Struggling to Sustain Marriages and Build Families: Mobile Husbands/Wives and Mothers/Fathers in Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City

This paper explores the implications of increasingly feminized flows of rural-to-urban migration on the gendered family lives of low-income migrants. We focus on the strategies of migrants with young children through life histories collected in 2008 in the contrasting destinations of Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City. We illustrate the trade-offs migrants make in their efforts to maximize earnings/savings and safeguard their children's future. We show that taking advantage of new economic opportunities for these low-income migrants with young families comes at a cost. This cost is in terms of family relations, social identities and subjective experiences and is strongly gendered.