Navigating ‘the Vietnamese Community’: Local and Transnational Belongings

Abstract

While preceding chapters have focused mainly on how Vietnamese identities are constructed and negotiated in relation to mainstream society, this chapter sheds light on how identity and belonging is shaped through co-ethnic relations and experiences within ‘the Vietnamese community’. The chapter explores how themes of generation, homeland origins, ethnic ties and networks within the Vietnamese community shape the experience of those born in Britain. Britishborn participants must navigate differences and divisions within the Vietnamese community in London, and construct their own communities of belonging through other means. It is argued that the younger British-born generation actively seek alternative communities within which to construct a sense of ethnic belonging. The chapter will begin with an exploration of young people’s experiences of ‘the Vietnamese community’ in London, to show how community is constructed and experienced. The shifting, heterogeneous, internally divided and contested nature of the Vietnamese community in London is found to require young people to selectively navigate it and develop more fluid and non-reified ethnic identities illustrating the redundancy of dominant political models around ‘cohesion’. The second part of the chapter explores alternative narratives of community and belonging, and argues that the notion of ‘personal communities’ of belonging (Wetherell et al. 2007) provides a more useful way to understand young people’s participation in and development of ethnic networks.

There is a funny feeling between the old generation. It just so happened that the young, the South people tend to stick together with the South and the North tend to stick together with the North, there has never been an agenda of separating the two or rejecting the other, it just so happens to be that way because, maybe our parents were that way.

(Simon, 34, community worker, South Vietnamese)