Remittance Roads

Formal and informal channels for remittances to Vietnam are diffuse, especially when it comes to the widely traversed Vietnam-US corridor. While living in Ho Chi Minh City in 2008 I met with a remittance recipient named Duong who explained that when it comes to sending remittances, “there are two ways for money to travel to Vietnam—the legal road and the illegal road. The first is taxed, the second is not.” For him, his family's choice of remittance corridor was easy. Take the illegal, untaxed road, and keep the government away from his family's personal gift exchanges. It was a road that was familiar, and has been around, long before formal financial channels started opening up. “We've been using the same services for over twenty years”, Duong explained. “The money arrives every time, the fees are low, and we know the people in both Vietnam and the United States who arrange the money transfer. If anything was ever to go wrong, we would just go to them and they would figure it out. We trust them, and they know how important the money has been for our living.” It is precisely this confidential [chuyện riêng] yet illegal road that government and banking regulators are trying to crack down on and divert. Senders and receivers that utilize informal services circumventing formal financial oversight make it difficult for government stakeholders that seek to publicly capitalize on these private remittance flows. The Vietnamese government has actively sought to track and incentivize family remittances for public works projects, particularly through research and outreach by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Committee for Overseas Vietnamese Affairs and its associated Overseas Compatriot [Kiều Bào] associations that have emerged in neighbourhoods and communities where a significant proportion of households have overseas kin connections. One Overseas Compatriot organization volunteer in Ho Chi Minh City, whose job it was to track return overseas Vietnamese visits and remittances, explained to me that “many Việt Kiều homes don't want to let the police know about their overseas relatives or remittances.”Footnote ³ He elaborated, “sometimes relatives even stay in hotels so they don't have to register with the local police. It is very difficult for us to know exactly how many houses have Việt Kiều.” Many of the interviews that I conducted in Vietnam described diverse but always discreet practices of remittance sending and receiving, as well as the important role of “middle” women and men who facilitate their transfers.

Secrecy surrounding remittance transfers and channels inevitably fuels speculation about just how much money is coming into Vietnam, and to individual homes. Does the addition of another floor or the refurbishment of a house betray remittance support? In some cases, yes, which may itself reflect a return gift of sorts. As one remittance recipient explained, “our overseas relatives cannot live in Vietnamese conditions anymore, they have become used to western ways of living. They have forgotten for example how to squat on the toilet. So, we modernize our house so that when they return they can be comfortable.” In general, informal, “confidential” remittance services benefit recipients by disguising the moment of arrival so that money can make its way to projects such as home improvement, rather than succumb to the demands of conspicuous shared consumption celebrations with friends and neighbours that also inevitably occurs. One recipient who was more prone to such conspicuous consumption spending patterns explained, “if you get money, you take all of your friends out to nhau [eat and drink], the money is gone in a couple of days.” It was precisely for this reason that many recipients preferred private discretion when it came to remittance reception.

Given the continued prevalence of informal transfer services in Vietnam, estimates of overseas remittances range quite widely. But calculation tools and methodologies to account for informal flows are improving as policy interest in remittances continues to grow.Footnote ⁴ In 2018 (World Bank) remittances to Vietnam were estimated at over fifteen billion USD per year—making Vietnam one of the top 10 recipient countries in the world—and for the most part reflect a remarkably steady annual increase over the last quarter century.Footnote ⁵ Even in the wake of the 2008 global recession when this study took place, Vietnam's international remittance flows flattened but barely declined.Footnote ⁶ The financial crisis did however draw attention to Vietnam's new interdependence on the global capitalist economic order. “Money is ephemeral” [tiền là phù du], was a comment I sometimes encountered during my interviews. When I would follow up on what “ephemerality” means, one recipient explained that money wanders here and there, beyond one's ability to control it. This “wandering” was directly connected to many recipients’ own desires to wander abroad—indeed there was a notable qualitative correlation between reception of remittances and desires for migration in my interviews among remittance recipient households in Vietnam. But ephemerality was also about the ups and downs experienced in the global economy. Although America was widely viewed as an idealized capitalist utopia where money was imagined to be infinitely accumulative, 2008 also brought awareness that capitalist bubbles occasionally burst. Many families who received regular remittance transfers were sensitive to the ephemerality of economic security and the hardships senders were facing in the post-financial-crisis climate, heightening sympathies and appreciations for the role of remittances as gifts signalling and recognizing familial obligations and sacrifices. As one man in central Vietnam who receives regular remittances from his son related in April 2009, “he sends less than before, but still remembers his parents. The economic situation in America is not good now, many are unemployed [thất nghiệp]. We understand that he has to be careful with his money.” Indeed, migrant remittances, unlike other global financial flows that respond quickly to market up and downturns, remain relatively steady in periods of economic decline, as comparative studies have demonstrated (Yang Reference Yang2005). It is during such moments of stagnation that a fundamental recognition of remittances in its role as an empathetic gift, rather than assumed obligation, may be momentarily restored.

Remittances as business investment from the diaspora have also been growing. Although relatively small compared to other foreign investment streams, like personal family remittances they tend to be more stable and less likely to disappear in times of fluctuating financial crises and market uncertainties. There have been incentives to encourage investments from overseas Vietnamese, such as dual citizenship opportunities extended by the government that offer overseas Vietnamese preferential treatment over foreigners in business and land ownership. Investment remittances to Vietnam from the United States have risen steadily over the course of the past three decades, especially after the US lifted its economic embargo against Vietnam in 1994. Since the 1990s, overseas Vietnamese have invested well over twenty billion dollars in Vietnam.Footnote ⁷ Many of these overseas Vietnamese businesses bring international business practices and market fashions to Vietnam, such as the popular Starbucks-like national Highlands Coffee chain originally started by Seattle-raised Vietnamese American entrepreneur David Thai who arrived to Vietnam in the late 1990s. He came determined to introduce the Vietnamese to “good quality espresso style coffee” and the expensive machines necessary to make it.Footnote ⁸ Although coffee-drinking was already a strong tradition in Vietnam, typically using individual drip filters and mixed with condensed milk, Thai's business ideas took off and young urban professionals across Vietnam now flock to Highlands Coffee and similar chains.Footnote ⁹

Although business investment would not immediately appear to have a gift-like orientation, overseas Vietnamese capital for start-up businesses has often been used as collateral in lieu of loans for relatives in a country where access to credit is limited, and many overseas Vietnamese start-up entrepreneurs express their business philosophy in part as providing opportunities to people in their homeland. Such personal investment transfers increasingly take place on frequent return family visits by overseas Vietnamese. The number of overseas Vietnamese returnees is rising annually—in 1987 there were about 8000 returnees, in 1992 the number was 87,000, in 2001 it was 360,000, in 2002, 380,000Footnote ¹⁰, by 2007 it was over 450,000, and the number continues to climb well over half a million.Footnote ¹¹ Many successful overseas Vietnamese-owned businesses have also engaged in corporate social responsibility practices as profits increase. The US-based Vietnamese American Entrepreneurs Association, for example, states encouraging such initiatives as one of its organizational aims.

Another growth category where formal oversight is expanding is in the area of collective and charitable remittances, in which the philanthropic philosophy of gifting is central. Generally in Vietnam, collective diaspora giving via official government institution channels, such as the Home Town Association (HTA) models in countries like Mexico where local governments encourage and often match development assistance donations from migrants,Footnote ¹² remains limited due to long-standing mistrust of the current Vietnamese regime by many former refugees particularly in the United States. Despite the expansion of local government supported Kiều Bào, overseas compatriot associations that seek to emulate HTAs, most report underwhelming results. To the extent that case studies of diasporic giving to Vietnamese municipalities are officially celebrated they are often from Vietnamese living in Europe characterized by a much larger proportion of economic migrants. The differential relationship that forcibly displaced political refugees and their families tend to have to the state, further influenced by political attitudes and social alliances in countries of resettlement, stands in contrast to the orientations of voluntary migrants. Such differences between migrants’ experiences and orientations are often overlooked when governments emulate models of diaspora engagement.

The Vietnamese government actively solicits support from overseas Vietnamese communities through a variety of official and unofficial programs and policies. Most notably, the Vietnamese Politburo passed Resolution 36 in March 2004 officially recognizing the overseas diaspora as an integral and “inseparable part of the Vietnamese nation.” However, the reception by the Việt Kiều community has been mixed and generally limited. For example, only a small number of overseas Vietnamese took up a subsequent 2008 offer of dual citizenship. In a parallel vein, however, overseas Vietnamese philanthropy through other non-state channels has actually been on the rise and become increasingly visible as fund raising for transnational humanitarian and development aid to Vietnam beyond immediate family support becomes more acceptable to both overseas Vietnamese communities and the Vietnamese government(s) at the national and local levels. An example of this trend was seen in the 2005 formation of the Vietnamese American NGO (VA NGO) network, a coalition of over twenty member organizations primarily run by overseas Vietnamese volunteers addressing issues from education to human trafficking to public health. This was a group that I followed and volunteered with while conducting research in Vietnam and California from 2007–2009. While state linkages were downplayed in any fund-raising efforts among diaspora communities overseas, in fact all of the VA NGO organizations were required to register with PACCOM – the People's Aid Coordinating Committee, in order to conduct their projects, although there remain quite a few NGOs that resist doing this. Significant collective remittances are also directed to religious and community organizations such as temples and churches that provide charitable [từ thiện] outreach including education and disaster relief services. Collective remittance giving practices also take different forms as they transition from first to second generation organizers. In such shifts, one gains insight into new identity mappings and relations that expand and challenge the notion of remittances as gifts that only seek dyadic recognition and return.

There is another category of remittances that is often overlooked but of significant interest as it truly challenges classical formal/informal and gift/money binaries. This is what is often called “social remittances” (Levitt Reference Levitt2001; Sorenson Reference Sorensen2004; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves Reference Levitt and Deepak2011), including “ideas, practices, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending country communities.”Footnote ¹³ Social remittances are often invoked in policy discussions on “grey matter” and knowledge transfers: the idea that diasporic subjects learn valuable skills abroad that can be reinvested in or “returned” to their home country for the purposes of development. As with other remittance categories, the emphasis tends to be on the sending side, often unintentionally constructing a passive recipient subject deemed to be lacking adequate skills or knowledge for self-advancement, and not necessarily addressing the political and economic roots or structures of social inequality and injustice. And of course, despite analytic attempts to separately categorize social and monetary remittances, such forms and flows are intimately intertwined.

An important area of consideration when it comes to remittances and the roads they travel is how the modes or channels for sending remittances themselves have been rapidly changing, in turn affecting the relations, capacities and aspirations of remittance senders and receivers. Remittance channels, or the logistics of how money is actually transferred, reveal the integral importance of financial infrastructures but also professional and social networks and their effect on sender/receiver interactions. These channels take a variety of formal and informal forms – from banks and money transfer operators to private couriers. There have been significant and ongoing policy efforts accompanied by legal reforms to shift international remittances to more formal and official transfer channels. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), for example, in an advocacy statement on the “International Day of Family Remittances”, maintains that “migrants who send and receive money need to have effective access to affordable and sustainable financial services from reliable and formal providers… IOM advocates the improvement of access to duly regulated, reliable and efficient financial services and products, for improved financial infrastructure”.Footnote ¹⁴ The push to formalize and “bank” remittances provides security and regulatory oversight but is also in some ways reflective of a broader shift in what some might call a “neoliberal” agenda to facilitate and promote the unfettered expansion of capitalism. The free flow of goods, services, and most importantly finance are central to Washington Consensus (Williamson Reference Williamson1993) tenets on the most efficient path to economic development and global integration. Facilitating the financial flow of international remittances across borders is part and parcel of globalization.

However, while the argument for facilitating cross border finance has made important traction, it is also worth stepping back to consider how development policy overtures to facilitate the free flow of remittance financial flows have in fact ironically been accompanied by more scrutinized and bureaucratic oversight of such international transfers. The general policy consensus on formalizing remittance channels has, arguably, made it more difficult for many of the informal transfer channel providers to continue offering the services they have been providing to migrants for years, long before governments and banks intervened to offer their oversight and service remedies. Many informal remittance services that serve particular ethnic communities have been hit with new regulatory concerns about due diligence in know your customer requirements (KYC) and money laundering oversight, particularly after the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008 emanating in the United States. Many ethnic remittance services have been considered “grey” market – officially licensed in the states they operate within but without strict federal oversight. Since 2010, however, oversight is increasing with new financial regulations including provisions in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 that potentially re-designate such operations from grey to black.Footnote ¹⁵ The result is a slow concession of customers by so called ethnic remittance service providers to larger established money transfer companies or banks, actually reducing competition in the marketplace and eliminating lower cost informal operations. Following September 11, 2001 for example, official remittances to Pakistan tripled due to increased monitoring of informal transfer channels and fears by migrants that their flows would be labelled and confiscated as terrorist money laundering (Najam Reference Najam2006). Obscured by this data is the turn away from existing community transfer services that operated in the grey area but cannot stand up to new regulatory scrutiny. Such monitoring efforts to ensure monies are only transferred through legal, above board formal financial entities are spearheaded by the United States through the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Smaller states in the global economy such as Vietnam are incentivized to adhere to such oversight measures for fear of being relegated to a global money laundering black list that would negatively affect other international investment ratings and flows. A 2014 State Bank of Vietnam Circular for example requires international online transactions valued at more than |US$ 1,000 as well as all transactions in foreign currencies worth more than VN 500 million (about $23,000) to be reported to the anti-money laundering office of the Bank. While the shift to formal transfer channels may officially contribute to a quantitative appearance of international remittance growth, one wonders what happens to the many other remittance transfers that cease or are deferred for future physical delivery due to the decline or disappearance of informal service alternatives.

As remittances have become more visible as an intervention of public policy attention and oversight, framings and road mappings of them have also developed along characteristic lines. Some scholars (Hernandez and Coutin Reference Hernandez and Coutin2006; Coutin Reference Coutin2007; Pederson Reference Pedersen2013) describe the process of producing remittance recipients who are responsible for directing private family gifts to projects deemed to be contributing to the public good – and by doing so admonishing state responsibility for social services as well as making invisible the migrant risks and hardships that the public good of remittances rely upon – one of crass neoliberal subject making by constructing a “citizenship of remitting”. The neoliberal governance project has been widely examined and critiqued (Hardt and Negri Reference Hardt and Michael2000; Ong and Collier Reference Ong and Stephen J.2005; Harvey Reference Harvey2005), but the issue of visibility and invisibility when it comes to remittance flows should also draw our attention to vantage point. Invisible remittance flows have been made visible by the growing public debate around diasporas and development (Merz et al. Reference Merz, Lincoln and Peter2007; Ratha and Maimbo Reference Ratha and Maimbo2005), but of course such informal flows of mostly direct family assistance funds have never been invisible to the households that send and receive them. As the case has been made, remittances appear to be a classic example of gift giving among kin and as such have an important role in symbolizing and mediating obligations, expectations, emotions and personal histories in their exchanges.

And yet, even an expanded definition of remittance as gift ignores an important aspect of what makes such exchange possible but also complicated in an international context – the circulation of goods, people and finance across distance and borders. Moving from remittance-as-payment to remittance-as-gift allows us to embed the payment in a broader world of social meanings and practices. But the market-in-society world of substantive or “human” economics (Polanyi Reference Polanyi1957; Hart et al. Reference Hart, Laville and Cattani2010) that anthropologists working in such a vein have traditionally attuned themselves to are typically localized interactions where givers and receivers are familiar with the people and things they exchange and interact with, as well as the “roads” they travel. In the case of long distance remittance economies where migrants and the households and communities they maintain kin, social, and financial connections with are separated by distance and time, the histories, channels and mediums of payment or gift giving as the case may be are increasingly important to consider, as well as the forms of the gifts themselves.

Money, Gifts, and Mediation

Since remittances are gifts that are commonly money that traverses distance, it is worth turning to Georg Simmel and his work on the “philosophy of money” (Simmel Reference Simmel2004). Simmel's analysis of money is often simplified for heuristic purposes to a utilitarian understanding that views it as a functional tool mediating between parties with different interests and valuations of the things they exchange. In The Philosophy of Money Simmel makes the argument that “the economy transmits all valuations through the form of exchange, creating an intermediate realm between the desires that are the source of all human activity and the satisfaction of needs in which they culminate” (Reference Simmel2004: 80). Economic anthropologist Bill Maurer, in his seminal essay on “The Anthropology of Money”, describes the common idea that has emerged in the sociology of money via Marx (Reference Marx and Arthur1992) but particularly Simmel that “money commensurates, flattens, homogenizes” (Maurer Reference Maurer2006: 23). But it is also important to not flatten the nuances of Simmel's analysis of money, which he intricately describes over the course of six hundred detailed pages as a complex, animated thing. Simmel recognizes that while economic value may “consist in the exchange relationship of objects according to our subjective reaction to them”, nonetheless “the economic relativity of objects develops only gradually from their other meanings and it can never dominate these meanings entirely in the total representation or the total value of an object” (Simmel Reference Simmel2004: 130).

Simmel was particularly interested in money's capacity to connect parties of exchange across distance, and noted that the relativity created by that distance allows money to continue to mediate connections despite transformations in the subjects as well as objects of exchange themselves. He explains that “money…expresses the relation between things, a relation that persists in spite of changes in the things themselves” (124). The efficacy of bridging distance then also creates social distance—“the power of money to bridge distances enables the owner and his possessions to exist so far apart that each of them may follow their own precepts to a greater extent” (333). Eventually, Simmel argues, money as a medium can become an end in itself, and the parties of exchange may get lost in a relationship now focused on that which is exchanged, rather than why it is exchanged. While this might at first appear alienating, à la Marx, there is a powerful unleashing of energy in this process of what is essentially embodying the medium of exchange. Money becomes all encompassing. Simmel notes, “when the mind is embodied in objects, these become a vehicle for the mind and endow it with a livelier and more comprehensive activity. The ability to construct such symbolic objects attains its greatest triumphs in money. For money represents pure interaction in its purest form; it makes comprehensive the most abstract concept; it is an individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond individualities” (129).

In reaching “beyond individualities” we come to understand money's role as an unsettling material medium in and through which the participants of its exchange apprehend something beyond their more immediate structures of familiar and assigned identities. Desire for the Other motivates money's exchange—which in turn attempts to mediate and materialize such desire while also masking its origins. Such a process unsettles social identities and assumptions through relationality, catalysing an intriguing but ultimately elusive glimpse into alternative ontologies and comparative valuations. In Vietnamese remittance economies, value, in terms of material, social, and financial gifts, act as a medium of exchange between vastly different worlds, attempting translation across them but always falling short, as the repeatedly expressed frustrations of remittance participants indicate.

The concept of translation has been examined by Walter Benjamin, who considers its liberating and transformative potential—“in translation the original rises higher and purer… it points the way to…the predestined, inaccessible realm of fulfilment and reconciliation” (Benjamin Reference Benjamin1969: 75). Putting Simmel into metaphoric conversation with Benjamin allows us to then connect back to Mauss, who reveals the embodied, almost frenzied, excitement of gifting. For Mauss, gifting can be an anxiety-provoking but nonetheless thrilling process that “brings about a remarkable state of nerviness and excitement”, where “one fraternizes, yet one remains a stranger” (38). Money, then, particularly when it arrives in the form of a gift, marks the difference between exchange parties and social worlds that it attempts to bridge and translate across, but also becomes its own form of affective response which, far from alienating its users, heightens their emotional response and curiosity. The skill of navigating the “illegal” remittance road, as in the case of transnational remittances that once had to traverse the Cold War's iron/bamboo curtain, has in particular contributed to heightening that imaginative and emotional curiosity, or as Mauss might say, “nerviness and excitement.”

Navigating Remittances

To demonstrate this navigational skill set and its associated affective registers and relations, I detail the story of one interviewee from Binh Thuan province in Vietnam who shared the challenges of receiving remittances over the years.Footnote ¹⁶ I highlight this particular interlocutor because his story provides a particularly insightful illumination of the changing forms of remittance forms and channels in the post-war period, and their effect on not only transnational but local social networks and relations. His name was Dung, and I started our conversation by asking him about the history of remittance forms experienced in his lifetime. In the immediate aftermath of the war until around 1978, gifts from overseas relatives could be a dangerous affair. Receiving a box from overseas would involve an invitation from the police to visit their office and explain the nature of their relationship with overseas refugee kin including why or when they escaped, which could be troublesome. But as Vietnam's economic condition worsened through the 1970s, overseas remittances in material form became more widespread, and quite necessary.

Dung explained that in the past, material products in Vietnam were of poor, practically unusable quality. Even items like underwear and toothpaste from overseas were much better made and therefore highly valued. Boxes of things would arrive from his relatives who had resettled in Canada. They often included clothes, electronics, and medicines. Until 1988, his family would travel down to Tan Son Nhat airport in Ho Chi Minh City to receive boxes sent by overseas relatives. There they were forced to sell at least half of the goods received, such as medicine and electronics, to cadres. There was a government store next to the airport that would buy the items and return local currency at about 60% of the value. They would take that money home, and exchange most of the rest of the items at An Đông market in Cholon or in the local black market, all for much needed food, keeping only a small amount of medicines for themselves. Customs officers played a key role in the reception of overseas boxes, and Dung would regularly have to pay them off to get their goods faster. American dollars were also sometimes hidden in the things received, but customs officials were keen to find them, and would frequently disassemble the electronic items in the box while he waited for them to be released.

Another time Dung went to the airport with Hung, a Chinese Vietnamese friend. Because of his experience receiving remittances, he had started to help others in the village who were not familiar with navigating the complexities of receiving goods from abroad. But it was risky, because there was a great deal of value lost in the process, and no one could really trust if he was taking a cut for himself, or simply reporting the lost cuts taken by others along the way. In this case, Dung and Hung went down to the Ho Chi Minh City airport without telling Hung's wife to receive a two-kilogram box, but upon receiving it they were immediately forced to sell 60% of it, taking home only 800 grams in the end. Dung told me how Hung cried when he was forced to sell so much of the goods. Many were simply ball point pens, which there was no good supply of at the time in Vietnam. The customs officers gave them the choice of selling them for a fraction of the cost, or paying a tax that would have equally reduced the value of the items ultimately received. These kinds of rent seeking situations continued until around 1988 according to Dung.

Dung told me that starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s overseas Vietnamese started sending money to Vietnam. But it was still complicated, and it was not until 1997 that remittance taxes were officially lifted. Money sometimes came by post but was unreliable. “Private” services were often preferred, involving a complex network of informal couriers, the entire scope of which was rarely understood by most remittance recipients. What they did know was that it eliminated the need to travel to Saigon to receive boxes as in the past and freed them from rent-seeking by cadres who forced recipients to pay taxes or sell goods below price. These private services typically involved cash couriers who would work together with the airport officers, each taking a cut of the fee. By this time Dung, because of his familiarity with the latest ‘trends’ in remittance channels and nodes, had become a part of this process himself and was traveling to pick up money brought by couriers in the city, often with or on behalf of others. As he explained “I would go with the recipient to help them get their money. We gave a gift to the middle person to thank them, even though we knew they had already taken a cut, shared with the officer at the airport”. From the 1990s, foreign transacted remittances had become mostly monetary, and it became easier to retrieve nearly 100% of the stated sent value, as fees were by then mostly paid on the sending side. Nonetheless, Dung explained, private services continue to dominate the remittance market, despite the availability of Western Union or Money Gram. Now many such services make their money not from taking cuts, but from swapping other monies that are going out of Vietnam, for which higher fees are charged for circumventing capital controls through creative book keeping.Footnote ¹⁷ It is all still part of the “illegal” road, but one that by now has become, with all of its networked gatekeepers and facilitators, familiar to traverse. Compared to the past it is relatively cheaper and simpler to navigate, and remains competitive with the legal road, which requires bureaucratic formalities that carry many costs and disadvantages. Yet even that is changing as the scales post financial crisis are increasingly tipping towards formal transfer channel preferences.

Dung's story demonstrates how changing forms of remittances involved complex networks and personal deal making, often with legal officials making illegal deals in which one laboured to build and maintain trust and connections, while always also risking fraud and deception. Nonetheless remittance networking across diverse stakeholders was a skill that had become part and parcel of survival in Vietnam's economy over the last thirty years. Now, the relative ease of money transfer for Dung, whether legal or illegal or somewhere in between, was a relief that served to catalyse comparative recollections of all of the many previous steps, entities, and personalities involved in the process of transferring and receiving value across international borders.

Boxes of material things might be appreciated for the creativity involved in their strategic packing, item selection based on understanding the unique supply and demand situation of Vietnam's post-war command economy, and the secret hiding of dollars, gold, and other forms of more universally exchangeable objects. However, the emotional stress and diplomatic acumen required to negotiate the reception of such items often meant people familiar with the process such as Dung would do the labour of navigating the various complexities together with, or on behalf of, neighbours, while always running the risk of suspicion for profiteering. The transition to more straightforward monetary transfer channels after the Cold War, and especially after 2002 when financial channels really started to open up, meant that money was easier to receive, which in turn made the relationship with the sender on the far side of the remittance relationship—in Dung's case Canada and in Hung's case the US—more straightforward, whether one lives in urban or rural areas. The new situation was preferable to having to divert relationship building and maintaining energy to all of the middlemen—from couriers and cadres to airport officials—in between. Money, in its mediating role, did indeed introduce a welcome distancing of relationships from other financial exchange mediators, and also allowed people like Dung and Hung to refocus on the more immediate and intentional dyadic gifting relationship with direct overseas kin, whose familial motivations of care, concern, and obligation always drove the gift exchange process and rationale, even when bodies were not proximate.

Reminiscing the Network

The networks of corruption and survival that pervaded Vietnam's remittance economy in the 1980s are now in many ways a source of recollective comic relief. In the popular play “Gratitude” [Tri ân] that performed in Saigon theatres in 2007, a Vietnamese American man sends a gift of silk home to his parents in Vietnam. The silk arrives at the local People's Committee who are supposed to make the delivery. However, as the story proceeds, various officials and village members come to the committee office and take small pieces of silk for themselves, always justifying that there is far more than the parents could possibly need. By the time the parents arrive at the office to pick up the cloth, there is only a small piece left. They do not know that much of the cloth had been already taken by others and are overjoyed to receive the gift from their son. The catch, however, is that the gift box contains a letter directing them how to use the gift. The son wants his parents to have decent clothes and requests the father to make pants and the mother to make a nice blouse top with the silk that he sent. At the end of the play, the son returns home. He asks his parents to show him the clothes they made. The parents seem embarrassed, but he insists, so they leave to change outfits. When they re-emerge on stage, they are wearing long overcoats but not yet the new silk clothes. Finally urged by the son to remove the coats, the father is revealed to be wearing only a silk thong, and the mother a skimpy silk bra, as these were all they could have tailored with the limited remnants of cloth left over after everyone else in the village had taken a share. The scene was, of course, responded to by widespread laughter in the audience, and was certainly a metaphor for an all-too-familiar theme of the complexities and disconnects of remittance gifts from overseas relatives and rent-seeking mediators in between.

Today such scenes reckon with the trauma of remittances as a lifeline during more impoverished times in the late 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, as Vietnam's tiger economy has taken off in the last generation, memories of economic hardship are often reflected upon with laughter and even sometimes nostalgia for the social networks survival necessitated, as Ken MacLean (Reference Maclean2008) has argued in his work on spectators of the subsidy economy exhibit at Vietnam's Museum of Ethnology. In my interviews with remittance receivers and senders alike, the majority said that remittances to Vietnam continue not because they are necessary, but because they maintain relations and serve as placeholders in communities to which once exiled Vietnamese refugees now regularly return. In many cases, remittances have shifted from regular subsistence payments to sporadic gifts transferred during special occasions or holidays such as a death anniversary or the lunar new year. Remittance recipients regularly describe such gifts as earmarked for “chơi” or play, and consider larger amounts designated for investment, or in many cases, migration, as “loans” even if there is not a realistic schedule to pay them back.

One man that I met during fieldwork carries a lucky dollar bill around with him, tucked away in his wallet. He explained that for him money is simply a symbolic reminder that maintains connections with his relatives overseas, from whom he was separated in the midst of a traumatic war and years of exile. They are now safe, healthy, and able to return to Vietnam whenever they wish, and he too is in a secure enough situation that he can keep, rather than have to sell, the gifts and money that his relatives send him. He also expressed pride at being able to afford local food specialty items to send as return gifts whenever those relatives visit. Showing me a photograph of his younger brother's family in Las Vegas, US, replete with the gaudiness of all that gambling city has to offer in the background, he pointed to his niece, whom he had met on occasion during their return visits to Vietnam, and says, “Look at how much fun she is having. I hear Las Vegas is a place to win money. But whether you win or lose doesn't matter, because you can always make more money in America. What matters is they have found an environment (môi trường) where they are all happy and can be and grow together as a family.”

Affective Allusions

We return then, to the affective allure of money, their imagined environments of accumulation and the gamble it takes to get there, and the complex relations and desires money represents and mediates via the remittance gift. In the ethnographic accounts and examples related in this article, money does in many ways “become a vehicle for the mind and endow it with a livelier and more comprehensive activity” as Simmel would say, as well as serve as dangerous and illicit gifts that catalyse “nerviness and excitement” in Mauss's words. Remittances, as gifts and money that transcend borders and family relations, while indexing imagined capitalist utopias abroad, have gone through a variety of transformations and surmounted a deluge of challenges for Vietnamese that have attempted to maintain transpacific relations through them over the years. Despite all of the setbacks, those remittance flows have never stopped, and quantitatively, at least, appear to continually be on the rise.

Perhaps it is time that we shift the focus of our attention when it comes to money and gifts, to attend less to what they do or how they contradict, but rather what their collective work demonstrates. When it comes to Vietnam and its globally dispersed diaspora, remittances as gifts or money, but always something more, highlight strong and enduring connections across great temporal and spatial distances. Their transnational wanders connect communities across core and periphery economies, catalysing spectres of comparison (Anderson Reference Anderson1998) between and across them. They are functional, but also symbolic and affective. As such, they appear unlikely to sever or diminish.

The lessons from Vietnam can surely be directed elsewhere, and comparative and predictive lenses are always tempting to propose. Anthropologists of money have long made the case for recognizing the emplaced sociality that monetary mediums reveal or sometimes conceal. The specificities of geography, political economy, history, and humanity will inevitably illuminate a complex tapestry of socio-cultural stitch work that may be difficult to generalize or project from. Nonetheless such tapestries of human connections, memories and aspirations are infinitely intriguing to observe, particularly when it comes to appreciating the creativity and resilience of humans to produce and mediate value, recognition, and linkages within and across varying societal conditions and opportunities.