Eddie Truong - Week 9

In "Social Transformations From Virtual Communities" in Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora, Valverde points out the sustained activism that arises from instantaneous connections between diaspora and Viet Nam. Valverde also reveals that numerous instances in which Vietnamese diasporic engineers pushed the IT development of Viet Nam in the 1990's. As such, the author makes the connection that the Vietnamese diaspora was instrumental in pushing technological development in the homeland and continue to participate in its development.

This instance reminds me of the ways in which my family sustains our transnational connections to our extended family members. Through remittances, we are able to fund the sustained development and improved living conditions of our family members across the world from each other. Our family in Viet Nam depend on our remittances and enjoy a better standard of living. In this way, I observe that the desire to help our family trumps the desire to be antagonistic towards the communist state, although helping family in Viet Nam will also directly support the state as well. These sentiments are overlooked in order to attend to the immediate needs of the family. Will the diaspora continue to push the development of Viet Nam in this way and does this signal the start of new beginnings as well as new relationships between the diaspora and Viet Nam?