This essay examines Vietnamese tales of marvels [ kỳ ] and the uncanny [ quái ] composed in Literary Sinitic and offers close readings of four narratives through focusing on the theme of predestined love [ duyên ]. The essay shows that the discourse of duyên was embedded in both Confucian and Daoist voices and that this reflected a common cultural repertoire in which the discourse of social karma was a part of a shared moral metaphysics. The essay offers a theory and methodology for examining tales of marvels and the uncanny, arguing that heretofore scholars have read around the depictions of religious phenomena, rather than by means of them.

Vietnam’s New Rural Development program envisages the creation of a newly modern rural Vietnam. Drawing on fieldwork, this paper argues that the program has had little bearing on peasant livelihood strategies. The emergence of deagrarianization has not arisen as a result of the program but because of household interest in maintaining a diverse set of income activities. These two contrasting rural realities—the advance of deagrarianization against a backdrop of continued subsistence farming—coexist and are mutually supportive. Peasant livelihood diversification strategies have been perpetuated without much attention to broader state-led initiatives aimed at “reforming” the countryside.

Through a case study of workers’ protests to demand owed wages and social insurance benefits after foreign management had suddenly fled the country, this article discusses the moral and legal dynamics of labor dispute resolution in Vietnam. It examines the local government’s use of extralegal measures, which combine a tactical deployment of the law and moral responsibility, in brokering a resolution. The article argues that these measures, while aimed at addressing the legal challenges of supporting affected workers in the event of these so-called “cicada practices,” are limited in satisfying workers’ demands for justice as workers struggle to claim their legal rights and overcome their precariousness.

During the eighteenth century, the Vietnamese government relied on local chieftains to govern its northern uplands, including the Sino-Vietnamese border region. In Lạng Sơn Province—an intermediary point for diplomatic documents traveling from the Lê-Trịnh government to the Qing—the government constructed a documentary system that gave local chieftains considerable political responsibility. Under this system, local chieftains were responsible for administering tax collection and some forms of military service, researching the titles and positions of Qing officials, purchasing Qing calendars, and forwarding official documents. Thus, these local chieftains played important roles in eighteenth-century Sino-Vietnamese relations and politics.

During the colonial period, particularly in the 1920s, Vietnamese intellectuals frequently debated Rabindranath Tagore’s Greater Indian, pan-Asian vision in their political exchanges. Drawing on scholarship on the rise of an Indian Ocean public sphere, this article analyzes periodicals covering Tagore in colonial Vietnam in order to explore alternative and less researched trajectories of contemporary Vietnamese nationalism. Specifically, it examines media coverage of Tagore’s works, ideas, personality, and appearance, and, in particular, his visit to Sài Gòn in 1929, to answer the question of how those depictions reflected and shaped different anticolonial imaginaries and ideological debates at the time. Radical and moderate forms of Vietnamese nationalism reflected both appreciation and criticism of Tagore’s views of Indian nationhood. The engagement of both moderate and radical Vietnamese intellectuals with Tagore’s work was thus an important early moment in the turn of Vietnamese intellectuals away from colonial models of nationalism toward those articulated by other colonized populations.