http://englishkyoto-seas.org/<Book Review>
Le Hoang Anh Thu
Ann Marie Leshkowich. Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in aChanging Marketplace. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014.
Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, April 2018, pp. 142-145.

How to Cite: Le Hoang Anh Thu. Review of Essential Trade: Vietnamese

Women in a Changing Marketplace by Ann Marie Leshkowich. Southeast AsianStudies, Vol. 7, No. 1, April 2018, pp. 142-145.

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Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

142Book Reviews

Essential Trade: Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace
Ann Marie Leshkowich
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014.
Bến Thành Market, where Ann Marie Leshkowich did her field research for Essential Trade:
Vietnamese Women in a Changing Marketplace, is the most famous market in Ho Chi Minh City.
Built more than 100 years ago and still standing at the heart of the city, this market and its iconic
clock tower are a familiar sight for all Saigonese, domestic and overseas tourists, or simply anyone
who has read a guidebook about Ho Chi Minh City. The market still holds firm to its reputation
as a traditional Vietnamese market, where transactions of goods and money have never ceased
since its opening in 1914 under the French colonial regime. As a long-standing market that haswitnessed myriad political, economic, and social transformations in Ho Chi Minh City, Bến Thành
Market was a fruitful site for Leshkowich to conduct her research on commercial activities, socialand political transformations, petty traders’ trading practices, and subjectivity formation during aturbulent period of shifting to socialism and to post-socialism in southern Vietnam.
Starting her fieldwork in 1988, when Renovation (Đổi Mới) started and gradually reformed
Vietnam’s socialist economy into a market economy following a socialist direction, Leshkowich
observed myriad transformations in politics, government, and state regulations targeting private
businesses. Alongside these vigorous changes, Leshkowich encountered many timeless claims
about gender, trade, class, kinship, and social relations that were constantly reproduced in statenarratives and in public perceptions about women petty traders. Intriguingly, these forms ofessentialism were also internalized by the petty traders themselves in their daily work and socialinteractions, although many of these essentialist perceptions about their trade and womanhood did
not match the reality; some even denigrated them as ignorant, low-class, superstitious, greedy,
and incapable of being virtuous mothers and wives.
In her book Leshkowich explores essentialist perceptions about gender, class, and trade that
traders used to talk about themselves, and which the government used to classify traders as lowclass and trade as a feminine activity. However, instead of completely accepting or debunking
these essentialist claims, Leshkowich uses essentialism as an analytical lens that offers an insightful understanding of traders’ formation of subjectivity in response to these dominant social andcultural conceptions about their gender, class, and trade. Leshkowich argues that women traders
embody and enact these essentialized claims about their gender and trade to become socially legible subjects who can react meaningfully to the social, political, and economic circumstances thatthey are enmeshed in. In so doing, they also manage to secure a strategic advantage for theirbusinesses during highly volatile political and economic periods.
The seven chapters of the book gradually unfold Leshkowich’s engaging ethnography, theoretically integrating discussions and analyses on the operations of essentialist perceptions about

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gender, class, family, kinship, and social relationships in southern Vietnam’s marketplace, and how
these ideologies are enacted and performed by women petty traders in their everyday work tocultivate a socially desirable gendered and classed subjectivity. All the chapters are eloquently
interconnected by the same characters appearing several times in the book, giving the reader aneasy-to-follow storyline and many opportunities to get to know the traders and their world byturning the pages.
In Chapter 1 Leshkowich carves out the setting in which the traders’ stories will be developed.
This chapter chronicles the history of Bến Thành Market since its construction following theFrench colonial regime’s master plan to civilize and modernize the Vietnamese indigenous trade.
The chapter discusses space-human interactions by illustrating how the market’s space was eventually transformed by stallholders and their ways of doing business to become an icon of Vietnam’straditional chợ (marketplace). Stallholders who inhabited such a traditional space were also naturalized as those who performed traditional kinds of trade.
Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the essentialism about gender and trade, which is a theme
that recurs in the following chapters. It tells the story of the socialist government’s configurationof commerce in the south right after 1975. During this immediate postwar period, women had
more advantages than men in owning market stalls to earn a living for their families. This endorsement of women’s trade was based on the socialist state’s belief in a naturalized notion that women
were an underclass whose productive activities were merely to support their own families and thus
were not associated with bourgeois capitalism. This movement led to petty trade being dominatedby women, and thus further reinforced the essentialized beliefs that women, unlike men, had thenatural skills for trade, and that petty trade was naturally a woman’s domain. By defining petty
trade as a feminine activity, the socialist state reshaped southern Vietnam’s political economy. In
response to this, women stallholders consciously internalized the state-endorsed narrative thatentangled trade, class, and gender as a strategy to secure their businesses during this difficultperiod.
Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 characterize personal and social networks that have a direct impact on
women’s trade, and discuss how through their performance of these interpersonal relations forpragmatic reasons, as well as for conformity to gender essentialism, women enact a socially recognizable gendered, relational, moral, and classed subjectivity. Chapter 3 describes the family
nature of many businesses operated in Bến Thành Market. Leshkowich points out that whilefamilism reflects traders’ performance of the naturalized perception of Vietnamese people as being
family oriented, it is also traders’ pragmatic response to the postwar social and political circumstances. In keeping their stalls looking “small” and classified as family businesses, stallholders
defend their enterprises from appearing “capitalist.” Their family businesses are also evidence of
their conformity to the state-idealized image of a Vietnamese cultured family as an economic unit
and a repository of Vietnamese traditional values and culture amid the threat from a Western

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Book Reviews

market economy, excessive materialism, and individualism. By presenting themselves and theirstalls surrounding this rhetoric of traditional family-centeredness, women traders bestow a senseof virtue upon their identities as traders, whose morality is often questionable in Vietnamese
traditional thought.
Continuing the discussion in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 portrays the rich personalistic network that
traders rely on to facilitate their businesses. This chapter characterizes the binary of inside andoutside in the Vietnamese conceptualization of social relationships. Leshkowich argues that thisessentialist distinction between inside and outside is, in reality, made in fluid and permeable waysby the traders to grow their networks, sustain and develop their businesses, and make the marketplace appear not just as a harsh environment for profit-seeking but also a community infusedwith an ethic of care and feminine sensibility. While relying on their “inside” network of kin forassistance, stallholders also focus on turning “outsiders” such as customers, competitors, creditors,
or moneylenders into “insiders” by cultivating mutual obligations, sentiment, and trust. ­Leshkowich
concludes that in utilizing insider tactics to cope with the uncertainties and anxieties of doing tradeunder market socialism, traders are also crafting a sense of self infused with feminine care andmorality.
Chapter 5 discusses one of the prominent outsiders in the traders’ network, which is thegovernment. In describing disputes over resources between traders and cadres, this chapter opens
up a complex discussion on memory of war, postwar differentiation in status and class between
non-revolutionary traders and revolutionary cadres, and traders’ experiences of market socialist
governmentality during Renovation. This chapter unfolds many unexpected twists of analysis andnarrative. For example, traders’ warning about wandering ghosts inside Bến Thành Market wasin fact a metaphor for the never-diminishing existence of the state’s control. Wandering ghosts
also speak to the lingering memory of the war, and the postwar hardship and humiliation that many
traders and their families experienced. This chapter makes a valuable contribution to the literatureof gender and war in Vietnam, especially when it highlights the voices of people whose memoryof war is marginalized in official history making. Leshkowich argues that gender essentialism wasagain drawn upon by both women traders and the government in their narratives of the presentconflicts, to conceal and divert attention from the unspeakable past tensions between them. This
argument would benefit from further development as it may illustrate another dimension in traders’formation of gendered subjectivity through their embeddedness in the present connections withmale authorities, while delving into the memories of their past aspirations and social status.
Chapter 6 turns to another dimension in the everyday interpersonal relations of traders, which
is with spirits and deities. Spiritual activities enable traders to inculcate a moral and caring femininity that conforms to social and cultural expectations. They also reinforce the commonly held
image of female traders as superstitious, weak, and ignorant. This image, however, affords womena protective rhetoric for their status as traders. Engagement in spiritual practice turns the mar-Book Reviews

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ketplace into a community where care, obligation, and sentiment are cultivated not only between
humans but also between humans and spirits.
The seventh chapter nicely bundles up elements of gender, class, subjectivity, traders’ socialand political status, and socialist governmentality into an elaborate discussion on class making andclassed subjectivity. Leshkowich draws attention to the contradiction between the socialist ideologies of “class-ification” and the actual process of class making and class performance, which
both the state and women traders pursue for their own needs and advantages. The book closes
with an epilogue where Leshkowich’s narrative zooms back out to an overview of Bến Thành
Market as a marketplace and an icon of traditional petty trade, and how it is positioned in theredevelopment plans of Ho Chi Minh City in the 2000s. Through updates on what has happened
to the market and its traders, the epilogue shows that Bến Thành Market continues to embody
both timelessness and change.
Essential Trade is a fantastic ethnography of the everyday life of women petty traders in Ho
Chi Minh City, and an important contribution to the literature on southern Vietnam’s society, history, and economy. It offers a brilliant analysis and insightful understanding of commercial practice,gender dynamics, class making, social stratification, and the operations of socialism and postsocialism in people’s lives. One aspect that may benefit from further exploration is the empowerment that women get from owning a business and playing an important economic role in theirfamilies. Leshkowich briefly mentions the potential empowering aspect of matrilineal familism intrade, in the ways women traders create jobs for relatives, afford middle-class lifestyles for theirown families, and mobilize their husbands to help them at their stalls as well as in household tasks.
It would be intriguing to find out how women traders balance their internalization of gender essentialism with their obvious economic power in their performance of a socially acceptable genderedsubjectivity as family-oriented moral and caring women. Further exploration may reveal a dimension of gendered subjectivity that is formed through negotiations between power and modesty, orbetween the enactments of timeless feminine traits in their interactions with the “outside” society
versus the “inside” kin network.
Le Hoang Anh Thu
College of Asia Pacific Studies, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University