Right before Thanksgiving Break, I connected the chapters we read in class from Willow Lung-Amam’s Trespassers on Asian American ethnoburbs to that week’s readings on Vietnam’s influence in the global sex market from Kimberly Hoang’s Dealing in Desire. My expert question focuses on the disadvantages Vietnamese Americans encounter in the United States and the privileges they attain by participating in Vietnam’s prodigious sex industry. Furthermore, I ask how Vietnam’s sex industry which sits at the forefront of the countries largest city and tourist attraction, Ho Chi Minh City (HMIC) is utilized to assert the rise of Eastern (more specifically South East and East Asian) dominance in the global market, as well as dismantle Western hegemonic patriarchy. Students and Prof. Greene had the opportunity to interact with the question the days following vacation. In Dealing in Desire, Western businessmen express Vietnams sex industry as “a performance.” Prof. Greene expanded on this in class when he discussed “cynical” and “sincere” performance. Greene described sincere performances as a performance that is true to the actor and the actor is trying to convey to the audience while a cynical performance is one that is not true to the actor, but the actor is trying to convey as true to the audience. This made me think of the excerpts we read for class. Hoang illustrates how many of the sex workers at the clubs come from impoverished areas but are able to portray upper-middle-class and wealthy statues through the ways they interact with businessmen and the forms of physical capital they own like luxury phones. This performance that they are putting on is cynical because the sex workers know that they are not from a stable high class, but they must constantly put on the performance since they’re constantly interacting with people that are of wealthier classes. A few students provided their own interpretations of performances from the readings we discussed this week. For instance, a student about how Viet Kieus who came to Vietnam to participate in the sex industry have to show that they are “Vietnamese enough” (although many of them are accustomed to diasporic Vietnamese culture) and that Vietnam is thriving and globalized enough to be a leading nation in the global market. 

Moreover, sex workers give themselves agency over their bodies through the performances where they reassert patriarchal dominance. I find it interesting because it is paradoxical. For instance, the sex workers do things like clink their drinks below the cups of the businessmen and make them feel special. In doing this women can use their bodies as a site of transaction to attain capital. A student in class described it as, “Vietnamese sex workers act like women so men can take up the role of ‘a man.’” This left me asking, how do these women redefine feminism by using the very same institutional practices that marginalize them? Many Western feminists would find this dangerous, but these Vietnamese sex workers have proved otherwise. Also, I found it intriguing how Vietnamese businessmen were able to use real banknotes instead of credit cards in these sex lounges to establish dominance over Western businessmen. I began thinking broadly about the few collapses the American economy has faced this decade. It left me questioning how might the renewal of urban spaces in America using credit lead to the collapse of the American economy and hegemony? How are Vietnamese men using their banknote capital to undermine Westerners in their high attracting tourist cities? Ultimately, is this a performance that they’re putting on truly becoming a reality?