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Over the past three decades, market socialist policies have revitalized commerce in Ho Chi Minh City. At the same time, officials and the public have expressed anxiety about the effects of a market economy on Vietnamese culture and individual morality. The image of the female petty trader or tiểu thương serves as a focal point for these concerns. As the city’s most famous marketplace, Bến Thành market symbolizes both the time-honored tradition of women’s trade and its backwardness in a modernizing economy. These characterizations rest on gender essentialism that ascribes the features of women traders to their supposedly underlying, natural qualities. Rather than dismiss essentialism as inaccurate stereotype, Essential Trade argues that it undergirds a meaningful worldview that enables traders to participate in a volatile political economy of appearances. In so doing, traders become recognizable, knowable subjects who agentively engage in meaningful action and interaction in the marketplace and elsewhere.

Bến Thành’s successful cloth and clothing traders occupied an ambiguous position with respect to Ho Chi Minh City’s newly prosperous middle classes: their incomes fueled conspicuous consumption, but their marketplace demeanors marked them as “just female petty traders.” This was partly a legacy of postwar socialist class-ification that sought to eliminate “bourgeois” market traders, yet interpreted femininity as a sign of lower class status than material relations alone might have suggested. Under market socialism, highly charged moral debates about class, production, and consumption have shaped a political economy of appearances in which traders class up through spectacular consumption, but class down by hiding the income garnered from production. The fact that Bến Thành traders have tended to experience class as indexed to gender suggests how even a status as obviously social, economic, and political as class can nevertheless become internalized as natural and self-evident.

In the mid-1990s, city planners considered proposals for an international trade center to be constructed on the site of Bến Thành market. These plans were suspended in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. By 2012, traders seemed more prosperous and secure in their middle-class status. Discussions of redevelopment continued, but they now praised the feminine allure of Bến Thành sellers who charmed tourists and generated enviable profits. These characterizations rested on essentialism about Vietnamese femininity, but instead of tradition, they highlighted a sophisticated, sexualized, and youthful Vietnamese femininity demanded by the spectacular political economy of appearances of the 2010s. It was also an economically foreboding femininity, for these new market women tended to be salaried clerks employed by men capitalizing on a highly speculative real estate market that threatened to price the more “traditional” female traders out of the chợ that had long seemed their natural home.