Dr Allison Cadzow
University of Technology, Sydney
Water Flexibility - Vietnamese women's experiences of migrancy, gender relations & rivers in Sydney & Vietnam
Vietnamese cultural analysts have drawn attention to distinctive cultural strategies of water flexibility within Vietnamese history – linking landscapes, spirituality, and the history of Vietnamese people through adaptability and change. This idea can be extended to discussion of Vietnamese women’s negotiation of the ‘new’ experiences of gender relations, land and family through migration and refugee experiences in Vietnam and Australia.
Based on oral histories, cultural and literary analysis, the paper shows that for women who came to Australia as adults from mainly urban centres, the Mekong, Perfume and Georges Rivers are never simply bodies of water between banks. Rivers, memory, culture and family are entwined. Rivers are a place for reflection on homelands and new landscapes, people departed (yet spiritually present), children & their future (especially in terms of pollution and safety), their own experiences of shifting opportunities. Activities along rivers and nearby parks were regarded as of asserting family togetherness and strengthening of relationships between women and wider family.
Water flexibility could be used in environmental programs as a way of recognizing cultural and gendered relationships with urban rivers, recognizing how through migrancy, connections with environment in various locations are made, sustained and revised.
Email: allison.cadzow@uts.edu.au