PHUNG N. SU
Researcher. Teacher. Fiction Fanatic
RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am interested in understanding how individuals make choices within drastic moments of cultural, political, and economic constraints. In other words, how individuals strategize within conditions that are not of their own choosing. My previous work on Vietnamese women during the Vietnam Revolution attests to this desire to understand the meanings and narratives crafted by the oft-forgotten women of war. My current book project explores Vietnamese outmigration from the countryside to uncover the interplay between economic and cultural transformation and individual’s mobility strategies, lived experiences, and subjectivities.
See below for select publications. For additional information, please see the C.V.
2024. “MARRYING TO LABOR, LABORING TO MARRY: GENDER AND THE RELATIONAL PATTERNS OF MIGRATION FROM VIETNAM.” SIGNS: JOURNAL OF WOMEN IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY VOL. 49, NO. 3
Amid dramatic economic transformations in East Asia in the late twentieth century, Vietnam entered the global market in 1986 through Doi Moi (renovation), with important gendered ramifications for labor, marriage, and mobility. This article analyzes rural Vietnamese people’s migration against the backdrop of both global political economic dynamics and a changing local gender regime. Drawing on nineteen months of ethnography and 111 interviews with Vietnamese women and men across three different countries (South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam), I show how gender, as a relational construct, operates as both a fundamental constraint on and an enabler of human mobility. Specifically, the framing of women as “good mothers” and the corresponding emphasis on men as “good workers” enables certain migration pathways but also shapes the strategies women and men use to improve their chances at mobility. Through this examination of the migration paths and strategies of Vietnamese women and men from similar communities, I clarify three types of relational dynamics in human mobility through which gender is the unifying thread: women and men migrants, marriage and labor pathways, and global and local transformations. My findings show that poor, rural women enact marriage migration as a mobility strategy to find work overseas, whereas poor, rural men participate in labor migration as a means to form families domestically. Through this study, I demonstrate how the intertwined valuation of female domesticity and breadwinning masculinity, which shapes conditions in Vietnam and overseas, creates distinct but connected patterns for women and men in human mobility.
2023. “STRIVING TO BE MEN IN THE FAMILY: MASCULINITY AND CAPITALIST TRANSFORMATION IN VIETNAM.” MEN & MASCULINITIES, VOL. 26, ISSUE 1
Women in Vietnam, historically and today, have participated in the labor force at a high rate. Since Vietnam opened its markets in 1986, their participation has noticeably declined. Given this change, what does economic transformation mean for how men understand the place of women in society, and relatedly, what does it mean for how they understand masculinity? Through ethnography and interviews with 53 men in Ho Chi Minh City, I find that Vietnamese men in this urban center aspire for projects of masculinity that rely on the reimagination of Vietnamese women as non-workers in history. My findings show that men from different economic positions and occupations evidence divergent views of the family and women’s role in it. Men who are employed in waged occupations with a high school degree or less seek to realize “tradition” through the single-income family and the homemaker wife, yet this family is not necessarily an echo of the past. By contrast, men in salary paying occupations with some or complete college education view the dual-income family and the female worker as progressive despite the long history of women’s labor in Vietnam. This finding presents an opportunity to understand how masculinity as an ideal, a process, and a lived experience occurs during moments of economic transformation.
WITH PH SU. 2023. “DISCOMFORTING SURPLUS: GENDER, SEXUALIZATION, AND OMISSIONS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK.” FRONTIERS IN SOCIOLOGY, SPECIAL ISSUES
As sisters and sociologists, we shared an unnerving experience of sexual harassment in one of our preliminary field sites. Our research pursuits split thereafter, with one of us leaning into questions of gender and sexuality and the other steering clear. Despite our diverging interests, we both encountered discomforting moments that raise questions about what data we render surplus in our analysis. In this article, we draw on ethnographic and interviewing data from our respective projects to conceptualize “discomforting surplus” as ethnographic data that we omit from our analyses. We offer two types of discomforting surpluses: those that reveal dissonance between our actions and self-conceptions, and those that seem not just uncomfortable, but inconsequential. We mine these discomforting surpluses, calling for introspection about our subject positions and the potential benefits of trying out analytical frames we have ignored. We conclude with practical suggestions for reflecting meaningfully on our relationships to the field and engaging in thought experiments that center discomforting surplus. These contradictions, omissions, and unnerving questions in ethnographic research are important to grapple with as we encounter a push for greater transparency and open science.
ETHNOGRAPHY AS STORYTELLING
Having the ability to travel to various countries has cemented my fascination with life narratives and individuals’ location against a backdrop of changing times and trends. In my travels, I witnessed first-hand the symbolic currency that is attached to one’s ability to speak fluent English in Singapore. I danced to popular South Korean songs in Seoul, songs that for more than three decades have enabled South Korea to export its popular culture overseas. I also squatted alongside Vietnamese village folks in the Mekong River Delta region, peeling durian and sharing in conversation about the role of food as both a cultural marker and a passport to new communities of people and histories.
Traversing different cultural lines at home and across many national borders means that I have constantly been afforded the opportunity to form friendships that are not limited by geography, learn to value different and sometimes conflicting worldviews, and trade tales of loss that speaks to a shared human experience. All of this I have come to hold dearly as a unique ability to stand at the convergence of various cultures and communities that transcend territorial boundaries.
As an ethnographic researcher and retainer of stories, I offer you, through my research projects, various vantages into the lives of the people whose stories illuminate the ceaseless interaction between conditional existences and individual strategies for survival.
Berkeley Sociology Commencement Speech (2022): For My Immigrant Parents
When Martin asked me to be the commencement speaker with him, my primary concern was, “Will I be able to see over the podium?” You see, Martin is 6’3" and commands attention. I still get asked by the TSA: “Traveling alone or with a parent?” So while I do, in fact, travel by myself, in terms of the roads I’ve taken in life, I’ve often been accompanied by family.
But family isn’t the easiest. Family can make you regress back to the 8-year-old you. Family lands you in therapy. And immigrant families, they're something else. You see, in my immigrant family, we don’t say “I love you.” We show it in passive-aggressive ways. For example, “Eat more food, you’re too skinny!” is code for “I care about you,” followed by a plate of fruit that you did not ask for.
As a first generation, immigrant child from a working-class family, getting a PhD isn’t easy.
Often, you feel like a walking assemblage of scars. You’re stitched together by tenacity and belligerence. When you enter an institution that wasn’t created with you in mind, it is a process where you peel away the layers of yourself, until all that is left is a flattening out of your differences.
When I near a point where, I think, maybe to succeed in academia, I should soften the rough edges of my being, I see my parents. I see their struggles and their sacrifices. I see how they navigate a world where they don’t know the language. A world that labels them “foreigner” because to be American is to be White; where, as garment workers, they put in 16-hour workdays to make sure that their kids’ basic needs are met. I see how the only marker of the passing of time is in their lush, black hair steadily turning white as they labor in the same job day in and day out. And importantly, I see how their experiences are not my own. Their sacrifices have made that a reality.
And I’m reminded of “Broken English” a poem by Rupi Kaur, of a specific verse about immigrant parents that goes like this:
They turned a suitcase full of clothes
into a life and regular paychecks
to make sure that children of immigrants
wouldn't hate them for being the children of immigrants
Insights from my family’s experiences have carried me throughout the PhD. They’re also the same ones I keep as travel companions into academia, where I will encounter others with similar life stories, stories that remind us of why we should celebrate rather than flatten out our differences.
And now, to make sure that my words can reach the ones that I wrote this speech for:
Thảo muốn lấy cơ hội này để cảm ơn Ba Tài Mẹ. Tại vì sự hy sinh của Ba Tài và Mẹ, Thảo có thể đứng ở đây hôm nay và lấy được bằng tiến sĩ này. Cảm ơn Ba Tài, cảm ơn Mẹ.
Happy graduation to all the immigrant families out there. Thank you.
