The anxiety of romantic love in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract

This article examines the role of anxieties about romantic love in the modernist self‐making projects of Vietnam's growing middle class. Romantic ideals and discourses that emerged from Vietnam's neoliberal reforms emphasize personal compatibility through emotional intimacy and communication. Middle‐class residents of Ho Chi Minh City increasingly privilege the emotions in daily life and define themselves and their relationships in an affective register. This cultivation of emotional self‐reflexivity has, however, become a source of anxiety about the self. An analysis of two case studies traces how individuals draw on their class, gender, and age to negotiate conflicts between various models of love and selfhood and reinvent romantic discourses to claim their own versions of a modern identity. A critical component of both the experience of romantic love and the construction of middle‐class Vietnamese selfhood, love anxiety stems not just from people's changed relations to others but also from a changed perception of the self, which has been rendered unrecognizable to them.

The Force of Love: Type II Diabetes in Vietnam as Tentatively Transformative Experience

“…, Ha . nh, and Gammeltoft 2018;Phinney 2008;Salemink and Nguyễn 2020;Schwenkel 2013;Shohet 2017Shohet , 2021Tran 2015Tran , 2018, in this essay, I direct attention to the lived immediacies of emotion-to people's everyday practices of love and their affective ramifications. 3 Inspired by fieldwork experiences in Thái Bình, I explore the analytical insights that can be produced by taking An's poetic evocation of the gift of love seriously, attending to the urges and intensities involved when people feel loved or love others.…”

“…44For important anthropological work that stands out against this tendency to theorize love away, see, for instance, Cole and Thomas (2009), Dominguez (2000), Jankowiak (1995), Rapport (2019), Rebhun (1999), Shohet (2017, 2021), Throop (2010), Tran (2018), Trawick (1992), and Zigon (2013). Shohet's (2021) ethnography of five families in central Vietnam provides a particularly perceptive account of practices of love and care in a Vietnamese context.…”

“…Comprehending this ambivalence demands that we attend to the complexity of everyday emotional engagements; it is, our research in Thái Bình indicates, people's efforts to enact love which compel them to downplay the significance of their disease while trying to protect themselves against it. Although existing anthropological studies of affective lives in Vietnam have framed emotion primarily as discourse, narrative, cultural category, or moral doctrine (e.g., Nhị, Hạnh, and Gammeltoft 2018; Phinney 2008; Salemink and Nguyễn 2020; Schwenkel 2013; Shohet 2017, 2021; Tran 2015, 2018), in this essay, I direct attention to the lived immediacies of emotion—to people's everyday practices of love and their affective ramifications 3 . Inspired by fieldwork experiences in Thái Bình, I explore the analytical insights that can be produced by taking An's poetic evocation of the gift of love seriously, attending to the urges and intensities involved when people feel loved or love others.…”

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“…Also notable is Rapport's (2018) critique of discussions of love that privilege the ‘I’ at the expense of what he terms love's status as ‘public virtue’. Tran's () more ethnographic study of anxieties around romantic love among Vietnam's new middle class reveals how self‐reflection leads not to ethical self‐fashioning but rather to the dissolution of the self. Intriguingly, in all of these pieces, ‘love’ becomes key to how social actors try to reconcile notions of freedom and constraint.…”

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“…Over the last decade, several groundbreaking anthropological studies have critically analyzed the global rise of psy (e.g., Béhague and MacLeish 2020;Lovell, Read, and Lang 2019;Zhang and Davis 2018) and its manifestations in different world regions: for instance, Latin America (e.g., Duncan 2018 on Mexico), Russia (e.g., Matza 2018), the Middle East (e.g., Behrouzan 2016 on Iran), and Asia (e.g., Yang 2015 andZhang 2020 on China;Tran 2018 on Vietnam; Kitanaka 2011 on Japan; Lang 2018 on India). Africa, however, has largely been neglected in these debates.…”