Keeping Up with the Nguyens: When Poor Immigrants Return to the Homeland

Hung Cam Thai

Hung Cam Thai is professor of sociology and Asian American studies at Pomona College, where he is former chair of Asian American studies, former director of the Pacific Basin Institute, and former chair of sociology. Prof. Thai is the 2019-2020 CUNY Thomas Tam Visiting Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College/CUNY. He received a sociology Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Prof. Thai's first book, For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy (Rutgers, 2008), is a study of international marriages linking women in Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese men living in the diaspora. His second book, Insufficient Funds: The Culture of Money in Low Wage Transnational Families (Stanford, 2014), won the American Sociological Association’s 2015 Best Book Award on Asia from the Asia/Asian America Section, and the 2016 Best Social Sciences Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Insufficient Funds examines how and why transnational families in the Vietnamese diaspora spend, receive, and give money.

A recipient of fellowships from the Haynes Foundation, Hirsch Foundation, Freeman Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, National University of Singapore, and the Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkeley, Prof. Thai has given more than 100 invited lectures and conference papers in 17 countries. He is currently writing a book about different forms of social exclusions, systems of social categorization, and symbolic superiority in contemporary Vietnam.