Through 67 interviews and 59 colour photographs, 'It's a Living' reveals the energy and struggle of the world of work in Vietnam today. A goldfish peddler installing aquariums, a business school graduate selling shoes on the sidewalk, a college student running an extensive multi-level sales network, and a girl doing promotions but intent on moving into management, are just a few of the people profiled.
Based on frank and freewheeling interviews conducted by students, the book engages a broad range of Vietnamese, both living in Vietnam and abroad, on their feelings about work, life and getting ahead. By providing a ground-level view of the texture of daily working life in the midst of rapid and unsettling change, the book reveals Vietnam today as a place where ordinary people are leveraging whatever assets they have, not just to survive, but to make a better life for themselves, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Review
...vividly illuminates the intersection between processes of social and economic transformation and the everyday ... We come to learn what change means, how it is experienced, and the myriad ways that ordinary people, in often quite extraordinary ways, navigate the shoals of life. Their stories are both instructive and humbling. --Jonathan Rigg, author of Unplanned Development: Tracking Change in South-East Asia
...beguiling in simplicity, but epic in scope, cutting a clean slice from the Vietnamese social economic strata from top to bottom ... The best non-fiction work on Vietnam I've seen in a decade. --Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish & Mandala: a Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
...captures much of the wit and personal drama of everyday Vietnamese life that is so often missing in academic studies ... a vibrant, nuanced journey... --David Biggs, author of Quagmire: nation-building and nature in the Mekong Delta
About the Author
Gerard SASGES is Assistant Professor in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
