Ivan V. Small's book Currencies of Imagination is a remarkably tight ethnographic account of how affectively complex money becomes when it flows between borders, boundaries, and kin. Sited as a transnational study of remittances, Currencies of Imagination shows the categorical transformations that befall remittances from migrant communities in the United States to their homeland communities as they gather and challenge cultural, social, legal, and financial meanings. A central part of Small's argument is that remittances are not “mere money” but concentrate the dynamics of gift-debt and historical motion in neat analytical ways. The transnational study of how money seems to flow freely between countries shows a third space in the making, a productive zone that becomes economically significant for developing national economies such as Vietnam, and a potential site of regulation and limit for sending countries such as the United States that seek to assert state power over gray markets and migrant communities with strong attachments to their homelands. By contrasting two kinds of mobility, that of the free flow of money and that of successful and failed migration, Small uses the contradictions that emerge to systematically unravel the theoretical assumptions about the symmetry of gift exchange and natural predispositions to giving that have placed gifting at the heart of Vietnamese identity and culture.
The book charts how the flow of remittances from the United States to Vietnam prefigures a commitment to cultural ways of belonging that never end, even as they ebb and flow over time. Drawing on the work of Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida, Small carefully examines the gift as a heuristic for historically contingent forms of kinship and sociality. For Vietnamese, gifts are the space in which memories and relations are honored, reenacted, and extended. While earlier forms of remittances included hard-to-procure goods and medicines, often with dollars hidden in crevices within, Small describes how, over time, remittances have settled into their preferred form as wire transfers. Such gifts enact intimacy between long-separated kin, and dollars become an effective substitute for love and care, as senders narrate how their parents or siblings feel loved and secure upon receiving money from them.
The true value of the gift, however, is never fully perceived by either the giver or the recipient. A common complaint of Vietnamese migrants to the United States is that their extended families in Vietnam do not understand the labor sacrifices made to secure those transfers. The largesse of the gift is both underwritten and eclipsed by the persona of the American dream, which hides the racial hierarchies that place Vietnamese migrants in low-income jobs with little social mobility. The senders are held hostage by it, just as the recipients in Vietnam are constrained by their inability to break into new markets, escape political and kin forms of surveillance, and explore new horizons on their own volition. For some families, remittances take on the quality of reparation—a means to address the inequities of who gets to live, stay, leave, or die.
Even as Small shows how remittances are only projected to increase over time and infrastructural innovations facilitate even more wealth transfers, the dreams and sentiments tethered to these remittances frequently come apart, especially between generations. Small's generational analysis shows the frayed edges of the diasporic imaginary, as younger generations of Vietnamese Americans complain of remittance fatigue and attempt to reform remittance practices into more transparently philanthropic gestures. Similarly, as more urban Vietnamese become prosperous and financially independent, they more consciously articulate their ambivalent feelings about the obligations of support and prestation to their elders and their kin. Accordingly, as Vietnam becomes more porous to global investments and financialization, the once meaningful gift of American dollars now becomes a relic of diasporic sentiment.
One of the more insightful and subtle reminders in Small's ethnography is to simply repeat the vernacular name for another horizon that functions like an alternate universe—“over there.” “Over there” is as much an amalgamation of capitalist and commodity dreamworlds located in the United States and the West as it is a name for the Vietnamese selves that could have lived out their alternate lives had they succeeded in leaving. The vague-sounding but unmistakable content of the name “over there” signals to anyone who pays attention the outsized importance of the outcome of historical traumas, naturalizing the destination of the perilous boat journey and imagined relation to other homelands where large Vietnamese communities have come to congregate and call home. The later chapters of the book feature the “Little Saigon” strip malls, temples, and neighborhoods that one finds readily in California as signs of thriving migrant communities, but even these communities are temporary stations.
Small sheds light on one of the more fascinating aspects of circulation: that of return migration. As more and more older Vietnamese Americans plan a return to resplendent (or at least more comfortable than the United States) retirement in Southeast Asia, their remittance dollars fuel real estate booms that hold value in abeyance. “Dollar villages” are physically transformed by remittance dollars into spaces of gambling, entertainment, drinking, and empty, upgraded houses. It is the context of the limited and limiting windfall that Vietnamese find themselves in, which Small illustrates with his ethnographic example of young men cruising aimlessly on motorcycles bought by remittance dollars. In a complex return gaze, Small is sensitive to the entrepreneurial and nostalgic exploration of “homeland” that Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) bring to Vietnam, as they imagine what life would have been like had their families not left.
Small's book is a timely reminder of why it is important to pay attention to the inequalities and opportunities attached to migrant lives in the United States. Southeast Asian communities, especially Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, and Lao communities, continue to be significantly poorer, less recognized, more criminalized, and altogether more historically complex than the umbrella term “Asian American” can convey. Currencies of Imagination allows us to glimpse the transnational future of scholarship as our ideas catch up to the practices and sentiments of Southeast Asians in the world.
