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This introductory chapter focuses on Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. It describes how national tropes and cultural stereotypes about rural–urban relations persists in places like Hóc Môn despite the constant disruptions of an everyday existence that seems to depart so dramatically from the ideal. It discusses the idealization of the Vietnamese peasant as the source of Vietnamese tradition, which became further reified during the Vietnam War. It shows the ways in which the ideal categories of Vietnamese culture are simultaneously contradicted and reinforced through everyday social life. It attempts to understand the intersection of space, time, and power and the interplay between cultural ideals and everyday practices of most Hóc Môn residents.

This chapter seeks to understand the persistent use of binary frameworks, such as rural versus urban and inside versus outside, to understand complex urban processes. It argues that social life in Hóc Môn challenges and reproduces simplifying schemes for understanding Vietnamese spatial organization. It discusses that Vietnam is both capitalist and socialist, an agrarian nation constantly marked by an emphasis on urbanization and industrial development. It explores the conceptual and practical difficulties that arise when a place and the people who inhabit it must straddle symbolically opposed concepts. The chapter also examines in detail the ambivalence Hóc Môn residents associate with the current urbanization process in Ho Chi Minh City, linking this to the ways that people living on the fringes of the city fall between the spatial and temporal categories used to imagine the city.

This chapter provides a thorough discussion of the conflation of order with progress, modernization, and development in Hóc Môn. It argues that people cannot see the material transformations and social problems that develop out of the conflation of rural and urban spaces. In this conflation, the vegetable gardens suffer from poisonous run-off from the industries that surround them, and the rice fields are mined for soil that is carted to various parts of the district and into the inner city for use in filling the foundations of new construction projects. It explains that understanding life on the edge requires moving back and forth between the symbolic categories of space and the everyday experiences of lives lived within the space.

This chapter focuses on social change and social transformation in Hóc Môn. It argues that descriptions of Hóc Môn marked the edge as a mixture of orientation to time, a sensibility that combined a distinct future orientation with a symbolically charged form of nostalgia described by scholars who have taken to calling Vietnam “the country of memory.” As local residents described it, Hóc Môn lay somewhere in the middle of this temporal mix of present, past, and future. The sense of place implied a sense of time as well as space. Descriptions of the here and now oscillated between a vanishing rural past and the vanguard of modernization.