Although the proportion of Vietnam’s population living below the official poverty line has dropped drastically in the past thirty years, a large percentage of Vietnamese still live precariously even if they are not among the impoverished. They struggle to provide minimum quality housing, food, clothing, education, and other essentials. People in these circumstances include most vendors and factory workers in Vietnam’s expanding urban areas.

These are the Vietnamese featured in the two publications discussed here. Central in Tu Phuong Nguyen’s book are low-income people using, bending, and ignoring laws and authorities while trying to minimize their hardships. Joe Buckley’s study features factory workers resorting to strikes and other actions aimed at improving their wages and living standards.

Both authors have rich empirical material that they gathered primarily through interviews, casual conversations, and observations. Nguyen draws mainly on what she heard and saw when visiting homes and neighborhoods of seventy low-income...

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