The double-edged sword of language: empowerment and precarity for interpreters in a Chinese border hospital

Abstract China’s borderlands represent an ideal space for examining the ways in which multilingualism is socially experienced, enacted and exploited. This critical ethnography examines the lived experiences of five Vietnamese-Mandarin interpreters at a Chinese hospital bordering Vietnam. Drawing on the concept of alternative language regimes, we demonstrate that Vietnamese proficiency, while creating a crucial niche for employment and mobility, simultaneously functions as a mechanism for entrenching precarity. Specifically, Vietnamese proficiency provides interpreters with a competitive edge in securing a job and maximizing cross-border mobility. However, the convertibility of Vietnamese language remains largely speculative, which entails a high degree of self-investment and precarious forms of labor. We argue that Vietnamese as an alternative language regime relegates interpreters to a highly uneven distribution of symbolic and material precarity in the cross-border medical market. The study offers a nuanced understanding of how language functions as both a resource and a site of constraint within the geoeconomic dynamics of China’s evolving borderlands. It contributes to the emerging scholarship on alternative language regimes in regulating migrant labor and distributing medical resources in the China-Vietnam borderlands and beyond.