“I Am Tired But If I Don't Try to Have Sex, My Wife Will Think I've Been Fooling around in the City”: Work, Migration, and Sex Among Vietnamese Migrant Laborers

Abstract

Mostly operating from a risk and risk-reduction paradigm, existing research on migrants in Vietnam tends to conceptualize sex and risky sexual behaviors as isolated life domains. This study begins to develop a contextually rich understanding of migrants’ sex lives by examining the relationships among sex, work, and the constant pendulum-like migrating movements of 23 Vietnamese married migrants in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Using data from in-depth interviews, it was found that most participants had no sex in the city; this was followed by visits to the home village, where they had sex with their spouses as often as possible to make up for the “long drought” in the city. Within this sexual schema, sex came secondary, and even peripherally, to migrants’ working lives; thus, exhaustion from work was cited by migrants as the overwhelming factor leading to their sexual problems. This study suggests that migrants’ intimate lives are more strongly linked to their working lives than has previously been recognized, and that their sexual behaviors should be viewed in tandem with the hardships of their working lives.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Institute for Social Development Studies for their support.

Notes

¹“Social evils” include a litany of activities and behaviors, including prostitution, drug use, gambling, and even karaoke. The government-backed campaign against social evils has intensified with the influx of Western media and goods.

²The three submissions in Confucian teaching are as follows: Submit to your father when you are home, to your husband when you are married, and to your son when the husband dies.

Note. N = 23. The government's minimum nationwide monthly wage is 540,000 dong (General Statistical Office, 2007). Participants’ jobs included the following: industry workers (n = 7; bricklayers, painters, welders, and tailors), street vendors (n = 8; selling eggs, fruits, vegetables, and recycled materials, as well as door-to-door marketing), service providers (n = 4; massage, cupping, nails, hair, waitressing, and maid); and drivers for hire (xe om; n = 4).

³Generally, city sexual attitudes include greater tolerance of premarital and extramarital sex (relative to rural areas) and permit greater sexual autonomy and power for women (Huong, 2010; Khuat, Le, & Nguyen, 2010; Ngo, Ross, & Ratliff, 2008).

⁴“Make-up sex” is used here because participants were trying to make up for lost opportunities to have regular sex while working in the city. This terminology should not be confused with the popular use of the same terminology to refer to sex following an argument with one's partner.

⁵Participants also disliked condoms because they interfered with sexual pleasure.

⁶This issue is analogous to the issue of domestic violence in Vietnam. Although one-half to one-third of Vietnamese women report having experienced acts that would be defined as domestic violence (including sexual violence) by Western criteria, most women do not see this behavior as criminal. Instead, the culture still dictates that marital violence against women is considered a private matter that should not be exposed to outsiders (Center for Studies and Applied Sciences, 2009).

⁷Giao, quoted earlier, is an exception. In his case, his guilt at not being able to satisfy his wife's sexual needs was compounded by the concern that she would assume he was cheating if he did not have sex with her.