Dirt and Diamond: The Polarized Identities of Vietnamese in Cambodia

On July 31^st , 2017, The Cambodia Daily reported a case of mob beating in Kompong Thom province. The incident was egregious and messy. It occurred amid a wave of recurring rumors of children kidnapping across Cambodia, allegedly to have their organs harvested. The writer detailed,

“a mob of 1,000 people in Kompong Thom province on Saturday allegedly beat up two men wrongly suspected of the crime before proceeding to trash a commune police station, officials said.  An opposition activist was arrested and charged on Sunday for posting about the incident on Facebook, describing “three Vietnamese people suspected of kidnapping children to cut out their kidneys and eyes.”

Vietnamphobia – the omnipresent fear of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, or “Yuon” – is no novelty in Cambodia. During the French colonial period, administrative policies favoring the Vietnamese over the Khmers severed the age-old animosity between the two people. After independence in 1953, anti-Vietnamese rhetoric has stayed at the centered of each and every nationalist regime in Cambodia, including the genocidal Khmer Rouge. The mob-beating incident in July fits squarely into a political landscape highly sensitive, even antagonistic, to anything deemed “Vietnamese” in Cambodia.

My work this summer revolves around debunking the myth of “Vietnameseness.” I identified and explored different understandings of the Vietnamese in Cambodia. From dirt to diamond, this population includes disenfranchised Vietnamese Cambodians living in floating settlement along the Mekong, seasonal workers, professional girlfriends, and powerful Vietnamese businessmen in Phnom Penh. I contrasted different imagistic understandings of these groups to get at the polarized significance of Yuonness, or Vietnameseness. The fieldwork occurred in Chrouy Changvar, a peninsular across from the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, where a modern hotel owned by the most powerful Vietnamese in Cambodia stands atop the site of a sanguinary purge against ethnic Vietnamese people in 1970. The research leads me to further questions about the relationship between ethnicity, nationality, and the maintenance of hatred in post-conflict societies like Cambodia.