Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City

This book is about money. More specifically, it is about money in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest and most populous city. The city’s vibrant markets and alleyways teeming with homegrown businesses, its deepwater port and broad boulevards, and its ample restaurants and sidewalk vendors all signal the city’s rightful place as the country’s center of commerce and trade. But in this city so steeped in and structured by market transactions, money mediates more than exchange value. In its plural forms, money is a highly visible and material symbolic focus for commentary on national integrity, political authority, and membership in a globalizing world. The arguments I present in this book are neither limited to money nor restricted to Ho Chi Minh City. They apply as well to other infrastructures of modernity, whether financial institutions or engineering projects. As with these other systems, we trust money precisely because of its impersonal qualities and abstract capacities. But money can fail, sometimes spectacularly so. And money’s failure is instructive insofar as it exposes a series of conditions that were present but difficult to perceive. Currency stability throughout the twentieth century has proved elusive for both socialist and capitalist societies. Instability has defined modern economic experience, increasing people’s psychological investment in reliable money, a phenomenon that Karl Polanyi famously called currency consciousness, in which men and women everywhere appeared to regard stable money as the supreme need of society.