Loan Lu ’15

January 2014

Vietnamese Women Diaspora

The title of Loan Lu’s project is “Examining Vietnamese Women Diaspora in South Korea,” and her research spanned two countries. Loan ’15 spent the first part of her project in Vietnam at the Kanata School. The Kanata School offers Korean language classes and cultural preparation workshops specifically designed for Vietnamese women getting ready to move to Korea and marry Korean men. Loan then looked at the other side of this diaspora, traveling to Seoul where a large Vietnamese population lives. She interviewed recent transplants as well as individuals who have been living in Korea for a longer time. Though this project may seem very specialized at first glace, it is a microcosm of the phenomena that occur in a modern, globalized world, one in which going abroad can sometimes be for fun or education, but other times for survival, or in hopes of an improvement in quality of life.