The Ordinary Family: Adapting Women, Morality, and Media in Vietnamese Sitcoms

Since the 1990s, television in post-Đổi Mới Vietnam has been a central medium for shaping everyday life, with programs increasingly focusing on “ordinary” Vietnamese families rather than overt propaganda. This paper examines the 2016 Vietnamese adaptation of the Korean sitcom Unstoppable High Kick! (Gia Đình Là Số 1) to explore how visual media circulates through Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding framework. By recasting characters, modifying dialogue, and adjusting narrative and visual humor, Vietnamese producers decode and re-encode the sitcom with socialist moral values and the ideals of the “cultured family,” where women play a prominent role. The adaptation demonstrates how inter-Asian media circulations are localized through gendered representations of family labor and morality. By tracing the Vietnamization of a Korean sitcom, this article highlights the importance of inter-Asian cultural flows in shaping Vietnamese popular culture and complicates accounts of globalization that privilege Western influence.