Woman, Buddhist, Entrepreneur: Gender, Moral Values, and Class Anxiety in Late Socialist Vietnam

Abstract

By the 1990s, Doi Moi had sparked both desire for profit and suspicion of wealth as a threat to traditional Vietnamese morality. This article explores how one successful businesswoman responded by attributing her prosperity to Buddhist piety. In rejecting the Confucian ethics favored by businessmen, she advanced an interpretation of traditional morality more accommodating of women and defended her class privilege as righteous. Her narrative draws attention to individual performances of class as a means both to justify one's own status and to contribute to the gendered, political, religious, and moral discourses through which class stratification comes to be seen as natural.