Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

“She’s Not a Low-Class 40(4) 367­–396

© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: [Link]
Dirty Girl!”:  Sex Work in [Link]/[Link]
DOI: 10.1177/0891241611403481
Ho Chi Minh City,Vietnam [Link]

Kimberly Kay Hoang1

Abstract
Turning to Vietnam’s contemporary sex industry, this article complicates
existing frameworks of global sex work by analyzing a sex industry in a de-
veloping economy where not all women are poor or exploited and where
white men do not always command the highest paying sector of sex work.
Drawing on seven months of field research between 2006 and 2007, I pro-
vide a systematic classed analysis of both sides of client–worker relationships
in three racially and economically diverse sectors of Ho Chi Minh City’s
(HCMC’s) global sex industry: a low-end sector that caters to poor local Viet-
namese men, a mid-tier sector that caters to white backpackers, and a high-end
sector that caters to overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) men. I illustrate how
sex workers and clients draw on different economic, cultural, and bodily
resources to enter into different sectors of HCMC’s stratified sex industry.
Moreover, I argue that sex work is an intimate relationship best illustrated by
the complex intermingling of money and intimacy. Interactions in the low-
end sector involved a direct sex for money exchange, while sex workers and
clients in the mid-tier and high-end sectors engaged in relational and intimate
exchanges with each other.

Introduction

Studies on sex work pay particular attention to the growth of global sex tour-
ism, marked by the production and consumption of sexual services across
borders. A recent body of literature uncovers the complexities of stratified
1
University of California, Berkeley

Corresponding Author:
Kimberly Kay Hoang, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
Email: kayhoang@[Link]
368 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

sex industries around the world (Bernstein 2007; Zheng 2009). This article
extends the literature on the stratification of sex work by comparing three
racially and economically diverse sectors of Ho Chi Minh City’s (HCMC’s)
global sex industry: a low-end sector that caters to poor local Vietnamese
men, a mid-tier sector that caters to white backpackers, and a high-end sector
that caters to overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) men.
First, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) theories of capital, I explain
how sex workers’ various economic, cultural, and bodily resources position
them in different sectors of HCMC’s stratified sex industry. Global processes,
namely, the movement of people and capital around the world, expand the
sex industry creating different markets and opportunities for female sex
workers. Contrary to the current literature, I argue that sex workers are not all
poor exploited women; rather, they come with an array of economic, cultural,
and bodily resources that provide them with access to various types of local
and global men.
Second, I expand the literature on client–worker relations in sex work by
highlighting the multiple ways through which clients and sex workers mingle
economic activity and intimacy. The commonsense understanding of sex is
dichotomous: participants engage in sex either relationally (in a romantic
encounter) or as an economic transaction (in sex work). When there are mate-
rial rewards to sex, this perspective contends, each party’s calculus is funda-
mentally individualistic: the buyer wants sex, and the seller wants material
gain. In her research on sex tourism in Cuba, Cabezas (2009) highlights the
multivalent encounters of emotional affection that occur in sex work blurring
the boundaries between client–worker interactions and romantic relationships.
Drawing on seven months of field research between 2006 and 2007, I
expand Cabezas’s (2009) framework with a systematic classed analysis of
both sides of client–worker relationships. Sex work is not a mere economic
transaction; it is an intimate relationship best illustrated by the complex inter-
mingling of money and intimacy (Zelizer 2005). I find that interactions
between poor local Vietnamese clients and sex workers in the low-end sector
involve economic exchanges that are intimate but not personal, while sex
workers and clients in the mid-tier and high-end sectors engage in relational
and intimate exchanges developed through the continuous interactions that
tie customers to sex workers. In this article, I break away from the current
understanding that high-class sex work occurs in bounded spheres with clear
economic transactions (Bernstein 2007). Instead, I argue that there are porous
boundaries in the relations between sex workers and their clients that depend
on the strata they occupy. These permeable boundaries complicate our under-
standings of sex work because they allow women to offer a variety of
Hoang 369

services that go beyond sex, in return for various forms of payment beyond
money.

Sex Work in Ho Chi Minh City’s International

Economy
Vietnam is an ideal case for the study of sex work because rapid economic
restructuring has triggered new inflows of people and capital, creating a seg-
mented sex market. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnam effectively closed
its doors to foreign relations with most of the international community except
the Soviet bloc. In 1986, after a decade of full state management of the econ-
omy, heavily subsidized production, and postwar infrastructural instability, the
Vietnamese government introduced an extensive economic and administrative
renovation policy called Doi Moi (literally “renovation” or “renewal”) that
transitioned Vietnam from a socialist to a market economy.
HCMC has since become a city with heavy international flows of people
and capital. As the “Southern Key Economic Zone,” HCMC accounts for 35
percent of Vietnam’s gross national product (Pham 2003). In 2006, Vietnam
joined the World Trade Organization, joining a globalizing economy and
launching new foreign trade and investment projects, following similar
moves by other socialist or formerly socialist countries (Hoogvelt 1997;
WTO 2006). The transition to a market economy dramatically increased eco-
nomic inequality, intensifying and laying bare the stratification of sex work
(Nguyen-Vo 2008).
In her research on globalization, Sassen (2001) encourages us to examine
how the world economy shapes the life of particular cities. By foregrounding
cities as a strategic site of globalization, we can identify some of the mediat-
ing institutions that connect cities to the global forces that shape sex tourism
(Wonders and Michalowski 2001). There is some evidence that HCMC is
beginning to emerge as a new global city (Sassen 2001). However, HCMC
still lacks an advanced transportation system, a major international stock
exchange, and an active influence in international affairs. Thus, I argue that
HCMC is an emergent international city rather than a global city—an emer-
gent international city as part of the peripheral zone in the global capitalist
market, where processes of transnationalism from above and practices of
transnationalism from below shape the socioeconomic structure of the city
(Hoang 2010).
HCMC has a distinctive sex industry with an estimated 200,000 Vietnamese
women involved in prostitution (CATW 2005). While some scholars address
the sex industry in Southeast Asia, few focus on the contemporary global sex
370 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

industry in Vietnam (Nguyen-Vo 2008; Truong 1990). Among scant research

on Vietnamese sex work, Nguyen-Vo’s (2008) theoretical approach focuses
on how larger macro structures like the state regulate women’s bodies. She
tracks the governance of women’s bodies in the contemporary sex industry,
focusing mainly on establishments that cater to local Vietnamese entrepre-
neurs. My research expands Nguyen-Vo’s work by providing an ethnographic
analysis from the ground up that examines the significant differences among
sex workers who cater to both local and overseas clients.
The movement of people and capital makes HCMC a critical site where
globalization generates new types of inequality, which in turn create new seg-
ments of sex work. Unlike studies on sex trafficking that tend to view all
women as poor victims in need of rescue, I argue that it is important to exam-
ine the social and economic distinctions between sex workers in a stratified
economy. Globalization does not create a single market for poor exploited
women who cater to wealthy foreigners; rather, I contend that globalization
creates diverse markets and new segments that expand already existing
inequalities. Structural factors such as women’s access to economic, cultural,
and bodily resources position them in higher and lower paying sectors of sex
work with different relations of intimacy.

Sex Work through the Lens of Capital and

Intimate Relations
Bernstein (2007) and Zheng (2009) pioneered new research investigating the
stratification of sex work. These scholars highlight how the different types of
bodily, intimate, and sexual labors that workers perform correspond with
their positions in higher-class and lower-class sectors of the sex industry.
Bernstein (2007) illustrates how relations between lower-class street workers
and their clients involved direct exchanges of physical sex acts for money,
while higher-class sex workers provide their clients with experiences of
bounded authenticity. Zheng (2009) extends the research on the stratification
of sex workers beyond the United States in her study of hostesses in low-end,
mid-tier, and high-end karaoke bars in Dalian, China. However, Zheng’s
(2009) research is limited to local Chinese men; she does not discuss how
relations between clients and sex workers differ in the three types of bars.
Elsewhere, I analyze the range of repressive and expressive emotional labors
that sex workers provide their clients (Hoang 2010). In this article, I focus on
how structural factors such as the exchange of different bodily, cultural, and
economic capitals lead to a range of short-term and long-term relationships
that emerge through client–worker interactions.
Hoang 371

First, I turn to Bourdieu’s theories of capital to explain how clients and sex
workers draw on different economic, cultural, and bodily resources to enter
various sectors of HCMC’s sex industry. To develop Bourdieu’s theories in
the context of sex work, I also draw on Zelizer’s (2005) concept of intimate
relations to illustrate how clients and sex workers mingle sex, money, and
intimacy in different ways that correspond to their position in a particular
stratum.
Bourdieu defines economic capital as the monetary income, assets, or
other financial resources that an actor can access (Bourdieu 1986). Cultural
capital refers to actors’ dispositions and embodiment in specific social fields.
It is the ability to acquire and manipulate a system of embodied, linguistic, or
economic markers that carry cultural meaning, especially within a hierarchi-
cal social system of status (Bourdieu 1977). Broadly, the relevant demarca-
tions of cultural capital in the world of HCMC’s sex industry are the resources,
dispositions, and modes of embodiment that allow individuals to position
themselves within the particular social field of sex work in HCMC. More
specifically, on the client side, I use the term “cultural capital” to draw atten-
tion to Viet Kieu clients’ understanding of the local culture and their ability to
speak Vietnamese when navigating the sex industry in HCMC. For sex work-
ers, I use the term “cultural capital” to refer to the linguistic and discursive
abilities needed for communication with clients, and also to the sex workers’
level of comfort within particular bars and restaurants. In addition, sex
workers’ cultural capital encompasses the ability to embody and project to
clients an imagined nation: Vietnam as nostalgic “home” for Viet Kieu men
and, alternatively, Vietnam as foreign and exotic other for Western men
(Nguyen-Vo 2008).
I also incorporate Bernstein’s (2007) term body capital, which she defines
as an attractive appearance used to sell sexual services. In this article, I high-
light dimensions of body capital such as apparent age, designer clothing,
hairstyle, and make-up, as well as strategies to acquire body capital, such as
cosmetic surgery. Sex workers’ bodies serve as assets that allow them to work
as entrepreneurs in bodily capital (Wacquant 1995) to market themselves as
attractive and thus more valuable in relation to global men.
Bourdieu (1986) argues that different forms of capital have varied mean-
ings within social fields. A field, in Bourdieu’s oeuvre, is a terrain of struggle
in which agents strategize to preserve or improve their positions (Bourdieu
1984). While men and women use different forms of capital to enter and
maneuver within specific sectors of sex work in HCMC, these various forms
of capital are only valued through the relations between men and women in
this particular field. In this paper I highlight the forms of capital that are
372 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

relevant and valued in relations between clients and sex workers in HCMC’s
sex industry. Based on these relations, agents within a field stand in relation-
ships of domination, subordination, or homology to one another by virtue of
the varying levels of access that they have to the different forms of capital at
stake in the field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). I analyze relations of domi-
nation and subordination to show that they are not static but take on different
meanings in different sectors.
While Bourdieu’s (1984) theories of social fields and capital help us to
understand the structure of the HCMC’s stratified sex industry and the rela-
tions within a particular field, his theories inhibit our examination of the
product of interactions between clients and sex workers. Zelizer’s (2005)
concept of intimate relations is more useful because it provides a critical tool
for understanding how the exchange of different resources leads to a range of
short-term and long-lasting relationships between clients and sex workers.
Scholars of “separate spheres and hostile worlds” argue that intimacy and
economic markets are mutually exclusive (MacKinnon 1982; Pateman 1988).
In response, Zelizer (2005) argues that the “hostile worlds” view overlooks
how people who blend economic activity and intimacy actively construct and
negotiate interdependent and connected lives. I extend these ideas by explor-
ing how sex workers and their clients engage in economic and intimate
exchanges that vary according to these sectors of sex work.
How does Zelizer (2005) define intimacy and economic activity? Intimacy
refers to “the transfer of personal information and wide-ranging, long-term
relations which connect and overlap” between people (Zelizer 2005, p. 16).
Intimate relations vary over time along a continuum and as people exchange
different degrees of physical, informational, and emotional closeness with
each other. Economic transactions, in contrast, go beyond the mere use of
money. People may use gifts, different forms of compensation, or entitle-
ments as payment, corresponding to the way they define their relationships
with one another. They use varied symbols, rituals, practices, and distinguish-
able forms of money to mark distinct social relations (Zelizer 2004).
Integrating Bourdieu’s theories of capital and Zelizer’s concept of inti-
mate relations, I argue that sex workers and their clients engage in three types
of relationships with varying degrees of intimacy, capital, and duration (see
Table 1 below).
Sexual exchanges are swift encounters between clients and sex workers
that involve direct sex-for-money exchanges and happen almost entirely in
the low-end sector. Although interactions between sex workers and clients
are sexually intimate, they are not personal. That is, men and women do not
build emotional ties with one another. Relational exchanges, which take
Hoang 373

Table 1. Economic, Relational, and Intimate Exchanges

Relations Capital at Stake Duration

Low-end Sexual exchange Economic capital: poor Short one-time
(only sex and rural and urban women interaction
money are Body capital: lack of access
exchanged) to plastic surgery
Cultural capital: lack of
cultural and language
skills
Mid-tier Relational Exchange Economic capital: poor Short-term and long-
(sex, gifts, and urban women term remittance
money are Body capital: plastic surgery, relationships that
exchanged) hair, clothing, etc. often develop into
Cultural capital: ability to boyfriend–girlfriend
speak English and navigate or husband–wife
in foreign spaces relations
High-end Intimate exchange Economic capital: college- Short-term intimate
(sex, gifts, money, or trade-school-educated relationships where
and intimacy are urban women from marriage and
exchanged) wealthy families migration are not
Body capital: higher-end the end goal
plastic surgeries, spas,
designer clothing
Cultural capital: Ability
to display comfort in
navigating high-end hotels,
bars, and restaurants

Note: These typologies are ideal types specific to Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry.

place primarily in the mid-tier sector, involve a complex set of intimate and
economic arrangements, the exchange of bodily and cultural capitals, as well
as short-term client–worker interactions that sometimes develop into long-
term boyfriend–girlfriend relationships. Intimate exchanges, which occur
mostly in the high-end sector, also involve a complex set of economic and
intimate arrangements and the deployment of economic, cultural, and bodily
capitals. However, relations between sex workers and clients in the high-end
sector are short-term relationships that last only for the duration of the cli-
ent’s visit and rarely develop into long-term remittance relationships.
374 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

Research Methods
With the approval of Stanford University’s board of human subjects in 2006
and the University of California, Berkeley’s board of human subjects in
2007, I carried out seven months of ethnographic field research in three
intervals between June 2006 and August 2007 in HCMC. The board of
human subjects at Stanford and UC Berkeley required verbal consent from
the participants in my study in order to protect both workers’ and clients’
identities. I conducted participant observation in local bars, cafés, sex work-
ers’ homes, malls, restaurants, and on the streets. All of the sex workers I
studied were women over the age of eighteen who chose to enter sex work
as independent agents. None of my participants were trafficked or forced into
prostitution. Although all of the sex workers in my project disguised their
labor in barbershops or bars, or by framing their relations with clients as
boyfriend–girlfriend relationships, all of the women in this study referred
themselves as “gai di khach” (girls who accompany customers) at some
point in their conversations with me. The women never explicitly refer to
themselves as “gai ma dam” (prostitutes or sex workers). They referred to
themselves as “gai di khach” (girls who accompany customers) because sex
work is illegal in Vietnam.
I focused on three sectors of HCMC’s sex industry: those catering to poor
local Vietnamese men, to white backpackers, and to overseas Vietnamese
(Viet Kieu) men. I chose these sectors because together they represent a large
portion of the sex work industry in HCMC and because the relations between
clients and sex workers in these sectors are largely public and therefore easier
to observe. I later returned to Vietnam for fifteen months between 2009 and
2010 to examine sex work relationships within private spaces and enclosed
karaoke bars that cater to wealthy Vietnamese entrepreneurs and Asian busi-
nessmen. Here I focus on the sectors that are more publicly visible because I
did not have access to enclosed spaces during 2006-2007.
Initially, I conducted a total of thirteen formal interviews, with seven cli-
ents and six sex workers. However, interviewing methods were ultimately
ineffective for several reasons. Sex workers generally, and understandably,
refused to sit down for a formal interview but they were receptive to me fol-
lowing them in their daily lives more informally. Moreover, many of the men
and women in my study were not always completely truthful about their
motivations for entering sex work or the nature of their relationships. Women
in the high-end sector, for example, often claimed that they entered into sex
work because of poverty, but as I followed them to their homes and into shop-
ping centers, I quickly learned that they came from fairly well-to-do families
Hoang 375

by local and global standards. Lastly, and most importantly, participant obser-
vation allowed me to take careful notes on interactions that took place
between clients and sex workers, enabling me to examine the complexities of
their relationships.
My research began with time spent in local bars and on the streets to meet
and develop rapport with various sex workers, clients, and bar owners before
asking the women to participate in my project. The second phase of the
research process involved intensive participant observation and informal
interviews with individual sex workers who agreed to participate in the proj-
ect. Being an overseas Vietnamese woman helped me gain access to female
sex workers because many of them suspected local Vietnamese men who
asked them questions of being undercover police. Although all of the women
knew that I was a researcher from the United States who would eventually
write about their lives, this was not important to them. They cared more about
my family history and my life overseas, wanting to situate me in their mental
universe.
In my attempt to expand the literature on sex work empirically, I also incor-
porated male clients into my analysis. All of the clients knew that I was a
researcher from the United States. Overseas white backpackers and Viet Kieu
clients in my study were much more open with me than local Vietnamese men.
White backpackers and Viet Kieu could converse with me in English and relate
to me about the context of their lives overseas and the dynamics of their rela-
tions in HCMC. I befriended two local motorbike-taxi drivers who introduced
me to the low-end sector that catered to local Vietnamese men. Cuong and Loc
taught me how to approach men and women in this sector. They also helped
ease me into conversations with local male clients. Their assistance was crucial
in my understanding of the spatial and structural differences between the local
sector and the sectors that cater to overseas male clients.
During my seven months of fieldwork, I spent three days conducting field
research and three days writing field notes per week. On a typical research
day, I spent the mornings in the barbershops that double as brothels where
women in the low-end sector work, afternoons having lunch or coffee and
shopping with clients and sex workers, and evenings in bars with mid-tier and
high-end sex workers. I spoke mostly in Vietnamese with clients and sex
workers in the low-end sector and a mixture of English and Vietnamese with
men and women in the mid-tier and high-end sectors. However, I wrote all of
my field notes in English, while highlighting key phrases in Vietnamese. I
used pseudonyms in my field notes to ensure confidentiality in the event that
local authorities asked to look through my computer. This paper is based on
my extensive observations and informal interviews with fifty-four sex
376 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

workers and twenty-six clients. I studied twelve workers and four clients in
low-end sector, thirty-one workers and fifteen clients in the mid-tier sector,
and eleven workers and seven clients in the high-end sector. For analytical
depth, I present three different case studies that broadly exemplify the sexual,
relational, and intimate relationships between clients and sex workers in
these three sectors of HCMC’s sex industry.

The Low-End Sector: “Touching Them Makes

Me Want To Throw Up!”
Sex workers who catered to local Vietnamese men generally engaged in
sexual exchanges that involved direct sex-for-money transactions. These
women worked in brothels disguised as barbershops in HCMC’s Districts
Ten and Four, the Binh Thanh district, and the area surrounding the Tan Son
Nhat Airport. These districts were roughly forty-five minutes from District
One, which is the main business district where tourists tend to concentrate.
All sex workers worked during the day, from ten in the morning until about
six in the evening.
This schedule disguised their work from local officials, extended family
members, and friends. All twelve women in this sector were single mothers
between the ages of twenty-nine and sixty who had no more than a grade
school education. They were poor, urban women or rural migrants who once
worked in the service or manufacturing sectors before entering sex work. Sex
workers in this sector provided men with a variety of sexual labors (Boris,
Gilmore, and Parrenas 2010), offering a quick orgasm within a twenty-min-
ute interaction. Men typically paid three U.S. dollars for this service, and
clients and sex workers rarely negotiated these prices. On average, women
earned hundred dollars per month, which was forty to fifty dollars more than
they would earn working in local restaurants, legitimate barbershops, or as
house cleaners.
The older sex workers, aged between forty-five and sixty, said that they
resorted to sex work because their former employers preferred to hire younger
women. Phuong, a sixty-year-old woman, had worked in the shrimp industry
for a wage of roughly fifty dollars per month. She entered the sex industry
after her employer fired her for being too old. The women in this sector
worked on the margins of HCMC’s city center and did not have the economic
resources to enter higher-paying sectors. They could not afford the clothing,
make-up, or plastic surgery required of women who worked as disguised
bartenders in the mid-tier and high-end sectors, nor could they pay for their
own drinks in the bars where high-end women spent time. I asked Dung, a
Hoang 377

thirty-four-year-old single mother of two, why she worked for such low pay
and why she did not try to find work in District One, the business district,
where she could capitalize on the flow of men with overseas money. She said
very bluntly:

I am old. I have a kid. I don’t look pretty. I don’t speak English or even
know how to get to those places [that cater to foreign men]. I don’t
have the clothes or money to walk around in those kinds of bars so I
could never work there. I could never compete with those women.
Money is never easy to get from white men.1

In addition to the lack of money to move in and out of foreign spaces,

these women did not have the cultural or linguistic skills that would allow
them to interact with foreign men. As Dung states above, her inability to
speak English and communicate with white men prevented her from entering
higher-paying sectors. Moreover, although District One was only a thirty- to
forty-minute motorbike ride from the neighborhoods where they worked,
many of the women in the low-end sector had never been there. They did not
know how to get there and could not afford the fare into the city center (two
dollars). Even if they could afford to spend a day in HCMC’s District One,
many women did not know where to go or what to do there.
At the beginning of my research, I naively invited some of these women
to have lunch or dinner in District One. I quickly realized that they felt
extremely uncomfortable, if not illegitimate, in these spaces. Truc, for exam-
ple, said:

I do not go into those restaurants that mostly foreigners go into because

I am so afraid that I will sit down, look at the prices on the menu, and
panic because I couldn’t even afford the cheapest thing there. If I
turned around and walked out everyone would laugh at me.

In sum, sex workers’ lack of economic and cultural resources placed them in
a sector of sex work where they engaged in relations of subordination with
poor local men.
In addition to the lack of economic resources and cultural capital that lim-
ited them, the women in the low-end sector did not have the body capital to
participate in mid-tier or high-end sectors. As Mai, a woman from the Mekong
Delta who worked in one of these barbershops, stated, “I am in my mid-thir-
ties, I have a child, and I am not good looking. . . . So I don’t have a choice
but to do this.” While women who catered to foreign men reinvested
378 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

a significant portion of their earnings into their appearance by purchasing

cosmetic surgery, clothing, accessories, and make-up, the women in the low-
end sector spent all of their earnings on necessities like housing, food, and
schooling for their children. As such, the women in the low-end sector typi-
cally wore the same plain house-like clothing in both their homes and work-
places. They did not dress up for work or wear any clothing that marked them
in an explicitly sexual way. In fact, these women’s bodies resembled the bod-
ies of poor homemakers, sisters, or mothers. They were women who shared
similar class dispositions with poor local men.
Although they were not forced into sex work, many entered and continued
to do this work as a means to escape poverty. The women in the low-end sec-
tor were among the most vulnerable and the most exploited. These women
did not have much choice in terms of which clients they would service. In
most cases, they served any client, because they needed the money. Mai said:

What we do is dirty. Old dirty men come in here and they are rough
with my body. They don’t care about me because to them I am just a
worker. When I first started working, I would throw up after each cli-
ent, but now I am used to it.

Many of these women serviced poor local men whose bodies sometimes
made the women vomit. If hand jobs and oral sex did not make the client reach
orgasm, the women would proceed to intercourse as a last resort. Nine of the
twelve women told me that they vomited when they first started working after
feeling the men’s semen in their mouths or their hands because they were dis-
gusted by the men’s bodies. As Tram explained to me, “[when] they are old you
have to work harder to get them to ‘go’ . . . [or] they [truck drivers] have been
driving for a long time without taking a shower so they smell.” Vomiting was a
physical reaction to being disgusted with men’s bodies in general, and espe-
cially to older men’s bodies who were not clean. All of them told me that they
occasionally cried to each other because they were engaged in the kind of work
that, as Tram stated, “only women at the bottom of society do.”
Condoms cost roughly forty cents each, a price that low-end sector sex
workers considered very expensive. Therefore, they first tried to make the
men ejaculate through means other than intercourse. Men sometimes pro-
vided the women with condoms. However, if condoms were not available,
women engaged in intercourse with the men without using protection. Sex
workers in this sector rarely carried condoms, as Nguyet explained to me:
Hoang 379

I do not carry condoms because if the police come in here and inspect
my shop and they find condoms they can arrest me for being a prosti-
tute. I try to make a man “go” with my hands or my mouth first. If I
cannot get them to “go” after that then I will have sex with him. . . .
Then I will go to the pharmacy to buy a pill to take right after to make
sure I do not get pregnant.

When I asked male clients about condom use, some men said that they
always provided the woman with a condom, because they feared getting sick.
Male clients in the local sector were the hardest for me to engage in con-
versation. I often relied on the motorbike taxi drivers to help initiate these
conversations, often over coffee or cigarettes as clients waited for service.
Conversations with these men, and with the sex workers they visited, often
focused on what led them to these sexual service locations.
The following vignette illustrates the logic of “responsibility” that guided
interactions between sex workers and their clients in the low-end sector. One
afternoon, while I was sitting with women in the Binh Thanh District at a
local café that doubled as a sex shop, I met a client named Khoa, a man in his
midforties. Over the course of about an hour, I learned that Khoa worked for
a local construction company where he earned roughly hundred dollars per
month. He was married and had a one-year-old son who lived with his wife
in Ca Mau village, where relatives helped her raise their child. When I asked
Khoa what brought him to these establishments, he replied:

Look, you probably think all men are doing dirty things, but you
brought yourself here, so if you want to know, I’ll just tell you straight,
and if it makes you uncomfortable, then it’s your fault for wasting your
time in these places. My wife is in the village with my kid, and I am
here in the city alone. I need to take care of certain things, and either I
could leave her for another woman, or come here while I wait for her
to come back.

I asked him, “Does your wife know you come here?” He said, “She’s too
innocent. She doesn’t know about these places.” We sat in silence for a while,
and then I asked Loc if men like Khoa ever go to women working in District
One. Loc turned to me and said, “He can’t afford them.” Khoa then turned
and said, “I do not have a lot of money. Those women would never waste
their time with a man like me. Why would they when the white men can give
them more?”
380 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

Poor local sex workers provided sexual services to poor local men. Women
like Dung and Mai and men like Khoa were located so far from the city center
that they could not afford the cost of transportation into District One, where
the mid-tier and high-end sectors dominated. Moreover, for local men and
women, sex often occurred within the confines of these barbershops or cafés.
Very rarely did clients and sex workers conduct sex work in other spaces.
Low-end sex workers’ inability to afford motorbike rides into the city cen-
ter or the cost of food and drinks in District One, where mid-tier and high-end
workers operate, positioned them in relations of subordination with men like
Khoa, wherein women like Ha provided sexual services that oftentimes made
them vomit. These women had the least control over their work. Because
there were so few clients who came in on any given day, women in the low-
end sector could rarely refuse service to clients. Instead, they strategized to
finish their clients off as quickly as possible to avoid vaginal sex. Similarly,
clients in this sector minimized interactions with the women, as I often wit-
nessed men come and go relatively quickly. On the occasions that men did
stay to drink coffee or smoke, they rarely conversed with the women.
Although some women had a set of regular clients, these clients were pur-
chasing a product—an orgasm—and nothing more. Sex workers and clients
engaged in direct sex-for-money exchanges where economic and intimate
relationships were not closely intertwined.

Mid-Tier Sector: “She’s a Smart Woman Who Is

Just Trapped in a Poor Country”
The “backpacker” area in HCMC is well known as the central location for
people traveling on a budget. Lining the streets are souvenir shops, mini-
hotels, tourist agencies, restaurants, cafés, and bars catering to foreigners.
The majority of shopkeepers in this area speak some English. I conducted
participant observation in seven of the roughly twenty-five bars located in
this area. The clients I met in this sector ranged in age from twenty-two to
sixty-five, and all were white Americans, Europeans, or Australians. White
men in the mid-tier sector viewed themselves as savvy travelers who were
able to take advantage of a Third-World sexscape (Brennan 2004). They
tended to stay in a host of mini-hotels, searching for the “authentic”
Vietnamese experience. For example, Adam, a thirty-five year old man from
Houston, Texas, remarked:

I want to see the real Vietnam, not the part of Vietnam that caters to
tourists. I want to eat local food, talk with local people, and see how
Hoang 381

people here really live. Most families here live off of one or two hun-
dred dollars a month. I did not come here to hang out in places that
serve only Western food and see white people.

As a result, mid-tier sex workers who cater to men like Adam provided
their clients with more than just sex. They served as tour guides and cultural
brokers, providing men with an “authentic” Third-World experience.
Sex workers in this sector exploited the transnational sex market by devel-
oping relations with overseas men and engaging in what Smith and Guarnizo
(1998) refer to as practices of “transnationalism from below.” While the
women in this sector were certainly involved in direct sex-for-money
exchanges, they also made use of their cultural capital to feign love and pro-
vide their clients with a variety of other services. The following account illus-
trates how transnationally savvy sex workers create and sustain intimate
relations through their English-language skills and their bodies.
I met Linh in June 2006 and continued to maintain ties with her through
August 2007. Linh was working in Pink Star, a bar located in the backpacker
area of District One. At 5 foot 6 inches, Linh was taller than most Vietnamese
women and had a slender body and long legs. She always wore tight pink and
black dresses that accentuated her thin legs. Like many of the women work-
ing in this sector, Linh invested more than a thousand dollars in a variety of
body modifications: breast implants, eyebrow tattoos, Botox injections in her
forehead, and liposuction to flatten her stomach. While nearly all of the
women in the low-end sector were rural migrants, women like Linh tended to
come from urban families that were poor by city standards, but possessed
more economic resources than the families of women in the lower-end sector.
They were aware of places that catered to overseas white men looking for an
authentic Vietnamese experience, and all of them could speak some English.
All of these women worked in local bars disguised as bartenders. However,
they did not receive a wage for bartending, instead earning money from tips
and from their sexual liaisons with their clients. Many of these women
learned English by talking to overseas men in the bars, and the more ambi-
tious ones spent their earnings on formal English-language classes. Investing
in her body and in English-language skills enabled Linh to initiate and estab-
lish ties with white men with economic resources from developed nations.
On one evening, a client named Jeff, a man in his midfifties from New
York, walked in and sat down in Pink Star. Jeff was dressed in khaki shorts, a
short-sleeve button-up shirt, and flip-flop sandals. He was sweating, so Linh
walked over with a wet towel and wiped down his face, something she fre-
quently did for men to demonstrate her care for them. The two sat and made
382 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

small talk, despite Linh’s limited English skills. They exchanged typical
questions including, “Where are you from?” “How long are you here for?”
“What do you do?” “How old are you?” “Where does your family live?”
After five drinks, Linh moved in, nudged him, and said, “You take me home
with you.” He smiled and said, “Okay.” After which she said, “You pay me
hundred dollars?” He laughed and said, “Too much . . . I pay you fifty.” They
smiled silently at each other for several minutes before she said, “Okay,
sixty.” They got up and left.
The next morning, Linh called and asked me to go with her and her daugh-
ter to a local amusement park. After several hours of walking through the
park, we sat down to eat while her daughter took a short nap. During this
time, Linh told me that she used her employment at the bar to meet clients
from overseas. With clients she knew were in Vietnam for a short period, she
was direct and asked if they wanted to go with her for fifty to seventy dollars
a night. However, with clients who visited Vietnam for an extended time, she
engaged in relational exchanges in an attempt to develop long-term relation-
ships that sometimes turned into complicated boyfriend–girlfriend relations.
Nearly all of the women in this sector had multiple “boyfriends.” When I
asked her if she loved any of the men she dated, she said:

When I first started working, I was young and not so smart. I would
fall in love easily and then get hurt when things did not work out. Now,
I don’t let myself fall in love. I think I can grow to love the man who
takes the best care of me in Vietnam or some other country. I want to
change my life first and fall in love second.

In both long-term and short-term relations, Linh always attempted to

develop remittance relationships after the men left Vietnam. She also dated
multiple men as a strategy to migrate abroad: as she reasoned, if one man was
unwilling to help her migrate, then she had other men who might take her.
After leaving the amusement park, Linh asked me to translate the first of
what turned into more than hundred e-mails between her and James, a sixty-
seven-year-old Australian man who owned a small business before retiring.
She met James in December 2005 at Pink Star while he was on a holiday in
Vietnam. Their relationship began with long-distance cellular phone text
messages that became too costly, so she switched to e-mail. In the e-mails I
translated for her between June 2006 and March 2007, she developed multi-
ple crisis scenarios. For example, she told stories about her allegedly dying
father, the debts she needed to pay to avoid death threats from the mafia, the
possible loss of her house, and her desire to open a café so that she could
Hoang 383

eventually become economically self-sufficient. She wanted to build an

emotional relationship with James so that he would sympathize with her
“struggles” and send her money. James deposited several chunks of money
ranging from five hundred to five thousand dollars in her bank account to
help her through these crises, in addition to monthly remittances of three
hundred dollars a month to pay for English lessons and beauty school.
Through these transactions, by August 2006, she received a monthly remit-
tance of about seven hundred dollars from three overseas men, two from
Australia and one from the United States. Linh convinced all three men that
each was the only man in her life. While Linh did take English lessons, she
had several men paying for the same set of classes, which provided her with
extra money to pay for plastic surgery or purchase nicer clothing and fancier
phones. Women like Linh capitalized on global linkages by creating and
maintaining a series of fictitious stories about their lives in HCMC.
I first met James that day through Yahoo Messenger, an Internet chat sys-
tem. Linh introduced me to him as someone studying transnational relation-
ships. To my surprise, James took an interest in my project, and he and I went
on to communicate via e-mail, Internet chat, and postal mail more than sixty
times between July 2006 and August 2007. In August 2007, I met James in
person at a local café in District One. The sixty-seven-year-old Australian
decided that he was going to spend the rest of his life traveling as a back-
packer on a budget.
In several conversations that I had with James, he repeatedly described
Linh in these terms:

Linh is an honest person; she is a strong woman with a lot of integrity.

You know she only went to school through sixth grade, but she can
speak English fairly well. We talk about many things. I love Linh a lot
and I want what is best for her. She is a smart and intelligent woman
who is just living in a poor country where there aren’t very many
opportunities. I want to help her start her own small business in
Vietnam, you know, so that she can be self-sufficient and not have to
work in a bar.

In his e-mails to me, James did not speak of a sex-for-money exchange.

Instead, he framed his relationship with Linh as one based on true love. James
stated that he was in love with Linh, and that he believed she was truly in love
with him. He expressed strong convictions that he was going to be the man
who would “save” her from her life as a bar girl. The moral characteristics
(Lamont 1992) of honesty, hard work, and personal integrity that James
384 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

attributed to Linh motivated him to send her large sums of money without
questioning her stories of need. He sympathized with her because, as he said,
“as a first-world man with so much privilege, I felt that it was important
to help.”
Client–sex worker relationships in the mid-tier sector occurred in multiple
sites, including bars, cafés, restaurants, homes, hotel rooms, and over the
Internet. These relations ranged from short-term sex-for-money exchanges to
long-term relationships. As such, clients and sex workers engage in a form of
“relational work” (Zelizer 2005) as both parties share personal stories
(whether true or false) with each other. At the beginning of most encounters
between these sex workers and clients, there is a clear “price” for the services
of sex work. However, as their relationships develop, intimate caring and
sexual labors become complexly intertwined with economic relations.
As relations between men and women transformed from client–worker rela-
tionships to boyfriend–girlfriend relationships, one way that sex workers
expressed care for their boyfriends was by discontinuing condom use.
Moreover, it became less clear how men should compensate women or which
services the men thought deserved economic compensation. I watched James,
for example, purchase clothing and jewelry for Linh in local shops. However,
the vast majority of the material support that he gave her was in the form of
cash transfers, ostensibly to alleviate her life of poverty.
In August 2009, I met with Linh in Ho Chi Minh City to see how her life
had changed. Linh and James got married in 2007, and after a year and a half,
she was finally granted a visa to migrate to Australia. At her farewell party, I
asked, “Do you love him?” She replied, mixing Vietnamese with the English
that she often practiced with me to prepare for her move abroad:

We go through a lot together to get visa and he work so hard for it.
Now I love him, yes. Trong doi nay hen sui thoi, em cam thay rat may
man. (In life it is all about luck, I feel really lucky.)

While most of the men and women in my study at least attempted to main-
tain long-distance ties with each other as boyfriends and girlfriends, only a
handful were able to maintain these relations across distance, time, and the
multiple state barriers inhibiting migration. As of June 2009, only five of the
thirty-one women I studied secured visas to migrate via marriage. Sixteen
others continued working in different bars or returned to their villages to
marry local men. I lost touch with the other ten. However, the relationship
between Linh and James illuminates how sex workers in HCMC’s middle tier
self-consciously traverse the border between the (economic) transactional
Hoang 385

and the intimate spheres. Indeed, it is global socioeconomic inequality

itself—and moral discourses about it—that make this imagined border
porous. Linh and James began their relationship as worker and client, and
while Linh held on to multiple men until she was able to secure her visa to
migrate, she eventually fell in love with James. Vietnam’s status as a poor
country allowed Linh, and other women in the same position, to represent
themselves as victims of global poverty, generating sympathy and regular,
large remittances from several men like James. Linh’s ability to speak
English, navigate foreign spaces, act as a personal tour guide, and induce
feelings of love and sympathy in her clients made this relationship possible.
Her simultaneous involvement with multiple men across transnational social
fields also allowed her to choose whom she would serve, and determine the
country to which she would eventually emigrate. Likewise, James drew on
moral discourses about global inequality to explain why Linh entered sex
work. James and other foreign men like him also made use of the expanded
sexual and relational possibilities in a developing country like Vietnam,
where they knew their money would both buy more sex and go further to
support women they deemed deserving. The stories of men and women like
Linh and James demonstrate how seemingly powerless women can exploit
global and local systems of oppression by capitalizing on transnational link-
ages and engaging in relational sex with the hope of migrating to a country
with better opportunities, and if they are “lucky,” maybe even falling in love.

High-End Sector: “She’s Not a

Low-Class Dirty Girl”
Workers and clients in the high end of HCMC sex work engaged in intimate
exchanges, blurring the boundaries between economic and intimate relations
even further than those in the middle tier. The high-end sector was by far
most difficult for me to access because women’s status as sex workers was
not readily apparent. The women hung out in high-end bars and lounges as
bar-goers rather than as bar employees. Moreover, the relations between
clients and sex workers often resembled boyfriend–girlfriend relations, mak-
ing it difficult for me to differentiate between women who were working and
those who were “just hanging out.” I met many middle-class women in high-
end bars who were not sex workers. However, because I repeatedly showed
up at these bars alone, many of the women thought that I was a working girl
and would invite me to come have a drink with them. Over time, however, I
developed a rapport with various women in the bars and talked with them
386 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

about my research topic. Some eventually opened up to me about their expe-

riences as high-end sex workers.
Clients in the high-end sector engaged in relationships with sex workers
who possessed levels of economic and cultural capital similar to them. These
men were not looking for poor women whom they could save. Instead, they
sought young, desirable women with options. Unlike the women in the mid-
tier sector, the women who catered to wealthy Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese)
did not come from poverty. In fact, many of them came from relatively
wealthy families who owned small businesses and had the social networks
and resources to comfortably navigate some of HCMC’s most expensive
establishments. Although women in the high-end sector often received money
from their clients, sex workers and clients both framed the transfer of money
as a gift, never as a form of payment, and most definitely not as a way to help
save women from poverty.
In the next account, I illustrate the various forms of economic, cultural,
and bodily resources that women in this sector possess. I met Ngoc, a tall,
slender twenty-four-year-old woman, in May 2007 inside Dragonfly, one of
HCMC’s most expensive bars. A single drink cost approximately seven dol-
lars. A bottle of Rémy Martin, a French cognac favored by Vietnamese
patrons, cost between a hundred and five hundred dollars. One evening, I
arrived at the bar around 9:00 p.m., which was considered early. Ngoc and I
were the only two women in the bar, both of us sitting alone at different
tables. After about half an hour I walked over and introduced myself. We sat
and chatted over drinks and cigarettes. Over the course of the summer, I spent
several nights following her around the city. Ngoc’s family owned a small
electronics store in District One. She just started a job at Star Capital, an
investment company whose global headquarters was based in the United
States. She made roughly six hundred dollars per month working as an assis-
tant to an account manager. Like Ngoc, most of the women that I studied in
this sector had a college or university degree. Along with a well-respected
job, and a salary that was relatively high by HCMC standards, Ngoc’s parents
supplemented her income.
Ngoc always dressed in trendy clothing, owned several different designer
handbags, and owned multiple cell phones. While spending a day in a local
spa together, Ngoc described to me the various surgeries that she underwent
to enhance her body. She showed me her breast implants, saying [in
Vietnamese]:

Don’t these look good to you? I got them done in Thailand by a doctor
who specializes in breast implants for transsexuals: you know, men
Hoang 387

who want to be women. The doctor told me to stay with a C [size] cup
because they would look more natural and my nipples would look bet-
ter. You don’t want to get those cheap implants like a lot of girls in
Vietnam get [because] they look fake.

In addition to the breast implants, at the age of twenty-four Ngoc had nose
surgery to create a nose bridge, double eye-lid surgery, liposuction from her
thighs and stomach, and Botox injections in her forehead. With the exception
of the Botox, she completed all of these procedures in Thailand—a mark of
distinction that differentiated her from local women who could only afford
surgery in Vietnam. These cosmetic alterations cost her more than twelve
thousand dollars in total. Ngoc also had regular appointments at a local spa,
where she got a massage and a facial once a week. She spent several hours in
local beauty salons getting her hair and make-up done prior to going out at
night. For Ngoc, having plastic surgery, wearing designer clothing, spending
days in spas, and getting her hair and nails done at beauty salons distinguished
her from poorer Vietnamese women who catered to white men.
Ngoc and I also spent several nights out in cafés, restaurants, and bars
where she introduced me to many of her friends, who were local bar and
restaurant owners. These men and women often referred clients to Ngoc. On
our outings together, rich local men would often proposition Ngoc. She
always declined because, as she said, “They would automatically know that I
was working, and if something bad happened, everyone would know I was
working.” I asked her, “What about Western guys?” She said, “Those are for
the village girls who want to migrate. If I go with a white guy, everyone will
know I’m a working girl.” In addition to the rich local Vietnamese clients and
white businessmen, she also turned down several Viet Kieu men. When I
asked why she turned down so many clients when she had not been with
anyone for nearly two weeks, she explained:

You have to know how to pick out men. Many Viet Kieu men come to
Vietnam and they show off, but they are actually poor men. You can
tell the difference between rich and poor men by the kind of clothes
they wear, their watches, and the kinds of places where they hang out.
Poorer Viet Kieu men will eat at places that don’t cost much, but men
with money, know about good restaurants.

While overseas Viet Kieu men certainly leverage the power of the dollar to
consume more in Vietnam than they could in the United States, Ngoc used
the consumption patterns of male clients to distinguish richer Viet Kieu men
388 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

from working-class Viet Kieu men. Women like Ngoc avoided men whom
they thought were “working-class Viet Kieu” because these women had no
desire to develop relationships that would result in marriage and migration.
As Ngoc said:

I love Vietnam and I am comfortable here. I don’t want to live any-

where else. In Vietnam, when you have money, you can afford every-
thing. I have aunts and uncles in America, and you know in America
people have to clean their own houses, buy their own food, and cook
it themselves. I speak English, but I know that I could never get a job
overseas that will pay me enough to live like this. Life here is just so
much easier if you have money. If my family was poor, I think I would
want to marry someone who will take me to the U.S., so that I could
live a better life. I am not poor. Why would I give up this life?

Ngoc’s ability to live a high-end lifestyle year-round kept her in short-

term, noncommittal relationships with several Viet Kieu men, who spent large
sums of money on her while they were in Vietnam. She was aware that immi-
grants from Vietnam to first-world countries rarely find coveted jobs in the
primary labor market, often ending up with low-status, low-paying jobs
instead (Thai 2008). She had no desire to marry and migrate abroad, because
the possibility of downward mobility was too great. On another occasion, I
asked Ngoc, “If you have the money already, and you don’t want to live in the
U.S., why do you spend your time with these men?” She responded [in
English]:

I am twenty-six years old and I don’t want to settle down yet. Marriage
here is not easy. I see so many husbands cheat on their wives with
younger, more attractive women and I want to have fun for as long as
I can. It’s temporary: these men will eventually go back home, and it
is nice to be spoiled with nice gifts and extra money. I have fun doing
it. I’m young, so why not, right? I can’t do this when I’m in my thirties,
so that’s when I’ll get married.

Ngoc’s social, cultural, economic, and physical advantages allowed her to

move with ease in spaces where high-end Viet Kieu men spent their time and
money. Her body capital, economic resources, and ability to convey a high-
class image enabled her to exert power over her clients. In a conversation
about her two boyfriends, she said to me:
Hoang 389

I have to think fast on my feet sometimes. There are times when I have
too many men to juggle. I do not want them to think that I go with
everybody, so sometimes I lie and tell them that I am on a business trip
in Hanoi, I am busy with the anniversary of the death of someone in
my family, or I have too much work. I get more money when I can
manage more relationships but it’s like I have to chay show (run
around from one client to the next in the same night).

Women like Ngoc carefully managed their relationships with their clients
by conveying the image that they were busy, important, and highly sought
after. The power that women were able to exert over their clients enabled
them to command more attention and choose their clients carefully. Moreover,
because Ngoc did not need the money she received from clients, she could be
creative in her ways of asking men for more expensive gifts. This also allowed
her to strategize how to procure money from her clients. The women in this
sector never explicitly asked for money like the women in the low-end and
mid-tier sectors did. Instead, they would gently say that they wanted money
to shop or buy something new. If clients failed to acquiesce, sex workers
would stop returning phone calls or responding to the clients’ text messages.
I watched several relationships between men and women dissolve as clients
failed to compensate their women properly.
In June 2007, Ngoc introduced me to Tuan, a Viet Kieu from France who
had worked as an orthodontist for fifteen years in France before returning to
Vietnam to open a practice. During one of four informal interviews with Tuan
over coffee, he remarked:

I am thirty-nine, almost forty years old, and I am not ready to settle

down with anyone, but I don’t want to spend my days alone either. This
is a fun city to go out in at night. I don’t want to be tied down, so I
spend my time with girls who are sort of working. I mean, I know that
I have to buy her things and spend money on her. Otherwise, she won’t
waste her time with me. I can’t be with just any girl, either. I need to
be with someone who is young and beautiful. When you go out in
Vietnam, people see you. If you have money, you can’t have a cheap
girl.

Viet Kieu men looked for intimate relationships with local women that
involved more than just sex. These men purchased the services of women
whose skills and looks distinguished them from the lower-class sex workers
who accompanied white men. Men like Tuan wanted to be around women
390 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

who helped them display their masculinity in very public places (Allison
1994). High-end sex workers were better than women in other tiers at dis-
guising the nature of their relationships as boyfriend–girlfriend relations
rather than client–worker relations, because they did not work as disguised
bartenders. Instead, they could afford to pay for drinks and services in the
high-end bars and cafés that cater to foreigners. High-end men like Tuan
spent large sums of money on women like Ngoc because, as he said [in
English]:

Saigon is a small city. In Paris, you know I could walk into a bar and
drop over a thousand dollars and no one would notice. In France, rich
people hide their money. Here in Saigon, it’s different. When I walk
into a bar, the ten men at the door to greet me will walk me to my table.
When I spend five hundred dollars on a good bottle of Rémy [Martin],
people notice it. The same happens with girls. When I am with a young
pretty woman who other men want, I don’t mind spending money on
her for expensive things. She is not a low-class dirty girl who is going
to waste her time. Besides, when other people see her with an expen-
sive phone or handbag, it makes me look good.

Moreover, while relations of intimacy certainly involved sex in private

spaces, the relationships took place in very public places like local bars,
cafés, restaurants, hotels, and on the streets. The multiple sites of intimate
labors went hand in hand with the multiple forms of compensation. These
clients often spent large sums of money on expensive cellular phones, motor-
bikes, and designer handbags and clothing for the sex workers, all of which
served as markers of distinction. The clients were often willing to spend lib-
erally on gifts for their women because—as Thanh, a computer technician
from Paris, explained—“I don’t go to those low-class dirty girls, you know?
These girls are young and pretty, and other men want them. You know they
are smart, they speak English, and they come from good families.” In short,
the purchase of intimacy from high-end sex workers involved the deploy-
ment of economic, cultural, and bodily capital. In return, high-end clients
compensated women with expensive gifts and cash. However, the cash was
always framed as a gift and not, as in the middle and lower sectors, a way of
fulfilling a need.
Viet Kieu men also sought relations with local women who embodied their
ideals of Vietnamese femininity. When I asked Tuan why he preferred local
Vietnamese women to Viet Kieu women, he said:
Hoang 391

The women whom I dated back in France all had careers. One was a
lawyer. [She] loved me a lot, but she was too independent, and as a
man, I just wanted to feel like I could protect her. I didn’t feel that way.
I didn’t feel like a man who could take care of her, because she was
just too independent.

As Tuan stated, Vietnamese women could make men like him feel good
because, unlike women in the West, they knew how to foreground their
dependence on men and shunt their autonomy into the background in a way
that made men feel important.
Viet Kieu men, unlike white men, had the linguistic and cultural resources
to participate in the high-end sector. Whereas in the low-end and mid-tier
sectors clients and sex workers talked more directly and explicitly about
forms of payment, relations between men and women in the high-end sector
often involved more indirect and discreet exchanges. In fact, because so
many of the high-end sex workers disguised their labor so skillfully, many of
the white men in my study could not figure out how to engage in relations
with high-end women. In contrast, Viet Kieu men were comfortable partici-
pating in the oblique, elaborate pas de deux that high-end sex workers
expected. This was most evident in moments of rupture, when relationships
between clients and sex workers in the high-end sector grew precarious.
Clients understood that they needed to compensate the women in some way;
otherwise, their relationships would dissolve. As Trung, a thirty-two-year-old
Viet Kieu from Orange County, California, observed:

I was with this girl. She was hot! When we got together she would ask
me for small gifts and what not, so I bought her bebe [an American
designer brand] dresses and perfumes. I gave her money to go shop-
ping. You know, stuff like that. I knew I had to give her stuff or she
would just go with a richer guy. But then one day, she asked me to buy
her a motorbike. I told her that I would buy her an Attila [worth two
thousand dollars], but she told me that a woman like her could not be
seen driving a cheap bike around because people would look at her and
judge her. She wanted me to buy her a Dylan or an SH. Those bikes
cost nine thousand dollars. I said no, and that’s it—we were over. She
stopped answering my phone calls and text messages.

Trung’s inability to buy an expensive motorbike for his girlfriend eventu-

ally led to the end of his relationship. Without his girlfriend explicitly telling
392 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

him that she did not want to waste her time with him, he understood that once
the money and gifts fell away, so would the relationship.
In my conversations with high-end sex workers and clients, the physical
act of sex served both as a way for sex workers to distinguish themselves as
upscale women and to make clients feel more intimately involved. These
women often withheld sex from their clients, projecting the image that they
were not “easy” girls who would go with just anyone. When they did have
sex, the women made the clients believe that they were monogamous part-
ners and could therefore have sex without protection. Most of the clients in
my project, however, said that they used protection because they did not want
to get a woman pregnant accidentally. As Huy said, “If I accidentally get a
woman pregnant, I will have to give her money for a long time, and I do not
want any woman to hold that over my head.”
Economic and intimate relations in this sector were closely intertwined, as
both clients and sex workers went to great lengths to distinguish themselves
as high-end. The consumption practices of high-end women enabled men like
Tuan to distinguish themselves from the white men who participated in the
mid-tier market. While some white men spent just as much money in their
relations with mid-tier sex workers, they justified their consumption prac-
tices in different ways. White men engaged in relations with women who
“needed” help, while Viet Kieu men engaged in relations with women who
helped them assert a particular class status in public. This cultural logic of
desire (Constable 2003) is embedded not only in a client’s ability to engage
in relations with high-end women but also in the sex worker’s ability to dis-
tinguish herself from mid-tier and low-end sex workers who do not have her
bodily, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. Women like Ngoc are among
the most sophisticated workers because they have the money, skill, and looks
to mask their work. Clients in the high-end sector pay for intimate relation-
ships characterized by a hidden set of intimate labors that are intertwined
with a complex set of economic arrangements. While low-end women pro-
vide their clients mainly with sexual services, women in the high-end sector
provide their clients with short-term physical, sexual, and emotionally inti-
mate encounters.

Conclusion
In today’s global sex work circuit, men and women from around the world
enter into relations with each other across national borders, profoundly
changing the social structure of commercial sex. Studies on sex work in the
new global economy point to the migratory survival circuits (Sassen 2002)
Hoang 393

of poor women in Third World economies on the periphery of the global

system struggling against debt and trying to escape poverty. By dividing the
global economy into two parts, rich nations of the First World and poor
nations of the Third World, scholars document how the bifurcated global
economy is highly racialized and unequal. Research on global sex work
focuses overwhelmingly on the movement of white men from Western
nations to developing nations where they can purchase cheap sex from exotic
women. In this article I complicate the existing framework of global sex
work by analyzing a sex industry in a developing economy where not all
women are poor or exploited and where white men do not always command
the highest paying sector of sex work.
Turning to Vietnam’s emergent international city, I argue that globaliza-
tion does not create a bifurcated market between the global rich and the local
poor. Instead, I argue that we need to look at differences within various types
of sex work as global processes expand the sex industry creating multiple
markets and reproducing class structures similar to those found in other types
of occupations. Sex work in today’s global economy looks more like an
“industry” (Wonders and Michalowski 2001) that is organized and stratified
according to workers’ differential access to economic, cultural, and bodily
resources.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s theories of capital and Zelizer’s concept of inti-
mate relations, I extend the literature on sex work by paying particular atten-
tion to the structural positions of both sex workers and their clients. I
demonstrate how some sex workers were able to enter higher-paying sectors
of HCMC’s sex industry, while others were limited to lower-paying sectors
where they had little control over the types of clients they serviced. Contrary
to the research of Rosen and Venkatesh (2008), not all of the women in this
study sought work in the informal economy because they did not have access
to paid employment in the formal economy. Women with money and desir-
able bodies entered into relations with expatriates like Tuan, while poor local
women tended to service men like Khoa.
This article illustrates how men and women capitalized on HCMC’s posi-
tion in the global political economy in different ways. As an emergent inter-
national city, HCMC provides marginal men from strong nations with a place
to expand their relational possibilities across transnational spaces and serve
as economic providers to women from poor nations. At the same time,
Western visions of Vietnamese women as struggling mightily to overcome
Third World poverty allow the mid-tier sex workers to extract regular pay-
ments from white patrons in Australia, Europe, and the United States.
Ironically, however, it is Vietnam’s recent economic growth that defines the
394 Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(4)

dynamics of the high-end sex-work sector. As Vietnam emerges as a “rising-

dragon” economy (Hayton 2010), Viet Kieus return to Vietnam in droves,
chasing not only jobs and investment opportunities but also social status,
nostalgia, and the company of sophisticated women. HCMC’s sex industry
provides Viet Kieu men with public spaces where they can achieve a sense of
dignity and actively contest global racial hierarchies through their distinctive
patterns of consumption.
From a theoretical and methodological perspective, this is one of the first
studies to examine both sides of client–worker relationships. The current lit-
erature focuses heavily on the sex worker’s side of the relationship and
ignores the diverse motivations of men who purchase sex (Weitzer 2010).
Moreover, while interview data allow us to understand individuals’ motiva-
tions and interpretations of their relationships, research on sex work benefits
from in-depth ethnography that captures dynamic relationships between cli-
ents and sex workers that are class coded. By bringing the work of Bourdieu
(1984) and Zelizer (2005) together, I highlight how structural factors lead to
three types of exchanges: economic, relational, and intimate. This article
challenges the assumption that sex work occurs only within bounded spheres
of strict sex-for-money exchanges. Clients and sex workers in the low-end
sector engaged in economic exchanges that involved direct sex-for-money
exchanges, while men and women in the mid-tier and high-end sectors
engaged in relational and intimate exchanges by creating and sustaining ties
to one another. As clients and sex workers negotiate the transactional and
intimate spheres of their relationships in Vietnam’s globalizing economy of
sex, the purchase of intimacy involves the sale of more than just sex, for a
wide range of payments that go beyond money.

Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Professors Raka Ray, Irene Bloemraad, Barrie Thorne, Peter
Zinoman, Micheal Burawoy, Catherine Valentine, Rhacel Parrenas, Marion Fourcade,
Neil Fligstein, and Claude Fischer for their penetrating questions. I am grateful to
Suowei Xiao, Leslie Wang, Julia Chuang, Jennifer Carlson, Trinh Tran, Heidi
Sarabia, Kate Mason, Natalie Newton, Ryan Calder, Rylan Higgins, and Lauren
Beresford for their comments and helpful suggestions. During the review process,
Marybeth Stalp and three reviewers provided numerous helpful suggestions and
insights. A special thank-you to Jessica Cobb for reading multiple drafts of this paper.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or
publication of this article.
Hoang 395

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.

Note
1. All of the conversations that I had with the women in the low-end sector took
place in Vietnamese. The quotations are my English translations.

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Bio
Kimberly Kay Hoang received her master’s degree in sociology from Stanford
University and is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the
University of California, Berkeley. She has published an article in Sexualities (2010)
that examines the various types of repressive and expressive emotional labors sex
workers perform in Ho Chi Minh City’s contemporary sex industry. Her dissertation
titled “New Economies of Sex and Intimacy in Vietnam” brings together the sphere
of intimate relations and the global economy by exploring how Ho Chi Minh City’s
sex industry is not just a microcosm of the global economy but also a vector shaping
financial globalization itself.