of secondary importance: Oh we are just taking one day at a time. In this country, who knows what tomorrow will bring? Sometimes short-term plans become long-term plans and long-term plans end as soon as they begin. The most important question is whether we can work together. The relationship won’t last if we can’t work together. We wouldn’t be able to separate even if we want to when the business goes well. I entered this relationship thinking it’s just a fling [chỉ nghĩ đánh dậm thôi]. Can’t believe it’s been four years … I told Vũ that there was no problem with us cohabiting in Russia, but it would not work in Vietnam. No one would approve of him marrying an older, divorced women with two children. There would be no future for that marriage.

The case of Thanh and Vũ was anything but exceptional in the context of Russia. Mai – the millionaire broker discussed in Chapter III – held the same views about love and marriage. She had been living with her partner Vinh, who was six years younger than her, for more than ten years and borne him a daughter. Vinh had been pushing for a wedding and marriage registration over all those years, but Mai would not let it happen, a situation that ran counter to the conventional power dynamics between heterosexual couples in Vietnamese society, where the man is always in the driver’s seat. The power imbalance between Mai and Vinh lay in the wealth gap between them: Vinh was empty-handed when he met Mai and had not made any notable contributions to her remarkable economic success since then. Their awkward situation was a favorite gossip topic among their circles of friends, who viewed Vinh’s motives with suspicion and contempt while praising Mai for being ‘tỉnh’ (which means sober, sane, rational, smart, or shrewd) as she would not cave under the pressure from Vinh. Maintaining the status quo, they believed, was Mai’s only way to maintain Vinh’s loyalty while keeping her fortune intact. The cases of Thanh and Vũ and Mai and Vinh illustrate profound changes to the meanings and values of sexual-affective relationships as well as gender

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dynamics in people’s intimate lives in times of uncertainty. Here, both men’s and women’s attitudes to love and marriage are radically different from the social norms prevailing in Vietnamese society, as well as from normative ideals about love and marriage across cultural contexts. In Vietnamese culture, individualistic attitudes to love and sex are socially condemned (Wolf, Phan, Hyman, & Huber, 2010, p. 169). Likewise, intimate relationships of a transactional and rational nature, devoid of commitment and respect, are held in contempt (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c, p. 596). What we see in Russia relates to the debates on money in social life, especially the work done by Karl Marx (1975) and Georg Simmel (2011). Simmel extols the value of money in promoting rational calculation in social life and encouraging the rationalization of modern society. Marx (1975, p. 379), on the other hand, condemns money for corrupting social relationships ‘by displacing being with having.’ Expressions of romantic love and sexual passion are about who we are while money focuses our life on ‘having,’ thereby distorting human relationships and our ability to create social bonds (Hardt, 2011, p. 679). These differences notwithstanding, both Marx and Simmel regard money as being associated with, and promoting, the growth of individualism and the destruction of solidary communities. My research questions the seemingly straightforward ‘cause and effect’ relationship between money and individualism articulated in these earlier works, as well as the representation of money as a negative force reducing social relationships to impersonality. Research from a variety of contexts has shown that money is accorded different meanings in different sociocultural contexts, thereby disputing the notion of money’s universally homogenizing powers (Bloch & Parry, 1989; Truitt, 2013; Zelizer, 1997). The case of Vietnamese migrants in Russia casts doubt on the common view of money as having the power to shape a specific world view and engender particular kinds of social relationships. Whether it is ‘devilish acid or an instrument and guarantor of liberty’ (Bloch & Parry, 1989, p. 30) depends on not only contextual specificities, but also the social positionality of the subject. Here, money provides the women with a sense of empowerment, enabling them to assume control of their lives and defy the restrictive norms governing sexuality and marriage. What comes across as individualism is actually a coping mechanism in a context where trust cannot be taken for granted. The sense of sexual freedom and opportunistic attitudes in intimate relationships are not restricted to just garment factories. This is captured by a popular phrase often quoted to me by my interlocutors: ‘Go to America if you want to get rich. Go to Russia if you want to be a whore’ (Làm giàu đi Mỹ, đánh đĩ đi Nga). Almost every Vietnamese migrant I came into contact with in the field had their own story

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of infidelity to tell, whether as the wrong or wronged party. Temporal and spatial separation create both the need and the opportunities for men and women to engage in extramarital affairs. As 41-year-old Dương succinctly put it: ‘We are all flesh and blood (and thus have the same needs).’ For people at the market, sexual infidelity has become an accepted part of their transnational life and features strongly in the popular catchphrases, proverbs and poems, such as the following: Nước Nga đi dễ khó về Trai đi thêm vợ, gái về thêm con [It is easy to come to Russia but hard to leave it More wives for men and more children for women on their exit].

The conversations I had with those who had gone through failed relationships threw further light upon Mai’s and Thanh’s ‘better safe than sorry’ strategy. On one occasion, I had the opportunity to hear 40-year-old textile trader Ly and Thảo – the xưởng may đen owner mentioned in the previous section of this chapter – commiserate with each other over the bizarrely identical paths that led to the ends of their respective marriages. Both women found out they were being cheated on while they were on short visits to Vietnam. Letting men have too much money and free time at their disposal, they concluded, was a recipe for disaster. Luckily for each woman, the savvy businesswoman in her had saved her from ending the marriage empty-handed: both Ly and Thảo had been keeping a separate budget and buying their own properties over the years, without their ex-partners’ knowledge. Below is how Thảo summed up the hard lesson she learned after putting up with her husband’s string of affairs over nearly twenty years: It was not the first time [that her husband had an affair]. He once bought a house for one of his mistresses and poured a lot of money into her business and then she dumped him. I’ve learned my lesson. Here in Russia, the woman must hold the family’s purse strings [laughing]. We wouldn’t have to worry what they [men] are up to and who they are sleeping with if we hold on to our money. Whatever happens, we still have our money. We would end up homeless if we let them do whatever they want with the money [laughing].

Life in Russia, Ly said again and again during our conversation, was very ‘phức tạp’ (which means complex or chaotic, depending on the situation). To survive, one must not place complete trust in anyone and should always be

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prepared for the worst. Because of their uncertain future in Russia, women often travel to Vietnam for childbirth and leave children behind with their relatives, with the couple taking turns to visit them. Extramarital affairs usually begin during those short episodes of one’s spouse’s absence. On one of my overnight stays in the migrant hostel Ốp Tàu đỏ, I became an unwitting spectator of an embarrassing situation in which a roommate of one of my informants brought his lover to the dorm room, where we were having tea after dinner, and engaged in loud, intense lovemaking behind the curtains a mere meter from where we were. As it turned out, his wife had just gone back to Vietnam to give birth to their baby and the affair began as soon as she left. In a similar situation, one of my research participants, a 32-year-old mother of two named Lan, traveled to Vietnam to give birth to her second child and discovered upon her return that her husband had been sleeping with her best friend, who had been sharing the room with them. Subjective experiences of the provisionality and uncertainty of life in Russia seem to encourage opportunistic behaviors in every aspect – one feels the urge to live for the moment, to grasp at whatever opportunity presents itself before it vanishes. It is not uncommon for people to sleep around even while still living with their spouses or long-term partners. Sexual promiscuity and infidelity are, to a large extent, facilitated by crowded living conditions, whether migrants live in private, rented apartments or migrant hostels. Because of the high costs of living in Russia, it is common for two or three couples to share an apartment, or even one room in the apartment, sleeping on mattresses side by side, separated by flimsy curtains. Trang, for example, told me she once lived next door to two couples who shared a small studio flat in a crowded immigrant hostel, where she saw how an extramarital drama unfolds. One person in each pair usually left for the market early in the morning to set up their store while their partner would sleep in and/or do household chores first before joining them at the market. As it happened, the stay-behind man and woman quickly hooked up with each other, moving into each other’s beds the moment their partners left the apartment. The accidental exposé of the affair (by the unsuspecting husband of the unfaithful woman) and the infamous commotion that ensued finally destroyed both marriages. The lack of privacy, as illustrated by the vivid description of Tuyết the broker below, is often blamed for sexual promiscuity among migrants: It is common for one, two, three, or even four couples and probably a few single men/women to share a room this size in the apartments near the market. Your bed is just a curtain away from where another couple

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sleep. You can’t help but hear how the curtain flutters back and forth [cái màn gió phang phần phật] with their every move. How could you bear it? Carnal needs is one thing. Money is another. If you sleep with this man, he would supply you the wares you need. Your pants would undo themselves [dây chun quần nó tự nó đứt thôi chứ không cần phải tuột] as soon as you think about money.

As seen from Tuyết’s blunt explanation, intimate relationships are not always sought for the purpose of sexual gratification. The demanding market regime and the harsh, long winter make it extremely difficult for one to survive and thrive in Russia on their own. One of my research participants, a 45-year-old married mother of two named Tâm, told me there was nothing shameful about having an affair in Russia: ‘Here, every woman must find a man to rely on or you would not be able to survive.’ She earned her living as a wholesale vegetable supplier, which would not have been possible without help from her lover, who ferried her between vegetable farms and the market. Like Tâm, many engage in what I call ‘pragmatic intimacies’ to cope with the hardships and brutalities of their transnational life in Russia. The couple live and do business together in Russia, sometimes for decades, yet still remain married to their respective partners in Vietnam and send money home to support their separate families. It has become such a common practice that extramarital relationships among migrants, whose spouses live in Vietnam, no longer raise eyebrows or invite criticisms as they would in the homeland. On several occasions, I asked my research participants whether the people we had just met were husband and wife, to which they replied: ‘Yes, but only in Russia!’ Here, having an intimate partner to share the hardship with is seen as a necessity that is not to be subject to conventional moral judgments. Below is how 43-year-old Kim elaborated on why it is vital to have an intimate partner in Russia, a view that was concurred by many other interlocutors in my research: Men would not be able to do it [market trade] if they were on their own. They always have to find a lover to do the business with. They would fail spectacularly without a female partner. It’s equally hard for a woman to do everything by herself. Impossible! There are certain things that men can do better and other things that only women can do. That’s why 90 percent of people here have an extramarital partner, or even more.

What I found in Russia underscores ‘the productivity of uncertainty at the heart of human sociality’ (Berthomé et al., 2012, p. 130). Uncertainty brings

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people together and encourages cooperation as a way to minimize possible risks. However, as the above cases illustrate, intimate relationships, be they for survival or pragmatic calculations, may produce further uncertainties (see also Cooper & Pratten, 2015b). In the precarious situation of Vietnamese migrants in Russia, the social, emotional, psychological, and even economic consequences of failed relationships can be catastrophic. Operating in a strictly cash economy and having no legal recourse, the breakdown of an intimate relationship often entails devastating, irrecoverable economic damages for migrants, as they often run the business together with their intimate partners. Some of my research participants were driven to bankruptcy and despair when their partners suddenly disappeared with all the money they had pooled together. Thirty-nine-year-old Tùng, for example, was a married man with two children when I first met him in 2013. He and his wife Chi, 28, were selling women’s clothes in linia 15 at Sadovod market and took turns to visit their children, who were living with Tùng’s parents in Vietnam. The couple were very suspicious of me at first, declining to be interviewed, and would only engage in small talk about market life when I dropped by their công. It was not until 2014 that I learned Tùng had gone through a rough patch before he met Chi through a matchmaker in Vietnam. He had been living in Samara, a city just over 1,000 kilometers southeast of Moscow, with a Vietnamese woman and their one-year-old daughter, before he had to travel to Vietnam for a few months for medical treatment. The couple had been running a market store together and Tùng’s partner managed their pooled budget. Upon his return to Samara, Tùng was shocked to find that his partner had disappeared with the baby and all their money. Unable to track her down, Tùng decided to move to Moscow to rebuild his life and it took him ten years to restore his economic situation to where it was before his previous partner walked out on him. While opportunistic extramarital sexual adventures, particularly by men, tend to be easily tolerated and justified, they allow distrust to slowly seep into people’s psyche and, over time, establish itself firmly as a regulatory principle in their sexual-affective relationships. In no other aspects of migrants’ social life does the sense of caution and provisionality become such a powerful driving force as in intimate relationships. Looking at this from broader perspectives, sex and affect are the only domain of their transnational lives that migrants are able to take control of, hence the risk averseness. Uncertainty constrains people’s agency in their intimate lives, yet simultaneously creates new subjectivities and social imaginaries. Human emotions are not ahistorical, biological, or natural facts but conditioned by the historical, social, and cultural contexts they are embedded in (D’Aoust,

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2013, p. 112; Gammeltoft, 1999, p. 204). Practicing self-denial and avoiding long-term commitments are among many coping mechanisms developed by migrants to cope with the uncertainty of life in a place that, for many, has become a temporary home for a lifetime.

What’s love got to do with it? Narratives of sex, money and morality One must find a more established person to hook up with. Things would be easier that way. If you are new to Russia and have little capital, you wouldn’t be able to keep yourself afloat for more than three months. Those who have been here for a while … they have a store already, they have money and experience … I have a friend who is just two years older than me … he lives with a woman 20 years older than him. He is just a few years older than her children. But it doesn’t bother anyone here … Age difference does not matter. I know a seamstress. She is in her early twenties but she lives with a man in his fifties. You must understand … you really need money here … there are so many things you have to pay for every day: food, transport, rent. You are already in Russia and you must do anything to survive.

Above is how 40-year-old Quang, a male trader at Liublino market, sought to explain to me what scholars refer to as the ‘political economy of sexuality’ (Altman, 2001; Cantu, 2009) of Vietnamese migrants in Russia. The intimate relationships of Vietnamese migrants in Russia, my interlocutors claim, are largely driven by economic calculations rather than physical attraction or romantic love. Hailing mostly from rural areas of North and Central Vietnam, many new migrants lack the required economic, social, and cultural capital to successfully navigate the treacherous shadow economy of Russia (see also Williams & Balaz, 2005, p. 544). As described in Chapters III and IV, the exploitative market regime is not something for cash-strapped novice traders to play with, especially given that the support of family networks is minimal, and most do not have any safety nets to fall back on. Every aspect of market trade – securing a công at a suitable location and reasonable rental rate, choosing the right type of wares to trade, establishing a reliable supply chain, developing and maintaining a loyal customer base, having the capacity to predict market trends and conditions, and being able to negotiate appropriate terms and conditions with the market administration, creditors, business partners, and helpers – requires a great deal of experience

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in market trade, astuteness, prudence, flexibility, and resilience. Given the exorbitant rental rate at the market and the substantial start-up investment, misjudgments in any of the above put the trader at the risk of bankruptcy, which, in many cases, happened within only three months. It is even more difficult for waged laborers and itinerant vendors at the market to climb up the ladder. At the time of my second fieldwork stint in 2014, a shop assistant or warehouse laborer, who mostly worked on a casual basis, was paid RUB 1,000 (USD 28) per day on average, only a fraction of which could be put aside as savings if they maintained an extremely frugal lifestyle involving sharing rooms, eating basic food, and forgoing costly habits such as smoking, drinking, and socializing. Itinerant vendors made a similar amount of money, albeit under more precarious and irregular conditions due to fickle customers’ demands and the constant threat of detention and harassment by market security guards. However, as discussed in Chapter IV, many helpers, especially new and young migrants from rural areas, did not even earn regular wages, as they were working for relatives who had sent for them and were paying for their lodging and food. For them, getting involved in an intimate relationship with a well-resourced partner seemed to be the only avenue for achieving economic mobility. This is captured in Tuyết the broker’s blunt language below: Here, men are all so despicable [khắm bựa]. They have eyes only for old, ugly women who can give them money. They would not be interested in you if you have no money even if you are young and pretty. Ugly women tend to be more generous … it’s easier to extract money from them. Money is more important than looks here. The more money you have, the more desirable you become. If you have money, you can sleep with a man your son’s age … As for a man, he might sleep with a woman his mother’s age, but he can build a grand mansion for himself at home. The whole village would be envious. Who cares where the money came from? And why those women do so? When you are penniless, you have to find an old man who has money to give you, but once you have made it … you have more money than you need … you would never sleep with that kind of man. Life is not easy in a foreign land.

Migrants’ sexualities, like their material lives, are regimented by ‘global hierarchical intersections of race, faith, gender and class’ (Mai & King, 2009, p. 302). For migrants from lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, the body can become an economic resource serving the practical purposes of survival and consolidating their economic security in the face

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of disenfranchising and vulnerability in the host society (­Gonzalez-Lopez, 2005; Groes‐Green, 2014; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c; Liu-Farrer, 2010a). What is interesting in this case is the reverse in gender roles between the man and the woman in intimate relationships of transactional nature. The Vietnamese gender ideology of men as breadwinners and economic providers in the family also prevails in non-marital intimate relationships, in which the man is expected to provide his (usually younger) lover with gifts and even cash and pay for all their dating expenses. The practice is consistent with the traditional sexuality norms that treat the woman’s body as an instrument for reproduction and the fulfillment of marriage duties, while female sexual agency is denied and the moral integrity of the women who express sexual desire is shrouded in doubt (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c, p. 5). Because of the paramount importance of sexual chastity for women’s moral standing and social status, their engagement in non-marital sexual relationships is often expected to be compensated with economic support from their male partners. As such, the reversal of gender roles in a relationship involving an older woman who performs the role of a patron supplying her younger male lover with money and paying for his maintenance seems to disturb many of my interlocutors who generally have no problems with more ‘traditional’ type of extramarital relationships. As illustrated in the following quote from a conversation I had with 48-year-old nanny Cúc, such a relationship is seen as not only wrong, but also depraved and immoral: When I first came here and saw how easy it was to make money, I wanted to send for my children. But I was disgusted [khiếp ba đời] when I learned more about people’s lives. I’d rather that they stay hungry at home. I would never let them come here. Here in Russia, young men in their twenties sleep with women in their thirties, forties or even older, do you understand?

Research shows that migration has the potential to transform men’s and women’s sexual lives, more often in an enabling than a constraining way, largely due to the liberty and anonymity afforded to them at their destinations (Cantu, 2009; Chapman, Caib, Hillierc, & Estcourt, 2009; Gaetano, 2008). Sexualities are, indeed, ‘fluid, nuanced, changing, contextual, and contested’ (Gonzalez-Lopez, 2005, p. 4). In the moral economies of exchange of Vietnamese migrants in Russia, however, double standards about male and female sexualities persist. While intimate relationships between men and much younger women rarely cause a stir, even when they are transactional

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in nature, affairs between older women and younger men are met with a great deal of uneasiness and aspersions. By engaging in transactional sex with a signif icantly older woman in exchange for money, the man has compromised his masculine identity, which rests almost exclusively on his successful performance as an economic provider and protector (see Hoang & Yeoh, 2011). The woman, on the other hand, violates moral codes about female sexualities that restrict their bodies and sexual desire to the confines of marriage (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c). Patron-client relationships are defined as moral systems of asymmetrical personal exchange, often outside of state and formal economic institutions (Ferguson, 2013). In these informal redistributive processes, some people’s privileged socio-economic status obliges them to provide social protection and financial support to persons of lower status and income in exchange for their services and loyalty (Scott, 1972). What has often been overlooked in the scholarship on the moralities of exchange in patron-client relationships is the gendered hierarchy implicated in them, which becomes particularly pertinent in discussions on the political economy of sexualities. Gender is a primary cultural frame for organizing social relations (Ridgeway, 2009). As Bloch and Parry (1989, p. 22) point out, not only does money mean different things in different cultures, but it also may mean different things within the same culture because relations of exchange are not just economic, but also social. When the patron is a man exchanging money for sexual favors and emotional labor from a woman, the relationship is consistent with prevailing ideologies about gender division of labor and power dynamics between the sexes (see also Groes‐Green, 2014; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c). Money acquired through these transactional relationships, therefore, does not pose a moral problem because it upholds the socially accepted order within the broader moral economy of affect and sexuality within which Vietnamese migrants are situated. When the gender hierarchy in patron-client relationships is reversed, however, the money exchanged between intimate partners becomes dirty because the woman and the man now assume the roles that are deemed morally unacceptable according to the prevailing gender and sexuality ideologies. For my research participants, moral perils do not come from the transactional nature of intimate relationships per se. Neither do they view money as an inherently dangerous medium polluting relationships. It is the transgression of gender norms in sexual relationships that leads to the negative representation of the exchanges between the woman and the man as well as the money associated with it. That there is an intimate connection between gender symbolism and money symbolism has also

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been noted by Stirrat (1989) in his ethnography of a fishing village on the northwest coast of Sri Lanka and Carsten (1989) in her account of Malay fishing households in Langkawi. This research shows that money might give rise to a particular world view (Simmel, 2011), but an existing world view also gives rise to particular ways of evaluating certain types of exchanges and representing money (Bloch & Parry, 1989).

VI Transient existence and the quest for certainty I’m here to make money, not to live I first met 34-year-old Quyên and her 15-month-old baby in 2014 on one of my visits to the Yuzhnyie Vorota market. Yuzhnyie Vorota, as mentioned in Chapter I, is a low-end market where the rentals are the most affordable, but sales are also much slower than other markets. The Vietnamese I met at the market were novice, struggling traders, who had just arrived in Russia or made a career change from garment production or construction. Hailing mostly from poor, rural villages of Central and North Vietnam, they did not have any prior business experience, adequate capital, or support from an established network, which were the main ingredients for Vietnamese migrants’ economic success in Russia. While those I met often spoke of their plans – or, rather, aspirations – to climb the ladder and move their business to Sadovod or even Liublino market one day, I never heard of anyone successfully doing so. Low rents, low-cost merchandise, and free shuttle bus services connecting Yuzhnyie Vorota market with neighboring suburbs did not help to draw large crowds. The invariably empty lanes and a large number of unoccupied stores at the market were unmistakable signs of the hardships facing traders and the bleak economic prospects lying ahead of them. Quyên’s son was the only baby I met at the markets in the entirety of my fieldwork in Moscow. Due to concerns about security risks, the timeintensive market regime, and the uncertainty of their future in Russia, most migrants leave their children with extended family in Vietnam. Although they have free access to Russian healthcare services, expectant mothers still prefer to travel to Vietnam to deliver their baby and leave him/her behind after six months or a year to return to work in Russia. Even in rare situations when parents can afford the relatively high costs of raising a baby in Russia, children are often sent to Vietnam when they reach school age. In these cases, the mother has to either withdraw from work and become a full-time carer for the baby in his/her preschool years or hire a nanny from Vietnam, which would set them back between USD 500-700 each month, because bringing young children along to the market is not really an option. Except for Liublino and a small section of Sadovod, markets are generally not heated in winter, making the standard 12-hour work day a taxing ordeal

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even for strong, young adults. I was, therefore, taken by surprise when I heard that Quyên’s son had been a daily presence at the Yuzhnyie Vorota market since his birth. However, he spent most of his time sleeping in the pram since the pa lát (a small, open sale space) his mother was renting could not accommodate a small bed or even a reclining chair for him. I met Quyên when visiting one of my research participants, with whom she often hung out while her son was sleeping in her unattended pa lát two linias away. The quiet market and the little boy’s rather excessive sleep seemed to bore the young mother, who laughed off my question of whether it was safe to leave her son unattended. There was no cause for concern, she assured me, as the Vietnamese fellow traders next to her place would be able to hear the boy when he woke up and keep an eye on him until she got back. In fact, she regularly left him sleeping in the unattended pa lát in the morning when she took the bus to Sadovod or Liublino to buy new stock. A round trip typically took three to four hours. Quyên came to Russia with her husband in 2011, leaving their two older children with her parents in her home province of Thanh Hóa in Central Vietnam. Their f irst year in Russia was encouraging when trade at the Slaviansky Mir market (which was known to Vietnamese migrants as Km 41 market, due to its location at the 41st kilometer of MKAD), where they first worked, was booming. However, sales dropped sharply in 2012 and the couple decided to close down their business to work at a xưởng may đen. Quyên fell pregnant soon after she moved into the factory, but her husband had to travel to Vietnam to attend to his terminally ill father before the baby was born. Because market trade was declining and he had found a job at a local cassava mill that paid five million dongs (USD 250) a month, Quyên told me, he decided not to return to Russia after his father passed away. She therefore had no choice but to move back to market trade, as it was not safe to raise the baby at the xưởng may đen and impossible for her to juggle the intensive job of a seamstress and childcare at the same time. While Yuzhnyie Vorota was clearly not the best-performing market in Moscow, it was the only place Quyên could afford to move into. She and the baby slept in a bunk bed in a dorm room that they shared with six other people in a migrant hostel adjacent to the market. The baby had been accompanying his mother to the market since he was ten days old, from 4.30am to 5.00pm every day, rain or shine. Weighing only nine kilograms at 15 months, he was severely stunted and could not talk yet. Quyên’s business did not perform well either, but she was determined to keep going, hoping that the situation would soon change for the better. For now, each day was a struggle to make ends meet.

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Uncertainty, as illustrated by Quyên’s story, is not only about a sense of vulnerability and fear, but also feelings of hope and possibility (see also Cooper & Pratten, 2015b). Such a complex, ambivalent structure of feeling fashions a unique mode of action where people are constantly on the lookout for opportunities, while their lives and social relationships are held in suspense. A future-oriented posture, which is central to the capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 2004), is essentially about the willingness to take risks and the ability to make sacrifices today. As a 39-year-old market trader named Huy pointed out: ‘Living in Russia is about both sacrifice and hope’ (Người ta sang đây, người ta cũng phải hy sinh mà cũng là hy vọng). Quyên’s experience characterizes the future-orientedness and anticipation that shape Vietnamese migrants’ ways of being and doing in Russia. What they are going through today is only a transient existence leading to the kind of life that they aspire to beyond Russia. They are therefore prepared to forgo immediate needs and learn to live with any adversities that life throws their way so that when the right time comes, they will be able to seize the opportunities that luck or fate may bestow. Understanding uncertainty is, indeed, about understanding the contingency of practice, both socially and temporally (Cooper & Pratten, 2015b). The pressure to make the most of their present situation while it is still possible is felt particularly strongly by the women in my study. Although they often work with the assistance of or in partnership with their spouses, lovers, or relatives, women tend to play a dominant role in the day-to-day running of their business, while men assume the role of ‘helpers’ who fill in for the women when the latter are not available. In Vietnamese society, market trade is predominantly a female activity and characterizations of the market trader closely resemble what are presumed to be women’s innate personality traits, such as resourcefulness, verbal dexterity, patience, self-sacrifice, and fiscal prudence (see Leshkowich, 2011, p. 277). Market traders are also generally seen as dishonest, greedy, superstitious, ignorant, and lacking in intellectual quality (Leshkowich, 2011, p. 282) – traits that are closely associated with women, especially in comparison with men. Men, therefore, deliberately keep aloof from trade activities so as not to have their sense of masculinity compromised. Nevertheless, in the context of Russia, this is not always possible. The common trajectory among migrants who have arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union is that the man – the provider and patriarch of the family – migrates and enters market trade first, and sends for his wife and/or female relatives once he has settled into the new life in Russia. Once the woman arrives, she will take over most of the frontline activities at the market, although the man tends to remain deeply involved in the

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business and retain his decision-making power in important matters. There is therefore a greater female presence at the shop front, at grocery stores, and on the permanently jam-packed bus to Liublino, where Sadovod and Yuzhnyie Vorota traders source their merchandise. In the extreme climate of Russia, this means the woman must push aside the usual concerns about health and beauty. On one of my bus trips from Sadovod to Liublino in 2014, I sat next to a middle-aged woman and a man around the same age, both of whom were trading at Sadovod and on their way to Liublino to acquire new stock. Apparently, they did not know each other before boarding the bus, but quickly started exchanging pleasantries before turning the conversation to the tribulations of market life. The woman had recently moved to Moscow from Yakutsk and was running a garment store at CT4 – a row of côngs on the southern edge of the pavilions section that was directly exposed to the scorching heat in summer and the bitter cold in winter. With four full-time sales assistants, her business seemed to be doing well, but she was deeply upset about how badly her skin, hair, and health had been damaged by the weather extremes. The man expressed sympathy and, in an effort to make her feel better, gently reminded her of what she was in Russia for: Remember what you are here for! You are here to make money and that is the only thing that matters. You’d have nothing if you live an easy life without money.

The man’s words echoed what I had heard many times from my interlocutors. On another occasion when I was chatting with Ly, a 39-year-old textile trader, and Thảo, the 46-year-old garment factory owner, in Ly’s store, I remarked that all the customers who had visited Ly’s store that day were women even though most of them ran their garment production businesses with their male partners, and that there seemed to be only work, no play for Vietnamese women in Russia, for I saw only men at restaurants and cafés on the market compound. Thảo laughed at what seemed to be a silly observation and said: ‘We don’t live here. We are here to make money.’ For Thảo and many of her fellow migrants, their life course has been neatly partitioned into discrete chunks, each of which is designated a different purpose. They are willing to work hard and make extraordinary sacrifices today because they know life is waiting for them out there, beyond the market and Russia. Mary Douglas in her various works argued that we should see ordinary people as operating through cultural designs of anticipation and risk reduction (Douglas, 1982; Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983). This is, indeed, an apt lens for understanding migrant market traders’ ways of life of in Russia, whether this

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is a hand-to-mouth existence like Quyên’s or more economically comfortable circumstances like those of the millionaire traders at Liublino market. Unlike Vietnamese diasporas elsewhere, migrants to Russia mostly come from poor families in rural areas of North and Central Vietnam – the most densely populated and resource-poor regions in the country, respectively. Every decision they make in their transnational life, from trivial matters such as daily food consumption and choice of accommodation to weighty affairs such as marriage, children, and family economics, embodies the anxieties and apprehension built up over the years, through their lived experiences of poverty and unemployment in the pre-migration years and their sense of precarity and vulnerability in Russia. Dramatic ups and downs in the lives of Vietnamese migrants in post-Soviet Russia in the past twenty-odd years have taught them that disasters might strike at any moment. Likewise, one may be able to go from rags to riches overnight if in the right place at the right time – a belief that keeps people like Quyên going, despite severe hardships. One’s life in Russia, as explained by garment factory owner Tài, 42, totally depends on luck: It’s all about luck in Russia. Success comes easy to lucky people. We might work very hard, but still fail if luck does not come find us. We might make a fortune today and lose it all tomorrow. It is easy for that to happen in Russia. You might be scraping a living as a waged laborer today but come tomorrow you’ll be a boss. I’ve been through it all. I worked and saved, worked and saved, just to lose everything one day. Then I started all over again. I might have RUB 3 million today but find myself with only RUB 300 by the end of the month [laughing].

Uncertain what tomorrow will bring, migrants do everything to minimize potential damages should bad luck befall them. Regardless of vast differences in their economic circumstances, traders invariably maintain a simple, frugal, and transient lifestyle. It is often impossible to tell apart highly successful traders who own multiple properties in Vietnam and small-time traders who struggle to make ends meet, if one only looks at their daily routines and consumption habits. They live in the same dormitory, cook their dinner next to each other in the communal kitchen, leave for the market around the same time before sunrise, and return home after sunset. Lunch is usually cold food left over from the last dinner or a bowl of plain instant noodles. Simple pleasures such as eating out, going out, or even watching TV are withheld until they visit Vietnam. The only differences, which are not always clear-cut or apparent, are probably in their ability to afford

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valid migration documents, such as a work permit or dependent visa, and annual visits to the children left behind in Vietnam, both of which are the luxurious expenses that only better-off traders can bear. The wealth acquired in Russia, in general, does not produce any discernible change to migrants’ ways of life or stratify the migrant ‘community’ into distinct categories of the haves and the have-nots, at least in terms of everyday consumption while they are in Russia. The frugal lifestyle of wealthy traders, however, often attracts criticism from their fellow countrymen, as illustrated by Tuyết the broker’s tirade below: If you have money, buy a nice kvartyra [apartment], buy a nice car. Live a decent life! But how do they live? They carry lunch to the market in a lunch box … by lunch time, the food is too cold to swallow … they choke on it. Think about it! They live here for decades, but what kind of life is it? They can’t even go home to see their parents for the last time at their deathbed. They miss all their brothers’ and sisters’ weddings. They live like Stone Age people [ăn lông ở lỗ] so they can buy as much land as possible. They don’t spend money at all. Land is the only thing they want to spend money on.

Investment in properties in Vietnam, as mentioned by Tuyết, is the main use of savings by migrants to Russia. The most common way to greet someone a migrant had not seen for a long time, 46-year-old market trader Linh told me, was to ask the person: ‘How many plots of land did you buy last year?’ While some of the most successful businessmen in Vietnam, including the country’s richest man – real estate tycoon Phạm Nhật Vượng – and the richest woman – President and CEO of Vietjet Air Nguyễn Thị Phương Thảo – are former migrants to the Soviet Union, business investment is a privilege enjoyed almost exclusively by return migrants from middle-class, well-connected backgrounds and with higher education qualifications. To be a successful entrepreneur in Vietnam, one requires powerful connections and intimate knowledge of how to navigate Vietnam’s treacherous ‘socialistoriented market economy’ – resources that new, low-skilled migrants from rural areas do not possess. Some of my research participants had actually made an attempt to set up businesses in Vietnam but failed spectacularly and lost their life savings within a short period of time. Investing in real estate seems like a safer option, especially amidst the remarkable growth of the Vietnamese real estate market in the 2000s. Đổi mới reforms and the accelerated urbanization that ensued led to an unprecedented housing boom in urban areas, especially big cities like Hà Nội, Hồ Chí Minh City, and Đà

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Nẵng, throughout the 1990s and 2000s (Han & Vu, 2008; Quang & Kammeier, 2002). Owning a plot of land or a house in a big city is the ultimate dream of low-skilled rural migrants, which they would have never been able to achieve had they not migrated to Russia. Russia, as described by 43-year-old market trader Kim below, is where dreams are made: You can earn big money here [Russia]. It is possible to make a few thousand dollars a day. You may go back to Vietnam and set up a big company, but you’d never earn tens of thousands of dollars a month. And there is too much trouble [doing business in Vietnam]. You may earn tens of thousands of dollars a month here with a small công like this. Easy! It’s too difficult to make money in Vietnam. You spend more money there, but very few people make five to ten million dongs [USD 250-500] a month … In my good years … 2006, 2007 … during summer I made as much money as others would make in ten to twenty years. Each day I sold RUB 1-2 million [USD 42,000-84,000] worth of merchandise. My profit margin was at least 20 percent, sometimes 25 percent.

In the above statement, Kim was referring to her Chợ Vòm (Cherkizovsky market) days, when a remarkable boom in market trade turned many people into millionaires overnight. At the time of our conversation, in mid-2013, she was working at Liublino market where, she complained, the exorbitant monthly rental of RUB 600,000 (USD 20,000 as per April 2013 exchange rate) plus daily wages for her helpers at RUB 1,500 (USD 50) per person per day caused her considerable stress. Her income was therefore lower than what she previously earned at Chợ Vòm, but Kim had saved enough money to buy two big properties in Vietnam – an impressive achievement given that she arrived in Russia empty-handed only eight years before. The newfound wealth and increased economic security, however, did not prompt any changes to Kim’s frugal lifestyle and intensive work regime of 12 hours a day, 364 days a year. She had no plans to return to Vietnam in the near future, although her husband and son were still living there. Consumption, Douglas and Isherwood (1979, p. 68) argue, is used by individuals to say something about themselves, as well as the place and space they belong to. Because it is a situated practice, consumption is an active process in which all the social categories are being continually redefined. Research from various contexts has provided rich accounts of how migrants engage in conspicuous consumption in an effort to affirm their elevated status and forge a new identity. Osella and Osella’s (2000) ethnographic study

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on Kerala migrants returning from Persian Gulf states, for example, shows interesting links between cash and masculinity, spending and potency, as demonstrated by the men’s indulgence in a luxurious lifestyle and excessive spending. Likewise, low-waged Vietnamese-American men in Thai’s (2006, 2014) research face extreme economic hardships in the United States, but engage in lavish consumption on their short visits to the homeland as a way to compensate for the damage to their sense of masculinity caused by their low social status in American society. These findings speak to Bourdieu’s (1984) view of consumption as mainly motivated by processes of distinction and status-seeking. It resonates with the tendency in the literature to attribute people’s consumption to three main purposes: material welfare (i.e. the need to be fed, clothed, and sheltered); psychic welfare (i.e. for peace of mind and recreation); and display (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979, pp. 3-4). Consumption behaviors of Vietnamese migrants to Russia, however, convey completely different social meanings. With their lived experiences of vulnerability and precarity in Russia, the strong preference among Vietnamese migrants to invest every dollar they save in real estate properties in Vietnam represents a desire to restore a sense of certainty and security to their life – something close to what Douglas and Isherwood identify as ‘psychic welfare.’ The distressing crises at the market in the first three decades of post-Soviet Russia are etched in migrants’ memory, forming a sense of perpetual angst. For my interlocutors, one’s economic success is measured by the total value of his or her real estate properties in Vietnam and not by the scale and revenue of their business or the kind of lifestyle they have in Russia, as the former, but not the latter, is immune to the volatility and fragility of their Russian life. Uncertainty does not eliminate the possibility of choice for the migrants but shapes their choices in such a way that would guarantee uncertainty is eliminated from their future. In Russia, there are no social incentives for migrants to engage in conspicuous consumption. Consumption, Appadurai (1986, p. 31) remarks, is imminently ‘social, relational, and active.’ Since conspicuous consumption is a public performance with the intention of sending out certain social messages, it requires a specific audience to interact with. Only in the homeland can migrants’ success create the social impact that they desire (see Thai, 2014; Thomas, 1997, for example). Transnational social spaces, according to Goldring (1999, p. 169), constitute ‘zones of sociocultural intelligibility’ in which social trajectories that are invisible or devalued in the host nation can be recognized. The homeland provides the Mexican migrants in her study, many of whom find themselves on lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder in the US, with a context for legitimating status claims. A similar observation

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has been made of Fujianese migrants in Europe. Pieke et al. (2004, p. 195) note that the Fujianese do not measure their earnings abroad by their local purchasing power, but by how much they can save and how much that money will be worth back home. Likewise, Vietnamese migrants in my study see no point engaging in conspicuous consumption during their transient life in Russia, because this would not generate the symbolic capital that they wish to have. This is elaborated upon by 50-year-old market trader Đức below: We can’t live here forever, so we have to make the most of every opportunity and save every dollar and send home everything we have. Buy what you need. Don’t waste money. Here, no one cares how much money you spend. No one knows who you are when you show off. In Vietnam, your money has greater value if you change USD 1,000 into twenty million dongs and treat your friends to a feast at a restaurant. It’s worth spending money on. Here, no one cares if you go to a restaurant and spend USD 500-700 on a meal. If I send my money home and build a nice two to three story house in the middle of my village, it would change things. Once you see my house, you would build at least a one-story house for yourself, right? If you buy a nice, expensive motorbike, I must buy at least a Chinese motorbike for myself.

With only a few exceptions, Vietnamese migrants in my study do not want to invest in properties in Moscow, although they have the potential to generate a much higher rental income than houses in Vietnam. Neither do they consider buying an apartment to live in, despite the greater comfort and stability that it would provide. As of 2016, a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Kotelniki, Belaya Dacha, and Kapotnya, where many migrants working at Sadovod rented, cost around RUB 6 million (about USD 100,000) – a very affordable price compared to a similar property in Hà Nội, Vietnam. It would be a good investment, given that rent often accounts for a large proportion of migrants’ monthly expenses and many have been living in the country for ten to twenty years without any firm plans to return to Vietnam any time soon. Looking to the future with both anticipation and apprehension, migrants deliberately avoid putting down roots in Russia and set up their lives in such a way that they can pack their bags and go back to the homeland any time with minimum damage to their financial situation. Every time I visit Russia, I ask my research participants the same question – ‘When will you go back to Vietnam for good?’ – and receive the same response: ‘Only God knows! I’ll go when it’s no longer possible to stay.’ To them, nothing is certain except for one thing: life will start again once they return home.

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Consumption as belonging Trang, Trung, and their son – my host family in 2014 and 2016 – were living in the migrant dormitory named Khách sạn Mê kông (Mekong Hotel) next to Sadovod market when I began my fieldwork in 2013. They shared a twobunkbed studio flat with four other migrants – 33-year-old lingerie trader Thái, her brother, and two sisters-in-law on her husband’s side of the family, all of whom worked for Thái as shop assistants. Thái and her 35-year-old husband Khanh left their two sons in Vietnam with Khanh’s parents and the couple alternated their time between running their two stores at Sadovod and looking after the children in Vietnam. What Thái and Khanh had been going through in Russia was one of the most extraordinary rags-to-riches stories I came to know during my fieldwork. Coming of age in the mid 1990s, when Đổi mới reforms had not yet produced any perceptible impact on youth unemployment and rural poverty, Khanh migrated to Russia in 1999 with the help of his aunt, who had arrived a few years earlier with her husband. Khanh sent for Thái, his then fiancée, a year later. Without family support or start-up capital, the couple worked as itinerant vendors, selling tea door to door in commercial ốps before moving to Chợ Vòm when the former were closed down. It took them many years to save enough money to open a modest lingerie stall at Chợ Vòm, but things progressed quickly from there. They faced very little competition at the market as most of their fellow countrymen specialized in outerwear, and their business expanded considerably within a few years. By the time Chợ Vòm was closed down in 2009, the couple had bought several properties in Hà Nội and Hải Dương City. Confident with their newly acquired wealth and business experience, they decided to return to Vietnam for good. Once they had settled into a new life back home, Khanh sold one of his properties, bought a nice car, and set up a furniture company with the assistance of a relative, appointing himself the company’s director. It was a dream come true for a young man from a poor rural family with only a high school diploma in his possession. Nevertheless, the company performed poorly, and had to be closed down within two years. The ill-fated venture cost Khanh VND4 billion (roughly USD 200,000 based on the exchange rate in the early 2010s). Realizing that there would be no way for them to make as much money in Vietnam as they did in Russia, the couple made their way back to Moscow in 2011 and opened two lingerie stores in the busy linia of CT6 at Sadovod, where rentals were at a premium (RUB 600,000 or USD 20,000 per month as of 2013). By the time I met Khanh again in late 2016, he and his wife had expanded their business to four stores, which employed six

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relatives, and ‘bought’ the use rights of two côngs, each of which cost them USD 120,000 but was still subject to a monthly ‘market tax’ of RUB 450,000 (USD 7,000 as per November 2016 exchange rate). Their remarkable success illustrates the powerful appeal of Russia that fills migrants’ lives with hope and anticipation and entices many more to come. Nonetheless, the thriving business did not lead to any changes to Thái and Khanh’s lifestyle. They continued living in the 20-square-meter studio flat in the Mekong dormitory, sharing four beds with their six helpers. Except for the congestion and excessively long work hours, little reminded me that they were living thousands of kilometers from home. On my first visit to their flat, I was stunned when Thái proudly showed off the contents of her fridge, which was overflowing with fresh produce from Vietnam. There seemed to be almost everything one would find at any open air market in the Red River Delta, from frozen foods such as crushed rice field crabs (cua đồng xay), fleshy pulp of spring bitter cucumber (ruột gấc tươi), eels, snail meat, frog legs, and shrimp, to chilled groceries such as herbs, lime leaves, yam, taro, banana flower, snake gourd, water spinach, mustard leaves, eggplant, bamboo shoot, shredded pork (ruốc), fermented pork (nem chua), and an assortment of pork sausages (giò chả). The only small cupboard in the kitchen was overloaded with spices and condiments of all sorts: pickled chilies, ginger, shallots, galangal, turmeric, dried lemongrass, shrimp paste, fish sauce, soya sauce, and chili sauce. Underneath the kitchen top were two big glass jars, one filled with pickled mustard leaves and the other pickled eggplants. For dinner that night, I was treated to rice field crabs and slimy jute mallow soup (canh cua rau đay) and pickled eggplant (cà pháo muối) – the timeless culinary favorites of people native to the Red River Delta, which are almost impossible to find outside the region. Every time someone from the group traveled to Russia from Vietnam, I was told, they would bring tens of kilograms of fresh and preserved food supplies to be consumed together with daily staples bought locally, such as rice, cabbage, tomato, meat, and fish. When they ran out of a particular homeland food or ingredient, they could easily find it in one of the Vietnamese grocery stores at Sadovod or Liublino or place an online order with the casual caterers and grocery suppliers operating on Facebook, who would deliver the goods to their công. Like many of their fellow countrymen, they never bought their groceries from local supermarkets or non-Vietnamese shops, not only because these outlets did not sell what they normally ate but also due to the fear that they might stumble upon Russian police who prey on migrants to extort money outside the ‘protected’ zones of the market and the dormitory.

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For Vietnamese in the diaspora, homeland food has a central place in their everyday lives, giving them a sense of being ‘at home’ (Thomas, 1997, p. 160). With their lives restricted within the ethnic bubble in both social and spatial terms, Thái and Khanh, as well as most other Vietnamese migrants who arrived in Russia after 1991, have never had an opportunity to socialize with local Russians or migrants of other ethnic origins. Their daily habits and consumption, therefore, often remain unchanged from pre-migration days. If one looks only at their lifestyle, especially daily meals, one can hardly tell if a migrant has been living in Russia for 20 or 25 years or if they only arrived a year ago. Vietnamese groceries are charged at a premium in Moscow, however, because they are almost exclusively ferried to Moscow by air as passenger luggage. Luggage carousels allocated to Vietnam Airlines flights from Vietnam to Domodedovo airport and Aeroflot flights to Sheremetyevo airport can be recognized from a distance because of the high volume of cardboard and polystyrene boxes instead of the usual sight of suitcases and travel bags. Every kilogram of luggage allowance is convertible to money. It is common to see advertisements on Facebook where travelling migrants offer to ferry things between Vietnam and Russia for their fellow countrymen at the rate of USD 10 per kilogram. Many migrants now earn a living from ferrying goods back and forth between Vietnam and Russia on a weekly basis. With 30 kilograms of luggage allowance, they can easily cover the cost of their return ticket by smuggling vodka, cosmetics, and Russian delicacies (including the famous salt-dried Caspian roach called vobla and preserved meat) to Vietnam and make a profit from bringing Vietnamese groceries back to Russia. Although some ethnic foods could be made locally and sold at a much lower price than similar products imported from Vietnam, the latter are still preferred because, I was told, they have an authentic flavor that the former lacks. A kilogram of lean pork sausage (giò lụa) imported from Vietnam, for example, is sold for RUB 900 (USD 15 as of November 2016), while a kilogram of locally made lean pork sausage is priced at RUB 400. The costs of Vietnamese groceries in Moscow are further inflated by bribes paid to Russian custom officers at Moscow airports, who have come to learn that the fresh groceries in cardboard and polystyrene boxes are of such high value to the Vietnamese that their usual request for RUB 2,000 (roughly USD 57 as per May 2014 exchange rate) per passenger will not cause any trouble or discourage such transnational flows of food. Certain Vietnamese vegetables, such as water spinach, snake gourd, and mustard leaves, have become more affordable in recent years with the expansion of Vietnamese investment in farming in rural Russia, but most ethnic foods still have to be sourced from Vietnam due to the

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long, severely cold winter and continental climate that is unsuitable for their production in Russia. Unlike Thái, however, many other migrants do not have the luxury of consuming foods from the homeland on a regular basis. Without money and valid migration documents, they can neither travel to Vietnam regularly nor afford to buy imported groceries from Vietnamese shops, and have to make do with local produce such as bắp cải đá (which literally means ‘ice cabbage,’ a name deriving from its hard texture and bland taste) and caged chicken. In those situations, instant noodles often become a staple food, as they are not only cheap and convenient but also have a flavor closest to foods from the homeland. A sodium-heavy diet has caused multiple health problems among my research participants, such as hypertension and heart disease, which is aggravated by their lack of access to healthcare. Goods, as Douglas and Isherwood (1979) remark, are excellent communication systems that reveal not only the identities and subjectivities of those who consume them, but also the inequalities, inclusion, and exclusion among people. Goods can be used as fences or bridges (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979, p. 12). The women’s evening ritual of cooking and eating rice field crabs and slimy jute mallow soup at Thái’s place evoked nostalgia for the sounds, scents, and sights of the family kitchen in the rural Red River Delta before dinnertime. The clanking sound of pots and pans, the faint odor of crushed crabs being sieved through the plastic basket, and the sound of water gushing down the drains where slimy jute mallow leaves were being washed were punctuated with banter and laughs from the women hustling and bustling about in the packed kitchen. The women’s collective effort in dinner preparations and a homely meal away from home were much needed respites for them after a long, exhausting day at the market, to reconnect with each other and with their inner selves. The hearty bowl of soup embodies their sense of belonging to the homeland that is nearly ten thousand kilometers away as much as their isolation from the foreign society lying just beyond the walls of their dormitory. Food consumption is an important lens for understanding migrants’ transnational lives and making sense of their (dis)connections to various spaces and places (Mata-Codesal & Abranches, 2018a). For Thái and her helpers, none of whom had ever lived outside their native village prior to migrating to Russia, working and living for extended periods of time in a country that they previously knew nothing about, thousands of kilometers away from their children and everything they cared deeply about, was immensely intimidating and alienating. The sensorial and material experience of cooking, smelling, and sharing familiar food from the homeland

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provided them with the comfort and sense of security of being connected to what was dear to them. Food, Fischler (1988, p. 275) notes, ‘is central to our sense of identity. The way any given human group eats helps it assert its […] oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently.’ Migration and mobility have been treated by some researchers as the antithesis of belonging (e.g. Fried, 2000; Laczko, 2005). In an increasingly mobile and globalized world, some argue, territorial belonging has become mobile (see also Arp Fallov, Jørgensen, & Knudsen, 2013). What I observe in Russia suggests a more complex picture. The sociological and psychological literature on belonging has tended to overlook the fact that migration is a deeply classed, gendered, and racialized experience. In mobility, Massey (1994, p. 149) points out, ‘some people are more in charge of it than others; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.’ For many of my research participants in Russia, mobility does not necessarily work in tandem with migration, a paradox that strongly shapes their relationships with and attachment to place. Their everyday experiences of immobility and insecurity in Russia just serve to accentuate migrants’ sense of belonging to the place they have left behind and to which they plan to return. Food choices signal the desire to maintain or create specific group membership – of a family, a social class, a national origin, or a rural background (Fischler, 1988). In the context of Russia, maintaining the material connection to the homeland through food not only expresses migrants’ belonging and membership, but also enables them to temporarily ‘escape’ everyday hardships and relish brief moments of comfort beyond their tedious and toilsome existence. Homeland food, in other words, allows migrants to compensate for the sense of fragmentation triggered by migration (Mata-Codesal & Abranches, 2018b, p. 10)

Renegotiating the ‘Con buôn’ identity We left them in Vietnam so they would have a stable life, earning salaries from a stable job, and not having to bon chen [scramble for money] at the market. Perhaps we [my wife and I] have grown weary of this kind of life [so we do not want the same thing for them]. We have worked hard so they don’t have to worry about their future. All they need to do is to make enough money for their daily upkeep. My sister is the school principal so it did not cost us much to get a teaching job for our eldest daughter … we just spent about VND 100 million [USD 4,545 by the mid 2014 exchange rate] on luxury gifts for some big shots in the Provincial Department of

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Education and Training. We bought them bottles of whiskey and leather jackets … around USD 1,000 per person … It would have cost us several hundreds of million dongs (if my sister had not been the principal).

Above was how 50-year-old market trader Bằng explained the decision to leave his two daughters behind in Vietnam throughout his twenty-odd year sojourn in Russia and the recent investment in the eldest daughter’s career. Bằng’s daughter had just graduated from a local Teachers’ Training College and, much to his delight, landed a sought-after teaching job at a primary school in his home province of Hưng Yên in the Red River Delta, thanks to family connections and the generous bribes he paid to management officials. Bằng and his wife, 48-year-old Vy, first migrated to the Soviet Union as contract workers in 1983 and worked in factories in the Ukrainian city of Donesk (now the self-proclaimed Donesk People’s Republic) until their contracts finished in 1988. They then went back to Vietnam, got married, and settled down in Hưng Yên. Unable to find a decent job in Vietnam’s transitional economy, Bằng made his way back to Russia in 1992 and went through a typical trajectory of Vietnamese market traders in Moscow, starting out at a makeshift market in Locomotiv stadium before moving into a small room in the commercial ốp Saliut 3 in mid 1990s, Chợ Vòm (Cherkizovsky market) in the early 2000s, and finally to Sadovod in 2010 when Chợ Vòm was closed down. Throughout the tumultuous 1990s, during which Bằng saw his financial worth rise rapidly at some points only to lose everything when the next crisis hit market trade, Vy stayed behind in Vietnam to raise their two daughters. She did not join him until 2000 and had been making months-long visits to Vietnam every year to make sure that their daughters did not go astray or feel abandoned by their migrant parents. The trips were a substantial financial investment on their part, not to mention the extra private tuition expenses they paid for with the hope that it would enable the girls to go on to obtain higher education qualifications and secure well-respected, stable, salaried jobs. To my surprise, however, Bằng told me that his eldest daughter was earning a paltry monthly salary of VND 2 million (USD 90), which was an exceptionally low return on investment and barely enough to cover her living expenses. According to the 2012 Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey, the monthly income per capita in the Red River Delta was VND 2.337 million and the monthly total consumption expenditure per capita in the same region was VND 1.889 (GSO, 2012). It is important to note that more than half of the population included in the statistics live in rural areas where the deepest pockets of poverty remain. Bằng’s daughter’s income was

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only a fraction of what her parents were earning at Sadovod, and given the substantial investment they had ploughed into her education and career, it did not seem to be a worthwhile outcome. When I suggested that his daughter would have been able to earn at least 20 times more than what she was making as a teacher in Vietnam if she had followed in her parents’ footsteps, Bằng, however, assured me that it was all he and his wife wanted, because ‘money is not important’. What mattered most to them was education, social status, and a stable life for their daughter. Bằng was not alone. Migrants in my study were prepared to go to any lengths to secure a ‘social upgrade’ for their children. A single mother of two and a successful trader at Liublino, 44-year-old Lệ told me that she had paid a bribe of VND 300 million (nearly USD 14,000 as of November 2016) to have her eldest son enlisted in the police national service (instead of the military national service), which was supposed to be a mandatory and free system, hoping that it would provide him with a pathway to become a career policeman later. Apparently, his poor school performance had prevented him from taking a more direct route by enrolling in a police training college after graduating from high school. Once the young man completed three years of his national service duty, Lệ would have to pay another bribe of similar or higher value to have him transferred to a police training college, which, she declared with much excitement and confidence, would guarantee a stable, respectable, and comfortable life for him. Again, when I expressed doubts about the financial viability of such a big investment (especially if compared with what he might earn if he joined her at Liublino), Lệ immediately shrugged them off, pointing out that potential financial rewards were not her principal concern when laying out such a thorough road map for her son’s future. Both the earning and spending of money are, indeed, socially nuanced (Pine, 2002, p. 83). Market trade can be very profitable, but the money earned from trade activities does not automatically elevate one’s social status. Respectability, Skeggs (1997, p. 3) argues, is fundamental to the emergence of the concept of class, acting as both a marker of class and a benchmark against which to judge others and to be judged. To be respectable is to be moral, to be worthy of society. In Vietnamese culture, respectability and morality are precisely the two features that are deemed to be lacking in market trade. Bằng’s strategy for his daughter’s life underscores the Confucian tradition of valuing the literati over other social categories, which continues to prevail in contemporary Vietnamese society (see also Nguyen, 2017, p. 8). In the Confucian social hierarchy known as The Four Occupations, which consist of, in descending order, Sĩ (literati), Nông (farmers), Công (craftsmen), and

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Thương (merchants/traders), the literati are accorded the highest status in society, while trade is looked down upon as the lowest acceptable occupation. In feudal times, education offered people a means to ascend the class ladder as success in the mandarin examinations enabled them to leave ‘the ranks of the people to enter the mandarin “caste,”’ moving from the ‘subject’ class to the ‘ruling’ class (Nguyen, 1974, p. 26). The importance of education for social mobility continued throughout the French colonial era and in the early years of the socialist regime, when university students with the best examination results were sent to universities in European communist countries and, upon their return, assigned to important positions in the government. This is reinforced by the state-promoted model of personhood that is centered on modern human capital and the cultural value of formal learning (Nguyen, 2017, p. 10). In today’s Vietnam, education remains the primary route to social mobility and a means to establish or consolidate one’s position in the middle class (King, Nguyen, & Nguyen, 2008, p. 797). For youths from rural families without any connections to the political elites, education is the only avenue for them to secure employment in the public sector. Together, higher education and state employment are defining features of the middle class in a changing yet still centralized socialist system like Vietnam (Gainsborough, 2002; King et al., 2008). The emphasis on education and, in many contexts, state employment as an expression of middle-class aspirations is observed across all social strata in Vietnamese society, despite the potentially low return on investment (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015d; Nguyen, 2017). Market traders in my study have an ambivalent relationship to money and trade. On the one hand, they are proud of their economic success and appreciative of the opportunities that market trade has brought them. On the other, many did not hide their contempt for what was referred to as a văn hóa chợ búa (market culture), which is widely regarded as the antithesis of education and civility in Vietnam (see also Horat, 2020). My host Trung, for example, had a habit of lamenting his downward social mobility involving a move from an administrative position in Bến Thành company, which previously owned some of the biggest commercial ốps in Moscow, to his current job as a market trader at Sadovod: The people who trade at the market are all philistine folks. Market trade is a bottom-rung occupation [nghề hạ đẳng]. I used to hold an administrative position. Now, see how much my value has depreciated!

The view of market traders as uncultured, boorish people came up many times during the conversations I had with Vietnamese business owners and

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white-collar workers in Moscow. To keep their distance from those referred to as ‘dân chợ’ (which means ‘market folks’ with derogatory undertones), thereby marking themselves as of a different class, they often live in innercity suburbs instead of the outer suburbs near major markets where market traders congregate. The areas of inner-city suburbs with a high concentration of Vietnamese migrants are diplomatic quarters belonging to the Vietnamese embassy in the southeastern districts of Kotlovka and Khamovniki, each of which comprises several multi-story buildings. Although flats in these buildings are intended for staff and visitors of the Vietnamese embassy, a large number of them are rented out to Vietnamese migrants and their families on an informal basis. With a similar intention to dissociate themselves from the ‘dân chợ’ label, several traders and brokers in my study also choose to rent in these diplomatic quarters, despite the inconveniences and additional expenditure incurred by the long daily commute to the market and the need to acquire valid migration documents, due to their greater exposure to police while in transit. As diplomatic residences, the buildings are also protected from police harassment and extortion, giving their tenants greater security and stability. Xuân, a 38-year-old office worker living in one of the Vietnamese diplomatic quarters, was particularly keen to draw a distinction between himself and ‘dân chợ,’ who, according to him, have not only very different lifestyles, but also an unhealthy attitude to social relationships. Market traders’ lack of trust for other people was near pathological, Xuân said, and he found it impossible to have a meaningful conversation with them: We office workers can be friends with each other but at the market … sometimes it’s all down to petty money matters [vì đồng tiền, manh áo] … you could be friends with them today and nobody to them tomorrow. People at the market … they are always suspicious of others. They put up invisible walls between them and other people. We office workers are friendly with each other … well, in up to 90-95 percent of cases. There are some exceptions, of course … some short-sighted people … they must have been influenced by ‘dân chợ’s’ culture. Every time we talk about ‘dân chợ,’ we think about them that way. When you work in market trade, you don’t see very far … you don’t have any community spirit. It’s infectious, no matter how educated or gracious you used to be … you would pick it [bad habits] up sooner or later when you enter market trade.

The enduring influence of Confucian values notwithstanding, Vietnamese migrants’ uneasy relationship to market trade and money can be better

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explained when put in the wider context of socialist and post-socialist societies, where Marxist-Leninist negative treatment of the market retains its lingering influence to this day. During socialism, the market was viewed as deeply problematic to the socialist system’s ‘inner logic’ and market activities were therefore largely carried out outside the formal economy in the so-called ‘black market’ (Kaneff, 2002, p. 34; Truitt, 2013, p. 48). Marx’s labor theory of value led to the idea that only ‘production’ constituted real economic activity deserving of reward (Watts, 2002, p. 66). Making profits from private trade activities was portrayed as immoral, even illegal in many circumstances, as it involved individualistic motives and the pursuit of money, which were associated with the morally corrupt and profit-driven West and went against communist ideologies (Humphrey & Mandel, 2002; Ironside, 2014). In a culture where an emphasis is placed on communitarian values, individualism is to the Vietnamese ‘something inconceivable, because his primary sense of identity is so indissolubly a component within a broader, collective ego structure’ – that is, within the totality of a family or social unity (Le Xuan Khoa cited in Nožina, 2010, p. 232). Petty traders were therefore despised, and trade activities were conducted in the privacy of people’s homes in many circumstances. During socialist years, those engaged in trade and commerce outside the public sector in Vietnam were referred to by the derogatory terms ‘con buôn’ or ‘con phe’, whose activities of speculation, hoarding, and prof iteering were seen to involve dishonesty and greed (Schwenkel, 2014, p. 251; Truitt, 2013, p. 44). The notion of con buôn is a classed and cultural construct. In Vietnamese language, con is a pronoun or prefix used by superiors to address the inferior, while buôn means ‘trader’ and phe means ‘speculator’. As a prefix, con is often added to words referring to what are commonly regarded as disreputable, degrading, and lowly occupations, such as con ở/con sen (maid/domestic worker), con đĩ/con điếm (prostitute), and con ăn mày (beggar). Indeed, migrant traders in my study are keenly aware of and troubled by the derogatory connotations of the label ‘con buôn.’ Chi, a 28-year-old trader at Sadovod, was adamant that her two children would have middle-class jobs when they grew up because ‘traders are called con buôn, not cô buôn [Ms. Trader] or chị buôn [lady trader].’ Markets were an exclusionary sphere where individuals who were denied state-sponsored employment and access to the state allocation system earned a living, something that drove a wedge between traders and the rest of society, rendering them culturally and morally alien and affirming their status as a sub-class in socialist Vietnam (Leshkowich, 2006, p. 293; Truitt, 2013, p. 48).

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Traders’ profit-making activities placed them in the outer limits of the moral order, subjecting them to social condemnation and ostracization. In Azerbaijan, for example, the stereotype of an al verji (trader) depicted in the literature and the media was a poorly educated woman of dubious virtue, with premodern attitudes and village values (Heyat, 2002, p. 24). This resonates with Leshkowich’s (2006, 2011, 2015) observations in Vietnam, where petty trade is primarily a feminized activity and traders are critiqued as backward, uneducated vestiges of tradition. Driven by greed and selfinterest, they are perceived as stopping at nothing to procure a profit, a quality that places them on the fringes of the normative, civilized moral and social order. Research on various post-socialist societies shows that, although people are slowly adapting to the market economy, many still see engagement in market trade as a demeaning, even shameful, practice (Heyat, 2002; Kaneff, 2002; Leshkowich, 2011). The economic importance of and ideological antagonism to the market render it a contested site where issues of morality are subject to scrutiny and negotiation. The preoccupation with money, which is seen to characterize market traders, is considered incompatible with moral integrity (Leshkowich, 2006, p. 291). The moral undertones of market trade strongly shape traders’ aspirations for their children’s education and employment and drive their efforts to disassociate themselves and their families from the con buôn identity. Without exception, participants in my research see their children’s engagement in market trade as a last resort and therefore invest heavily in their education so they can avoid going down the same path, despite its promise of riches. Some became very curious about how I ended up teaching at a university in Australia and envied me for the ‘civility’ and respectability that the job brought, even though they were well aware that they were in a much more comfortable financial situation than me. In one of our casual chats about life in Russia, Minh, a highly successful trader at Liublino, concluded: ‘Lan, no matter how many properties we have in Vietnam, ten or twenty, they can’t compare to your peaceful life. We have money, but we have no time for our children, family, or anything else.’ The sentiment was more strongly felt among educated traders who struggled to fit into the văn hóa chợ búa to which they did not feel they belonged. For example, Khanh, a self-conscious and quiet 29-year-old man, studied economics in Belarus from 2007 to 2012, but could not find a decent job in Belarus or Vietnam upon his graduation and decided to come to Moscow to try his luck. At the time of my fieldwork in 2014, he was managing an Italian women’s garment store in summer and a fur coat store at Sadovod in winter, working for a Belarussian businesswoman and taking a share of the profits. Although the business was doing

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well and Khanh was making much more money than his previous office jobs in Vietnam paid (VND 6-8 million or USD 270-360 per month), he did not feel comfortable working at the market. He kept to himself and, unlike his fellow traders, never stopped contemplating an exit strategy. He kept comparing himself to me every time we had a chance to talk: You have holidays, annual leave … We toil at the market day in, day out [bán lưng cho đất, bán mặt cho giời] … Your life is one of civility. You work at the school during the day and go home to sleep at night. You have breaks and holidays. We can never catch a break … always worried whether our wares would sell and, if not, what we should switch to. Market trade is a tough job, don’t you think? It’s only petty trade, nothing more.

A stable job with holiday and leave entitlements, even if it is poorly paid, signifies a middle-class status to my interlocutors. Fifty-year-old Sadovod trader Bản, for example, was determined to do whatever he could to secure such jobs for his two children. While he did not have a clear idea what kind they would be, each must be a job that allowed them to ‘take a break from work and spend time with the family at the weekend’ even if it paid as little as VND 5-7 million (USD 220-320 per month), because ‘things have changed’ and ‘their lives must be different from mine.’ This was echoed by Tùng, 39, who said he would trade all the wealth market trade had brought him for a stable job, which would allow him and his wife to go out with their children at the weekend and savor a simple bowl of phở (beef noodle soup) and sip his favorite coffee in peace. Market trade might have given many traders what they work hard for, but money is not a priority when it comes to aspirations for their children’s future. In the conversations I had with them about their children, ‘stability’ and ‘security’ came up repeatedly as the things that mattered most. Having grown weary of the transience of their present life and uncertainty about their future in Russia, they tried everything possible to avoid seeing their children end up in the same situation. Money, as Tùng maintained, would be good for nothing if his children grew up uneducated: All your hard work would be pointless if your children go wayward and have no education. The people out there … they have education and knowledge … they have a completely different life. What would the money be for if your children end up uneducated? If they go to the university, they might earn three to five million dongs [USD 136-227] a month, but they’ll have a proper job, a career. Then they would make me proud. I do not expect them to support me.

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Vie tnamese Migrants in Russia

There is a common observation in major migrant-sending countries in the world that, over time, transnational migration becomes integrated into the fabric of society, developing into a way of life and an ultimate dream for younger generations. In Latin America, for example, where migration ‘up North’ has become an universal aspiration, local youths tend to drop out of school early to follow the footsteps of other migrant members of their families (Artico, 2003; Dreby, 2010). In various parts of Africa, youths strongly associate international migration with social mobility (Langevang & Gough, 2009; Salazar, 2010). In Chinese provinces with a centuries-old tradition of emigration, such as Fujian and Zhejiang, transnational migration is seen as ‘the best, even the only, avenue to true wealth, power, and success’, while immobility is a sign of failure (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 48, 194). The case of Vietnamese migrants in Moscow shows that there is not such a straightforward attitude toward transnational migration in contemporary Vietnam, something that I have also observed among low-waged migrant contract workers in Taiwan (Hoang & Yeoh, 2015d). With rare exceptions (Hoang & Yeoh, 2013; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015a), transnational migration often leads to upward economic mobility relative to the original context of Vietnam. Yet migrants’ lives tend to be constructed as those of hardship, suffering, and sacrifice rather than wealth, modernity, and self-indulgence, as has been found in other contexts such as Mexico and the Philippines (Dreby, 2010; Margold, 2004). In many circumstances, migration often leads to downward social mobility for migrants and their families, at least until they return to the homeland, in spite of the relatively significant financial gains. Transnational is not a loose adjective applied to any cross-border process, but a meaningful analytical category that sheds light on processes of (re) identification and the (re)construction of personhood (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 163). In Vietnamese society, transnational migration is not simply a lifestyle choice or a livelihood strategy, but also a social label defining one’s social status and symbolic capital. Whether a particular migration act is deemed desirable and respectable depends on a combination of factors, including the nature of the move (regular versus irregular), the destination (developed countries versus developing ones), the economic activities the migrant engages in at the destination (manual labor versus non-manual labor/ education), and prospects for permanent settlement in the host country. Even among transnational migrants to the same country, different, if not contrasting, discourses exist and serve to regulate their transnational lives (Hoang, 2016b). In Taiwan, for example, there is a strong social stigma attached to marriage migrants, who are generally looked down upon for ‘shamelessly trading dignity for riches’ (see also Wang, 2010, p. 226) – a view

Tr ansient existence and the quest for certaint y

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that has been partly reinforced by the government’s criminalization of transnational commercial matchmaking. Female migrant workers, on the other hand, are looked up to as unsung heroes of the family and the nation (see Hoang & Yeoh, 2015d, 191). In the case of Vietnamese market traders in Moscow, migration and wealth might not help to elevate their own status within Vietnamese society, but have the potential to redraw class boundaries in their children’s generation if they are prepared to invest in their education and willing to make certain financial sacrifices. In a context where cultural capital is becoming increasingly significant, one’s place in the middle class rests primarily upon the morality and respectability deriving from their education and work, or rather ‘proper’ work (see also Skeggs, 2005).

Conclusion The money we make in Russia is blood money [đồng tiền xương máu]. We are paying a dear price for it, but money can never buy back what we have lost. Minh – 50-year-old Liublino trader

I had my first experience of Russia’s merciless winter on my last field trip to Moscow in November 2016. Although I had anticipated deep snow, frost, and ice, nothing prepared me for the punishing cold, especially when I settled once more into the daily routine of market traders – leaving for the market at 5.00am and returning home around 6.00pm, if not held up in traffic due to snowstorms. It was a particularly frigid November when the temperature dropped to as low as -12 degrees Celsius at one point, which made the 13-hour daily routine in the open area of the pavilions section at Sadovod an ordeal for many people working at the market. My mobility, even within the market compound, was considerably restricted because it snowed almost every day and, on days when the temperature dropped below -10 degrees Celsius, the biting wind chill made a five minute walk from one part of the market to another a challenge. I spent most of my time either in the côngs, equipped with electric heaters, or inside the centrally heated AN building. However, not everyone was able to retreat to a heated, enclosed space. There was no escape from icy gusts of wind for those trading at pa láts (open sale spaces along the horizontal lanes of the pavilions section) and in the côngs along the four edges of the market. Long-term exposure to the cold could be debilitating, even deadly. During my fieldwork, a Vietnamese man running a công along linia CT4 on the southern edge of the pavilions section got frostbite and later developed blisters all over his face, from which fluid kept oozing and which he had to cover with layers of gauze and Scotch tape to prevent himself from scratching. A few years back, another man fell asleep on a stool at his pa lát during a freezing winter day and never woke up. A combination of long-term exposure to the cold, an unbalanced diet, and bad habits such as refraining from urinating, which costs RUB 15 each time, leads to multiple health problems among my research participants, the most common of which are arthritis, pneumonia, chronic bronchitis, cancer, hypertension, kidney infection, and kidney stones. Only when seeing for the first time how migrants toiled at the market from dusk to dawn, day in and day out, in an extremely inhospitable environment could I fully appreciate the brutality of life at the market.

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Regardless, it was business as usual at Sadovod. In fact, it was the time of year when many of my research participants worked hardest, due to the seasonal surge in demand for winter wear. The Russian rouble had partially recovered from the late 2014 crash, although it was still worth half of what it was during my previous fieldwork trip in the summer of 2014. Customers were returning to Sadovod and the mood at the market was visibly more upbeat than when I left it two years before. Nevertheless, the updates I received from my research participants were not always positive. Most of the 14 children who were attending School number 60 in 2014 (see Chapter III) had dropped out after flunking exam after exam and repeating Grade Eight three times in three different schools, and were now working at the market with their parents. A couple of families decided to close down their businesses and return to Vietnam, hoping their children would be able to continue their schooling in the homeland. Danh and Mạnh – the two young men who worked for relatives without pay (see Chapter IV) – had given up hope that their free labor and dedication would be repaid one day and left Russia empty-handed. Several traders, including 28-year-old Ngọc (see Chapter IV), had gone bankrupt and were now working as waged laborers or had left Russia for good. One of the men I met while doing participant observation in Ốp Tàu đỏ (Red Chinese Dormitory) in 2014, 60-year-old Sơn, had recently died of liver cancer. Seeing how shocked I was when hearing the news, his friend Quỳnh exclaimed: ‘In this unforgiving land, everyone dies sooner or later, if not of cancer then of some other disease!’ Sơn’s death might not have been wholly attributable to the hardships of life in Moscow, but Quỳnh’s statement illustrates a strong sentiment I observed among my research participants: they were bitterly aware that they were paying a dear price for the money. The sense of loss and sacrifice is palpable in migrants’ narratives about their aspirations for the future. Russia is often compared favorably to Vietnam, especially in terms of environment, standard of living, and civility, but very few contemplate a future for themselves and their families in the country. Russia is generally seen as a phase in one’s life, not a place fit for permanent settlement; something that has also been observed among Chinese migrants who treat Russia as a stepping stone or a transit point in their long-term plan to migrate to the West (Alexseev, 2006: 115). Gelbras (1999: 35) reports that only 12 percent of his 430 Chinese respondents wanted to work permanently in Russia and only 1.6 percent would like to become Russian citizens in the future. This is consistent with what I found in my research on the Vietnamese. ‘Russia is for Russians, not for us,’ Quang – a 40-year-old Liublino trader – told me, letting out a sigh after saying how

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much he liked the country and regretted not being able to settle down permanently. The lack of freedom, mobility, and basic rights, even in some rare situations where migrants have enough money to ‘buy’ a legal residence status and a middle-class lifestyle for themselves and their families, is the main deterrent to migrants’ consideration of a long-term future in Russia. Those few who can afford it tend to look to the West, especially Anglophone countries such as Canada, the USA, the UK, and Australia, as the final destination, and often begin by sending their children there for higher education if they do not have sufficient means to emigrate as investors, like Hồng and Tùng (see Chapter III). That option is not available to most migrants, though, because of the prohibitive financial investment required. A small number of migrants, most of whom are established, well-to-do business owners and brokers, are making moves towards putting down roots in Moscow. They send for their children and enroll them in local schools, purchase local properties and ‘buy’ permanent residency or citizenship. Disheartened by their lived experiences of precarity and marginalization in Russia, however, the majority of people engaged in market trade make no plans to settle down permanently in the country. Although some have invested a substantial amount of money in obtaining permanent residency or Russian citizenship, this is for shielding themselves from police harassment and financial extortion, rather than a step toward permanent settlement in Russia. With their daily lives wrapped up in fear, a long-term future in Russia is neither desirable nor tenable. Hằng, a 32-year-old trader at Sadovod, told me that her fear of police had become so deeply internalized that she even jumped in fright when catching a glimpse of a police car on her visits to family in Vietnam. Vietnamese migrants, as I started to notice after the conversation with Hằng, did not wait for buses at designated bus stops, like local Russians, but hid themselves from view while still keeping close enough the road so they would not miss the bus when it arrived. With home and the market as the only places where migrants feel relatively safe, even the daily trip to work is fraught with anxieties and fears. ‘I get butterflies in my stomach [mắt la mày lém] as soon as I leave home. It’s already bad luck if I bump into police, but it’d be worse if it’s hooligans [skinhead gangs],’ a 47-year-old Liublino trader named Hạnh sighed. Russian police maintain a heavy presence across Moscow’s extensive metro network, which mainly serves the purpose of preventing terrorist attacks, but the sight of them scares Vietnamese commuters stiff, whether they are in possession of valid migration documents or not. They will turn back, change the course of their walk, or run as soon as they catch sight of a police uniform – which, ironically, often makes the police suspicious and spot checks more likely.

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Vie tnamese Migrants in Russia

Belaya Dacha Mega Mall – a large commercial complex about one kilometer east of Sadovod – used to be the principal, if not only, site of recreation and entertainment for people working at the market, mainly because it is within walking distance and hence there was no need for them to use the metro and run the risk of running into police. However, it did not take local police long to find out when and where they could catch unsuspecting migrants and extort them. Weekly trips to Mega and leisurely meals at one of the fast food outlets in the mall used to be popular recreational activities for Vietnamese migrants working at Sadovod, but by November 2016 they had become a privilege enjoyed only by a lucky few who had legal migration documents, language skills, and enough guts to face the police. The restricted access to Mega, however, created a new opportunity for itinerant vendors, who would find ways to sneak into the mall and buy hamburgers, fried chicken, and chips to resell to traders at Sadovod. I came face to face with one of the policemen stationed at Mega one day in mid-November 2016 when escorting 17-year-old Kiên, from my host family, to the mall so he could buy food from KFC and McDonald’s for the whole family, who had not been able to visit the mall and eat their favorite fast foods for a long time because of the intensified police patrols. Although Kiên’s parents had valid work permits, visas, and residence registration, they could still run into trouble with the predatory police because they did not speak Russian well enough to talk themselves out of the predicament. Kiên used to be able to roam about freely, armed with only a student card, which had recently been revoked when he dropped out of school. We ran into a policeman in the middle of the food court and were immediately flagged down for a spot check. The officer, a tall and intimidating Russian man in his late thirties, was visibly pleased that he had spotted us, yet still kept a stern face when demanding to see our passports. His facial expression and the tone of his voice, however, softened as soon as he saw my Australian passport, which apparently caught him by surprise and, fortunately, distracted him from Kiên, who did not have any valid migration documents in his possession. With a broad, friendly smile on his face, the officer courteously asked me if I was on holiday and whether it was warmer and sunnier in Australia. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he bid us farewell, not forgetting to wish me a nice holiday in Russia. The encounter was a striking reminder of the significance of race, class, and citizenship in the policing and disciplining of migrants (see also Fassin, 2011; Lan, 2006). Categorizing and othering migrants by race has become a principal governance technique in migration regimes across the world. However, as illustrated by my encounter with the Russian police officer, racialized boundaries are not fixed but fluid and permeable, particularly when intersected by class and nationality.

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Present and future are not disconnected horizons of social practice (Cooper & Pratten, 2015b). People’s envisioning of a particular future (returning to Vietnam, settling down permanently in Russia, or migrating to a third country) shapes their actions and relationships today. To understand migrants’ current lives, Yeoh, Platt et al. (2016) suggest, it is important to consider not just simultaneous ‘stories-so-far’, but also ‘stories-to-come’ which may build upon, divert from, or even unmake the ‘stories-so-far.’ This is in line with Griffiths, Rogers et al.’s (2013) thinking about time in migration. There are, they argue, two types of ordering of time that are particularly important facets of migration experience: the ‘halting’ and the ‘futuring’. The ‘halting’ relates to periodization, i.e. migration can be experienced/ anticipated as a particular discrete period of life that can effectively be ‘time out’ from the life-course. The ‘futuring’ of time, on the other hand, folds the future into the present, something that occurs naturally as humans as cultural and social beings are future oriented (Adam, 2010). Because migrants tend to understand the present with reference to its use value to the future, the fact that Russia is just seen as a phase in one’s life lends insight into the rationalities and strategies underlying the ways in which they conduct their economic, social, and intimate lives, as described earlier in this book. It explains their deferring of happiness, putting life on hold, and investing in children’s education and real estate in Vietnam, as well as the judicious opportunism and individualism manifest in their day-to-day living. Their dispositions and life strategies are the product of their lived experiences of poverty, precarity, and uncertainty in the past, but also draw upon the hope and aspirations they have for their future. Transnational migrants, Ahmed et al. (2003: 9) remark, are in an ongoing process of ‘creating both pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of the present.’ Hope of future happiness enables the deferral of happiness today and makes present disappointments ‘liveable’ (Ahmed, 2010). Because social life is evidently not confined by the nation-state’s political and geographic boundaries, methodological nationalism, which is the tendency to accept the nation-state and its boundaries as a given in social analysis, has been heavily criticized (Levitt & Schiller, 2004, pp. 1007-1008). Social theorists seek to move beyond the ‘container theory of society’ and, in doing so, underplay both the concept of the social as well as the continuing power of the nation-state. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of ‘social field,’ which he used to call attention to the ways in which social relationships are structured by power, Levitt and Schiller (2004, p. 1009) introduced the notion of the transnational social field, which refers to ‘a set of multiple interlocking networks of cross-border social relationships through

214 

Vie tnamese Migr ants in Russia

which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed.’ It offers a powerful framework for understanding the potential array of social relations linking those who move and those who stay behind. In the transnational scholarship, migration has often been treated as something that opens up new transnational social fields and expands existing ones (Pieke et al., 2004; Schiller, Basch, & Blancszanton, 1992; Vertovec, 1999). The concept of the transnational social field distinguishes between ways of being and ways of belonging. ‘Ways of being’ refers to the actual social relations and practices that individuals engage in, while ‘ways of belonging’ refers to practices that signal or enact an identity that demonstrates a conscious connection to a particular group (Levitt & Schiller, 2004, p. 1010). This emphasis on social practices in the formation of identities and loyalties relates to Brubaker’s (2005) writings on diasporas, in which he considers diaspora not as a bounded group, but as a category of practice in the first instance. The unique migratory pathways and circumstances of Vietnamese migrants in Moscow add further complexity to these debates. For many, migration does not lead to mobility in both social and physical terms, at least during their time in Russia. Common experiences of the Russian migration regime and shadow economy fashion a particular mode of practice that embodies migrants’ sense of uncertainty and transience, disrupts normative codes of conduct, and renders social relationships particularly fragile. The notions of ‘community’ and ‘diaspora’, therefore, become irrelevant in this context because both of them denote certain degrees of homogeneity, solidarity, coherence, and alliance, which cannot be used to characterize co-ethnic relations among Vietnamese migrants. The social fields they inhabit are circumscribed, rather than expanded, by migration due to their precarious and disenfranchised existence on the edge of Russian society. Here, belongings and loyalties are not a matter of choice – something that has escaped scholars’ attention in the transnational migration literature. The nation-state retains its power in shaping migrants’ transnational social fields, dictating the terms of their engagement with cross-border processes and networks. The marketplace is often imagined as a free space, but in the context of migrant markets in Moscow, it is a space of unfreedoms. The anxieties caused by migrants’ disenfranchised existence on the edge of Russian society are compounded by the sense of displacement and insecurity brought about by migration. Migration, Kinnvall (2004, p. 747) argues, is both a structural and a psychological process, which is often characterized by a sense of powerlessness and dependence ‘mixed with an acute anxiety about their

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new circumstances and strong feelings of homelessness.’ In the context of Moscow, the unfreedoms that migrants are confronted with on a day-to-day basis are not just physical and social, but also psychological. The inability to trust and cooperate effectively with other people and the lack of control over their immediate future create a state of perpetual angst, with crippling effects on their social lives. The loss of their so-called ‘ontological security,’ a term Giddens (1991, p. 38-39) coined to refer to a ‘person’s fundamental sense of safety in the world and a basic trust of other people’, restricts their life choices and destabilizes what is commonly regarded as one’s last moral bastion – family and kinship. Trust of other people provides ‘a protection against future threat and dangers which allows the individual to sustain hope and courage in the face of whatever debilitating circumstances she or he might later confront’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 39). Family and kinship ties are often seen as the strongest and most resilient institution in Vietnamese society, surviving distressing social turmoil throughout the nation’s history to remain an enduring source of community (Kibria, 1995, p. 43). Yet, without a sense of confidence and trust that the world is what it appears to be, even kinship ties come to be seen as unwanted baggage, a liability, a burden, and a source of threat. The importance of Russia’s social, economic, and institutional contexts notwithstanding, it is crucial to consider the sociocultural baggage migrants bring with them when looking at their imaginings of and responses to risks and uncertainties. A person’s expectations of the world, Zinn (2008, p. 4) notes, are shaped by not just their knowledge and personal experiences of the past, but also the sociocultural values they adhere to. In other words, risk and uncertainty are socioculturally constructed and mediated. Scholars often speak of the Vietnamese peasant as the source of Vietnamese tradition when seeking explanations for Vietnamese people’s ways of life, mindsets, and dispositions. The notion of the ‘Vietnamese people’ brings to mind images of a ‘peasant nation’ that ‘is in some versions pure and innocent and in others wily and unpredictable, docile on the surface yet possesses an inexplicable hidden dimension beneath the surface’ (Harms, 2011, p. 23). If one looks at Vietnamese migrants’ behavior through this lens, James Scott’s (1977) analysis of the logic of the subsistence ethic and the concrete choices and values of the Southeast Asian peasantry proves particularly illuminating. In a subsistence-oriented rural economy, peasants typically prefer to avoid economic disaster rather than take risks to maximize their average income. The risk-averse and risk-avoiding peasant tends to follow the ‘safety first’ approach in his or her decision-making. This security-mindedness finds expression in a wide array of actual choices, institutions, and values in

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peasant society (Scott, 1977, p. 29). Peasant ways of life persist even in urban centers like Hà Nội nowadays, blurring the distinctions between urban and rural forms of sociality (Gammeltoft, 2014, p. 33). Vietnamese’s world views are also profoundly shaped by the successive armed conflicts and social upheavals in the country’s modern history, during which cultural practices, social values, and moral codes of conduct are subjected to continual revision and renegotiation. The ceaseless tumult in the last two centuries is etched into people’s memories, fueling a constant sense of anxiety about the unpredictable objective future, which may alter one’s predetermined fate, regardless of their will and efforts. The various ways people perceive and respond to risk are, indeed, determined by one’s sociocultural group affiliation and how such a group is positioned within society (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983; Lupton & Tulloch, 2002). While much of what I observe in Russia lends support to this ‘cultural turn’ in risk and uncertainty research (see Tulloch & Lupton, 2003), the insights generated through my focus on people’s migration experiences demonstrate that ‘culture’ is not definite, bounded, and distinct, as commonly assumed in risk and uncertainty analyses. In the context of transnational migration, social values and identities are in a constant state of flux. The transnational social fields that migrants inhibit cut across national boundaries, bring together the networks, patterns, and activities of both the old and the new societies, and, by and large, are reflective of particular classed and racialized discourses about them and the corresponding governmentality techniques (see Fassin, 2011; Hoang, 2016b; Hoang & Yeoh, 2015c; Pécoud, 2013; Phillips, 2011). In the literature on Vietnam, a strong community spirit (tinh thần cộng đồng) is often viewed as something that characterizes Vietnamese people (Gammeltoft, 2014, p. 65). This, however, is more likely to be a myth than reality. Both James Scott (1977) and Samuel Popkin (1979) argue that people in or from peasant societies usually act in a rational and self-interested manner because village welfare and insurance systems are often limited and village procedures tend to favor the rich and the powerful. The individualistic and self-interested behavior I observed in Russia, therefore, does not represent a deviation from the norm of communality, but is rather a rational response to human conditions of precarity in which norms of reciprocity – a central moral formula for interpersonal conduct – are easily broken.

Appendix Methodology Fieldwork for this study was conducted in Moscow over four years, from 2013 to 2016. I started out with the intention that in-depth interviews would be the primary data collection tool and that Moscow and St Petersburg – two Russian metropolitan areas with the largest concentration of Vietnamese populations – would be my field sites. I believed that my Vietnamese and Russian language skills and, more importantly, personal connections with Vietnamese market traders through family members would fast-track my rapport with the community and allow me to obtain sufficient, quality data within a short period of time. Nevertheless, it only took me two weeks to realize that in-depth interviews were not necessarily the most ideal method and that it was almost impossible to access Vietnamese migrants in St Petersburg because my key informants were based in Moscow. Moscow therefore became the sole research site for this study. Focusing on Moscow alone later proved to be a good decision, as it allowed me to conduct extensive ethnographic research at some of the largest migrant markets in the country. Moscow ‘hosts’ the largest number of Vietnamese migrants in Russia and serves as a crucial transit point for irregular migrants hoping to move further West (Nožina, 2010, p. 241; Yudina, 2005, p. 584). With half of all migrants to Russia residing in the Moscow metropolitan region (Yudina, 2005, p. 584), it is an important site for understanding how migrants’ lives unfold in a multi-ethnic environment at the heart of Russia’s vast shadow economy. Despite my strong personal connections in Moscow, access to potential research participants was severely restricted by the hectic market life, their long work hours, the lack of privacy, and the illegality of their migrant status, which resulted in a deep distrust for strangers, (self-imposed) social isolation, and a lack of interest in trivialities and frivolities, such as an interview that promised no immediate economic benefits. While I managed to conduct in-depth interviews with 31 men and women on this first fieldwork stint and spent a substantial amount of time doing participant observation at two of Moscow’s largest wholesale markets – Sadovod and Liublino – as well as in migrant living quarters around these markets, I realized that I would not be able to reach the depths of their lives without immersing myself in the community and participating in their everyday existence. I returned to Moscow in early April 2014 to conduct ethnographic research until the end of June. I shared an apartment with a Vietnamese trader family

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(a 40-year-old woman named Trang, her 48-year-old husband Trung, and their 17-year-old son Kiên) in Kotelniki, a suburb 32 kilometers southeast of Moscow city center. I adopted market traders’ daily routine for most parts of my stay: leaving for Sadovod at 5:00-6.00am, spending the whole day at the market, returning home at 7.00pm, cooking and eating dinner with Trang’s family, and going to bed at 9.00pm. While Sadovod was my main field base, I maintained a regular presence at nearby markets Liublino and Yuzhnyie Vorota, made several overnight visits to an illegal garment factory at an unidentified location about 45 kilometers east of Moscow city center, and occasionally stayed overnight in migrant traders’ hostels named ‘Red Chinese Dormitory’ (Ốp Tàu đỏ) and ‘Mekong’ and at the private homes of my research participants. I also made visits to local schools attended by Vietnamese children, to Rybak – a cramped, run-down Vietnamese ‘slum’ in the north of Moscow – and to the Hà Nội-Moscow multipurpose building complex81 that was then under construction. During this time I met and held casual conversations with 54 Vietnamese men and women, mostly on a daily basis. In total, the study draws on daily interactions with and/ or life histories of and in-depth interviews with 85 individuals aged from 25 to 60, who had been living in Russia between nine months and 27 years. Because market trade is primarily a female activity in Vietnamese culture (see Leshkowich, 2011, for example), there was greater female representation in my study (61 percent), and the vast majority of study participants were irregular migrants (92 percent). The sample’s socio-economic composition is presented in Table 2. The data collected over the period 2013 to 2014 include 31 audio-recorded interviews, 26 audio-recorded life histories, over 400 pages of fieldnotes, nearly 1,000 photographs, and media materials and policy documents. The interviews and life histories were transcribed verbatim and, together with fieldnotes, theme-coded in NVivo – a qualitative data analysis software. 81 The Hà Nội-Moscow multipurpose complex on the north side of the MKAD ring road was constructed by Incentra Ltd., a Moscow-based branch of a Vietnamese company named Eurowindow Holding. Eurowindow Holding’s founder and president – Nguyễn Sơn Hà – studied Civil Engineering in Russia in the late 1980s and made his fortune in the country in the 1990s when Russia was transitioning to the market economy. The Hà Nội-Moscow multipurpose complex has two components: a 21-story building with 700 flats of different sizes for residential purposes and an adjacent three-story trade center with a total area of 34,000 square meters. It initially targeted Vietnamese traders at Cherkizovsky market, but the closure of the market in 2008 and the relocation of Vietnamese traders en masse to wholesale markets in the south of Moscow dealt Incentra a major blow. They have been struggling to sell the flats and shops because the complex is about 60 kilometers away from where the Vietnamese currently work.

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Appendix

Male

33

Market trader

Female

52

Garment factory worker

8

Married

65

Garment factory owner

6

Single

11

Nanny

43

6

Divorced

5

Shop assistant

5

Separated

3

Itinerant vendor

4

Widowed

1

Broker

4

Moscow

38

Odd manual jobs

3

Vietnam

27

Irregular

Livelihood

Migration Spouse status location*

Marital status

Sex

Table 2  Socio-economic profile of research participants

78

Permanent resident

5

Russian citizen

2

Long-distance merchant

2

White collar workers

2

Not working

2

* This section accounts only for married individuals.

In-depth interviews were conducted with 31 men and women in 2013. Every effort was made to ensure the interview sample was as diverse as possible in terms of gender, marital status, age, occupation, socio-economic background, migration history, and length of stay in Russia. The interviews were focused on the following themes: (a) personal migration trajectory; (b) livelihoods; (c) migrant’s networks, including familial, ethnic, and transnational ties; (d) marriage and sexual-affective lives; and (e) belonging (perceptions of family and home, citizenship, and the relationship between self, society and state). Each interview lasted between one and two hours and was audio-recorded with the respondent’s permission. While the interviews were informative, especially with regard to migration trajectories, and provided me with interesting glimpses of migrants’ transnational lives, most of them were rather superficial and some did not even seem reliable. Some people agreed to the interview out of curiosity; others, politeness. Many, however, were wary about the true motives of the interview and maintained a cautious approach throughout the conversation. The deep-seated distrust of other people that pervades market life was palpable in the interviews and I realized that I would not be able to break down the invisible walls between me and my research participants without spending more time with them, participating in their lives, and gaining their trust. On my second trip to Moscow in 2014, the priority was ethnographic observation, which enabled me to establish trusting relationships with many people at Sadovod and Liublino, including those who had been interviewed

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before. Some went on to become my key informants and long-term friends. To avoid the issues encountered in 2013, I only collected life histories from a small number of people when feeling confident about our relationship, which resulted in a rich body of data that I draw on extensively in the book. To do justice to the experience and productivity of living in uncertain times, Cooper and Pratten (2015b) argue, we must methodologically draw heavily on narrative and the individual biography. Life histories reflect personal memories of the specific events in question, memories of what has happened since, and a culturally shared symbolic system between the narrator and the researcher. Because they are not direct mirrors of one’s experiences in the past, but mediated, intersubjective commentaries (Leshkowich, 2006, p. 279), life histories provide a powerful lens through which I could draw out connections between the past, present, and future and, in so doing, capture both the depth and complexity of migrants’ lives. The narratives from 26 life histories reveal interesting insights into migrants’ subjective representations of self and others, as well as their on-going negotiations with the tension between survival and morals. Unlike the in-depth interviews, the life histories were often collected spontaneously and were sometimes audio-recorded and sometimes not, depending on the mood and preference of the respondent in each specific situation. Much of the book, however, draws on my ethnographic observation of market life at Sadovod, Liublino, and Yuzhnyie Vorota over three episodes of fieldwork in 2013, 2014, and 2016.

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Index affect 44, 166, 178, 182 anomie 137 anti-immigrant sentiments 64, 120 anti-immigration campaigns 60, 64 apartment trade 19, 138 aspirations 44, 169, 185, 204-5, 210, 213 behaviors 37, 40-41, 43, 142, 148, 215 deviant 39, 136-37 individualistic 44, 156, 165 bilateral agreements 14, 30, 48, 52-53 borders 51, 53, 61-63, 94, 97 boundaries 37, 63, 105, 213 bribes 25, 60, 99-100, 113, 144, 196, 200 brokerage 97, 105, 107, 112, 118 fees 98, 111-14 industry 103 networks 25, 84, 103, 106, 119 brokers 95, 97, 99-101, 103-6, 108, 114, 118, 167-68, 176, 180 capital, symbolic 137, 193, 206 Cherkizovsky market 17, 20, 22, 70, 87-88, 113, 191, 199, 218 Chinese and Vietnamese migrants 70-71, 83, 129, 145 communities 53, 145 migrants 21, 34, 52-53, 64, 68, 70-72, 85, 144-45, 147, 210 migration 51, 144 nationals 52, 145 workers 53, 64 Chợ Vòm 20-23, 84, 100, 113, 139-40, 142, 153-55, 191, 194, 199 CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) 35, 47-48, 52, 70, 81 citizens 48, 51, 56, 58, 83 immigrants 57, 64 citizenship 58, 105, 211-12, 219 classes, working 22, 52 Cold War 24, 47, 50-51, 53, 61 community 36-37, 40, 42, 61, 120, 137, 145, 190, 214-15, 217 compatriots 26, 73, 130, 132, 145 Confucian values 150, 202 consumption 8, 44-45, 156, 191-94, 196 contract workers 24, 31, 72-73, 142, 170, 199 crimes 56, 70-71, 74, 92, 105, 132 cultural backgrounds 39, 70, 146 capital 21, 87, 134, 179, 207 logics 34, 42 turn 216

diasporas 36, 196, 214 disenfranchising 61, 63, 119, 181 displacement 214 dispositions 36, 213, 215 distrust 37, 41, 105, 129-30, 134, 147, 178, 217 Đổi mới 27, 94, 152 Đôms 19-20, 22 dormitory 19, 89, 189, 195, 197 Eastern Europe 20-21, 25-26, 50, 68, 71, 85, 94, 145, 147 Eastern European 24, 26, 32, 51-52, 71, 94 economic growth 32 economy, formal 33, 70, 85, 87, 203 edge 18, 39, 41, 43, 92, 112, 209, 214 estate, real 96, 190, 213 ethnic enclaves 32, 70-71 minorities 25, 49 solidarity 145, 147 ethos 34, 42 exclusion 34-35, 37, 41, 61-62, 197 extortion 86, 92, 202 family networks 141, 151, 167, 179 family ties 43, 150 fascism 67 Federal Law 56-57, 60 FMS 59-60, 82-83, 120 food 18, 104, 164, 168, 179-80, 190, 196-98, 212 foreign migrants 12, 35, 38, 69, 71, 74-75, 86, 119, 142 foreign workers 81-83, 99, 103 freedom 44, 61, 91, 163, 170, 211 frontiering 150 futuring 213 gender 173, 180, 182, 219 ghost companies 99-100 globalization 38 go-betweens 33, 43, 102, 108-9, 112 government 18-20, 22, 30, 53-54, 69, 84, 103, 120, 147-48, 171, 201 governmentality 43, 103, 119, 170 habitus 36-37 hierarchy, gendered 182 homeland food 196, 198 hooligans 66-67, 211 host societies 62, 64, 71, 145, 147, 166, 181 hostility 35, 68-70, 130 identities 36, 45, 61, 197-98, 203, 214, 216 illegal garment factories 18, 126-28, 165, 167, 218

240  illegality 31, 36, 43, 66, 71, 81, 105, 119-20, 217 immigrants 26, 56-57, 59, 61-66, 68-69, 83 immigration 47, 56, 63-65, 74, 108 irregular 26, 54, 87 policy 56 regime 56 immobility 61-62, 147, 198, 206 immoral 136, 148, 181, 203 inclusion 34, 61-62, 197 individualism 38, 145, 156, 174, 203 inequalities 41, 49, 153, 197 infidelity 160, 175-76 integration 24, 48 international migration 32, 42, 63, 206 intimacy 44, 166, 172 intimate relationships 40, 44, 129, 148, 162, 164, 170, 173-74, 177-82 irregular migrants 19-20, 25, 33-36, 47-48, 51-52, 54-55, 57, 60, 64, 101, 103, 108, 217-18 irregular migration 22, 25, 48, 50, 52, 56, 59-60, 64, 82, 103, 119-20 isolation 70, 108, 115, 163, 197 itinerant vendors 86-88, 92, 154, 180, 194, 212, 219 justice 11, 101, 136, 220 labor, foreign 31, 56-57, 81, 84, 99 labor migration 25, 31 legal frameworks 31, 57, 103 legal migration documents 89, 97, 212 legality 31, 81, 105 legislation 59, 66, 83 local police 90, 113-14, 212 local Russians 43, 70-73, 92, 119, 196, 211 love 35, 160-61, 163, 165-67, 169-71, 173-75, 177, 179, 181, 183 affairs 162, 165-66, 169 labor of 14 romantic 164, 166, 169, 174, 179 technologies of 170-71 luck 118, 187, 189, 204 market administration 86-87, 91-92, 144, 179 economy 204, 218 socialist-oriented 27, 190 ethos 123, 125, 127, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153 life 156, 178, 188, 220 owners 18, 84-85, 89, 91 place 19, 32-33, 129-30, 135-36, 214 security guards 80, 92, 180 trade 23, 26-27, 51-52, 84, 87, 108-9, 129-30, 138, 140, 145, 177, 179-80, 186-87, 199-202, 204-5 traders 86, 88, 91, 110, 113, 117, 119, 129-30, 143, 145, 187, 201-2, 204 transition 68, 84 marriage 104-5, 164, 166, 172-76, 182, 189, 219

Vie tnamese Migrants in Russia

marriage migration management 170 masculinity 187, 192 membership 34, 44, 61, 151, 198 middle class 201, 207 migrant hostels 131, 176, 186 networks 148-49 parents 110-11, 199 remittances 49-50 traders 84, 96, 136, 151, 203, 218 workers 63 migrantophobia 68, 75 migrants non-CIS 48, 50, 58, 70, 83 undocumented 47, 90 migration 25-26, 32, 34, 47-49, 58-60, 62, 95, 105-6, 141, 166, 198, 206-7, 213-14 brokers 33, 81-82, 105 cumulative causation of 106 documents 81, 97, 100, 105, 167 industry 81, 93, 95, 100, 103, 106 infrastructure 93 non-CIS 50 policies 58 political economy of 44, 141 regimes 34-35, 39, 53, 59, 105, 120, 152, 212 corrupt 42 exploitative 157 restrictive 75 securitization of 43, 59, 61-63, 66 to Russia 26, 47, 49, 106, 137 mobility 34, 36, 41-42, 62, 139, 141, 198, 209, 211, 214 modernity 38, 206 money 42, 87-90, 96-98, 113-14, 118-19, 130-32, 134-40, 146-50, 153, 155-57, 165-67, 174-75, 17783, 190-91, 193-94, 196-98, 200-205, 209-11 economy 157 extortion 81, 90, 92, 98 fetishism 148 transfer 95, 97, 102, 108 moneylenders 67, 91, 129, 131-32 moral codes 36, 182, 216 economies 157, 181-82 integrity 164, 181, 204 judgments 136, 164-65 moralities 34, 40, 42, 179, 182, 200, 204, 207 nation 151, 207 nation-state 61-62, 67, 74, 213-14 nationalism 69, 74 naturalization 58, 63, 104-5 networks 61, 84, 95, 102, 110, 142, 151, 165, 185, 214, 216 co-ethnic 129, 153 obligations, moral 150-51, 157 open-air markets 52, 85, 138

241

Index

opportunism, judicious 37, 153, 213 otherness 44, 198 Overseas Vietnamese 26 partners, intimate 130, 171, 177-78, 182 periphery 32, 62 permanent residency 58, 99, 104-5, 139, 211 personhood 38, 142, 157, 201, 206 police 15, 22, 60, 81-82, 90-92, 115, 117, 119, 144, 167-68, 200, 202, 211-12 harassment 27, 92-93, 98, 202, 211 raids 89-90, 115-18, 133, 165, 167-68, 171-72 post-socialist market economy 34, 42 poverty 25, 29, 56, 138, 152, 189, 199, 213 power 38, 41, 62, 64, 93, 99, 206, 213-14 practices, social 36-37, 41, 157, 213-14 precarity 35, 38, 43, 81, 135, 149, 166, 192, 211, 213, 216 predatory police 85, 100, 212 propiska 58, 97, 99 protection 53, 59, 74, 85, 88, 113-14, 155, 165 fees 84, 89-91, 119 money 114 provisionality 40, 152, 176, 178 Putin 22, 58 race 39, 180, 212 reciprocity 44, 152, 216 Red River Delta 29-30, 151, 195, 199 refugees 59 regimes exploitative market 27, 43, 179 visa-free 48, 52, 54, 57 relationships, sexual-affective 44, 170, 173, 178 relativizing 150 remittances 50, 95-96, 102 residence registration 57, 59, 81, 212 resilience 11, 145, 149, 180 respectability 200, 204, 207 risk society 38 risks 11, 13, 38-40, 42, 90, 93, 116, 134, 136, 143, 145, 215-16 high 74, 143, 167 new 38 social 38, 42 Russian authorities 88-91, 109, 115, 118, 146, 168 bureaucracies 61, 97, 104, 106 bureaucrats 81, 94, 103, 120 citizens 54, 58-59, 99, 104-5, 210, 219 citizenship 58, 104, 211 economy 55, 119 Far East 20, 27, 34, 50, 52, 64, 71, 75, 85 goodness 72-73 governmentality 61 government 22, 26, 33 markets 17, 152 media 22, 47, 70, 99 migrantophobia 66

migration policy 56 migration regime 34, 43, 56, 81, 84, 214 police 95, 153, 167, 195, 211 polity 33, 118 population 22, 47, 65, 69 scholars 35, 65-66, 83 shadow economy 43, 54, 70 society 35, 39, 44, 48, 54, 58, 67-68, 70, 74-75, 84, 214 state 35, 66, 120 territory 53, 59 Russians 52, 55-56, 69-70, 72-73, 88, 91, 104-5, 108, 114, 119-20, 210, 212 Sadovod market 15, 17-18, 78-79, 84, 91, 131, 133, 140, 142, 171, 178 security 42, 45, 51, 84, 90, 155-56, 161, 192, 198, 202, 205 dilemma 66 national 47, 56, 64, 66 self 40, 44, 171, 219-20 moral 41, 148 sex 42, 161-67, 169, 171, 173-75, 177-79, 181-83, 219 sexuality 39, 166, 174, 181-82 female 164, 181-82 shadow economy 22, 26-27, 33, 43, 54-55, 57, 60, 65-66, 69-70, 106, 109, 114, 119-20 shuttle trade 50, 52 skinhead 66, 68 social capital 29, 40, 106, 114, 153 conduct 37, 137, 164, 170 edginess 41 exclusion 41, 137, 145, 157, 166 fields 36, 213-14, 216 life 37-38, 93, 136-37, 148, 163, 174, 178, 213 mobility 26, 153, 201, 206 networks 36, 43-44, 101, 141, 145-47, 150, 153, 155, 167 norms 41, 170, 174 relationships 36, 38, 41-42, 134, 152, 157, 170, 172, 174, 187, 213-14 security 36, 43, 63, 129, 164 status 156, 164, 181, 200, 206 structures 37, 137 ties 43-44, 148-49, 156-57 solidarity 34, 53, 214 Soviet era 20, 43, 50, 56, 58, 104, 108, 151 Soviet Union 14, 18-20, 24, 35, 47, 49-50, 52-53, 58, 61, 72, 75, 108-9, 187, 190 State Migration Policy 56, 58, 60 stories-so-far 213 stories-to-come 213 subjectivities 38, 45, 74, 197 technologies 63, 170-71 tentativeness 40, 44, 152, 170 tình cảm 152, 156, 167

242  tourist visas 25, 31, 52-53, 94, 97-98, 118, 139, 167 transgression 44, 165, 182 transience 65, 140, 148, 205, 214 transient 136-37, 156, 165, 173 transient existence 42, 44, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203, 205, 207 transitional economies 51, 54, 85, 120, 136, 199 transitional societies 32, 37, 41, 146 transnational families 150 life 129, 175, 177, 189 migrants 43, 206, 213 migration industry 83, 148 trust 35-37, 39-41, 102, 106-7, 113-14, 129-30, 134, 136, 144-46, 153, 155-57, 171, 173-74, 215 cognition-based 155 volatile radius of 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151 uncertainty 13, 15, 32, 34-42, 44-45, 93, 106-7, 135-36, 161, 163, 169-71, 173-79, 213-15 unemployment 25, 27, 29-30, 44, 49, 55, 68-69, 152, 167, 189 values 17, 19, 38-39, 41-42, 44, 133, 136, 157, 173-74, 201, 203, 215 communitarian 43, 137, 151, 156, 203 moral 157

Vie tnamese Migrants in Russia

Vietnamese and Chinese migrants 52, 71, 85, 144 broker 97, 114 children 112, 218 citizens 53-54 communities 20, 24, 67, 81, 146-47 contract workers 94 culture 43, 141, 151-52, 164, 174, 200, 218 diasporas 154, 189 Embassy 100, 155, 202 embassy’s staff 100, 104 government 11, 25, 151 migration 14, 19, 24, 26, 31-32, 38, 51, 94 personhood 34, 42, 129, 151, 156 population 23-25, 34, 217 society 34, 42-43, 156-57, 164, 173-74, 187, 201, 206-7, 215 ugliness 73 women 104, 153, 188 workers 18, 27, 81-82, 109, 115, 133 vulnerability 23, 26, 37, 43-44, 69, 75, 134, 136-37, 148-49, 181, 187, 189, 192 Western Europe 11, 50-51 work permit 31, 57, 81-83, 98-100, 115, 190 work permit quota 99, 103 workers, garment 98, 100, 117, 129, 165, 167-68 xenophobia 55, 68-70