Native Entrepreneurs:
Indigenization, Diaspora, and Labor in Mobile Phone Apps in Vietnam
Lilly Nguyen
Postdoctoral Scholar
Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing
Department of Informatics
UC Irvine
In this paper, I will discuss the configuration of the native entrepreneur in response to the
development of a Vietnamese mobile phone app industry. In Vietnam, the figure of the
native entrepreneur mediates technoeconomic temporalities, as a disorderly present that
requires appropriate expertise and manipulation to segue into an aspirational future.
Henry Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American Managing Partner at IDG Venture Fund in
Vietnam, has stated that “The market here holds significant potential, particularly in its
human resources and rapidly growing technology needs. The people here are extremely
energetic and hard-working, with tremendous intellectual capacity.” More than mere
platitudes, statements like this underscore Vietnamese people as ideal potential labor in
the information technology economy. Technology investors pointed to the hustle and
bustle of street vendors, market stalls, and other so-called “informal” economic practices
as evidence of a native entrepreneurialism. This narrative of indigenous and native
entrepreneurial acumen served to characterize these Vietnamese economic hustlers in a
temporal present just on the cusp of transformative economic liberation.
This indigenization takes on additional complexity when it is members of the Vietnamese
diaspora who are the primary authors of this temporal rewriting of techno-economic skill
and expertise. As multiply inauthentic, members of the Vietnamese diaspora are neither
wholly Vietnamese nor wholly members of their adopted homelands. Members of the
Vietnamese diapora position themselves as time-travellers from a future geography who
have now returned to bring their fellow natives into the future of technology-driven
economic development. The figure of the native entrepreneur is thus vital to the alchemy
and hope of transforming indigenous disorderly potential into productive techno-labor.
In this paper, I will show how the figure of the native entrepreneur simultaneously
organizes labor, expertise, and skill temporally and geographically in the social worlds of
mobile phone apps in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Its history as Saigon, the capital of the
southern Republic of Vietnam, is significant in organizing the circuits of diaspora.
I submit this paper to the “New Geographies” track of the workshop.