The border within: Vietnamese migrants transforming ethnic nationalism in Berlin By Phi Hong  Su. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 216 pp.

Phi Hong Su has written a sensitive and finely differentiated study of various overlapping and contending Vietnamese communities in Berlin. Relying on “less theory, more description,” she explores the various ways that the Vietnamese of Berlin are united and divided. She shows how they all share a Vietnamese ethnonational identity but are divided by nationalist loyalties, regional origins, religion, and historical experiences. She focuses especially on how they are shaped by the experiences of crossing borders—and having been crossed by borders that shifted around them with the reunifications of both their sending and receiving lands. She also shows how a supposedly clear distinction between refugees and migrants breaks down when the lived experiences of many Vietnamese in Berlin are closely examined. She leads off with a review of Vietnamese history that sets the background for the various migration streams to Berlin. This is the book's weakest part, because it fails to fully engage with the nationalist struggles against French colonialism and the US-sponsored division of Vietnam after the French withdrawal in the 1950s. She does mention the 1950s persecution of veteran opponents of French colonialism by the US-supported Diem regime, but she generally treats the various South Vietnam regimes as representing democracy and diversity without discussing the widespread resistance to these regimes by large parts of the population of South Vietnam (she makes no reference to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, popularly known as the Viet Cong) or the fact that these regimes were generally undemocratic dictatorships. This may not be a problem for her ethnographic analysis, since it would appear (at least from her description) that South Vietnamese nationalist opponents of the Republic of Vietnam who supported the Northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam haven't played a role in the developments in Berlin. The founding groups in western Berlin consisted mainly of southerners from the anti-communist Republic of Vietnam (RVN) and refugees from that area who fled Vietnam after Vietnamese reunification under the communist-ruled Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Some of these “southerners” were originally Catholic refugees from northern Vietnam in the 1950s or their children. But by the time they emigrated to West Germany, these northerners identified with southern regionalism and the various anti-communist governments and military forces of the RVN. They settled in and became patriotic supporters of anti-communist West Germany and West Berlin—which they identified with their anticommunism of the RVN. On the other side of the border between West and East Germany, communist regimes in Germany and Vietnam formed close links that enabled northern Vietnamese students and contract workers to study and work in East Germany and East Berlin. When that border was eliminated by German reunification, these Vietnamese found themselves in West Germany by default. Vietnamese ethnic solidarity brought them help from their counterparts in West Berlin. But residential separation of the two groups into eastern and western Berlin, along with strong regional and anti-communist prejudices against northerners by southerners, and frequent nationalist resentments by northerners who rejected the demonstrative RVN nationalism of the southerners, created social distances that kept the two communities from merging. Su also explores the mechanisms that have caused their persistence even for German-born Vietnamese who were born long after the events that provided the basis for the original divisions between the two groups. Later, Vietnamese migrants from united Vietnam to united Germany had to accommodate themselves to Berlin's various communities and institutions. Su deftly explores how later arrivals tended to assimilate (voluntarily or not) to one or the other of these two mostly distinct communities. Focusing on individual life stories of Vietnamese Berliners from all these different migration streams, Su provides her readers with a sophisticated and very readable picture of the ways that ethnic identity, regional prejudices, conflicting nationalist identities, and other factors all combine to create a complex kaleidoscope of overlapping and contending identities—in processes that have parallels in other times and places. Hence, this isn't just an idiosyncratic example of one set of ethnonational and ethnonationalist developments in diaspora settlements. To conclude, I highly recommend this fascinating study to anyone interested in the complexities of migrant identities and experiences.