1
Vietnamese Immigrants in the Czech Republic:
Hiring a Czech Nanny as a Post-Migratory Family Settlement Strategy
Adéla Souralová
In January 2012 the magazine of the daily Hospodářské noviny printed an article about
“Vietnamese Nannies,” meaning Czech women who look after the children of Vietnamese
parents in the Czech Republic. It reported:
According to unofficial estimates, every other Vietnamese child has a Czech nanny.
Instead of spring rolls these children love dumplings and dill sauce. One woman often
went to the 24-hour convenience store to buy rolls, butter, and fresh milk, but one day
she came back with seven-week-old baby twins. “Their mother worked in the store
from morning till evening and didn’t have the time to take care of the baby girls”, as
67-year-old Růžena Kopáčková from Prague’s Žižkov quarter describes the moment
when she came by her first Vietnamese grandchildren (Procházková 2012)
Ms. Kropáčková and her Vietnamese twins are just one of many episodes in the story of
Vietnamese immigrants in the Czech Republic. Their story is markedly different from that of
Philippine nannies working in the United States or Polish domestics in Germany, but also
from Vietnamese migrants to Canada, France, or Germany. In the context of the worldwide
model of delegated care (for children and/or households) these Vietnamese families who hired
Czech nannies are especially notable because these tasks are generally carried out by migrants
for majority families in Western countries. Here we find the opposite phenomenon where the
work is done by women of the host society for immigrant families. This raises the question;
do the relationships between the immigrant family and the nanny from the majority society
correspond to the dominant model of migrant nannies in majority families? Is it the same
model “stood on its head” or a completely different dynamic of relationships?
Based on my qualitative research on Vietnamese families and their Czech nannies I
ask the following principal question: Why do Vietnamese families hire Czech nannies to look
after their children? I don’t try to analyze the complex relationship between families and
nannies, but focus instead on the demand for nannies in the post-migration lives of
Vietnamese in the Czech Republic. Analysis of the motivations leading to the formation of
intimate relations of mutual dependency between the nanny and the family reveals the specific
nature of this pattern—not only in terms of reversing the usual ethnic logic but also in the
context of the global Vietnamese diaspora and Czech society. First of all Vietnamese
migrants in other countries do not look for nannies to care for their children, or at least no
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researcher has described any such pattern of relations so far.1
Second, other immigrants to the
Czech Republic do not systematically seek Czech nannies to look after their children—for
them the model common in other European countries applies and it is the migrants (usually
from Ukraine) who work as domestics. Third, only one to two percent of Czech households
hire a nanny for their children (Hašková 2008) so the model of paid care for children is not
very widespread in the Czech context. So the answer to the question of “why” has to be
sought in the nature of Vietnamese post-migration life in the Czech Republic as it is not a
general pattern of Vietnamese migrants, nor of other migrants in the CR, nor of Czech
society—only in the specific situation of Vietnamese migrants in the Czech Republic. This
essay situates the story of Vietnamese families and the reasons why they hire Czech women to
care for their children as part of the more complex story of their migration and settlement in a
new country. On the following pages I focus on two related issues: why do some Vietnamese
families in the Czech Republic hire nannies to look after their children and why do some
Vietnamese families in the Czech Republic hire Czech nannies to look after their children?
The literature on domestic care workers is based on a dominant model in which the
nannies are migrants and the customers are middle-class white families, and it locates the
motivations for hiring a nanny as a strategy for combining family and working life. Feminist
authors used to criticize societies for being founded on a family model that featured men as
the main breadwinners while women were relegated to unpaid work in the household, but the
social states that made this possible have ceased to fulfil their role in many countries and this
has given rise to “transnational spaces of care“ (Isaksen 2012, 2010). These transnational
spaces allow well off families in the global West/North to outsource child care and enable
them to enjoy the advances of the feminist movement’s second wave (Ehrenreich and
Hochchild 2003). As a number of authors have noted critically (particularly Rollins 1992,
Stenum 2010, Lutz 2011), this institution of paid child care allows some women to avoid the
so-called second shift, but for others it means working in often illegal markets and leads to the
deepening of class and ethnic inequality among women from different continents and
countries on both sides of the global map of paid work.
These approaches, however, are extremely limited in their applicability to our
Vietnamese families and their Czech nannies. The main argument which I will develop is that
1
The specific nature of the Czech Republic on the global map of paid care and the Vietnamese diaspora is
reinforced by some of my interviewees (children who had a Czech nanny) who had been born in Germany, and
had moved with their parents to the CR at an early age. These children had never had a nanny in Germany; their
parents first sought a nanny for them in the Czech Republic.
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Czech nannies are hired both in order to help reconcile family and working life, and to help
manage family life in the context of post-migration settlement and the struggle for the
continuity of family and private life.
The starting point is an understanding of the family life of Vietnamese immigrants in
the Czech Republic. Migrants’ family life of has been the subject of a number of studies that
have shown how life in the new country leads immigrants to reconcile their old and new ideas
about family life (Kibria 1993, Foner 1997, Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). On a general level
Nancy Foner (1997: 962) writes:
The cultural understandings, meanings, and symbols that immigrants bring with them
from their home societies are…critical in understanding immigrant family life.
Obviously, immigrants do not reproduce exactly their old cultural patterns when they
move to a new land; but these patterns continue to have a powerful influence in
shaping family values and norms as well as actual patterns of behavior that develop in
the new setting.
She goes on to emphasize that “cultural roots” are a key to the process of redefining family
life and allow us to understand the differences between various groups of immigrants (in this
context for example why Vietnamese seek Czech nannies and Ukrainians do not).
One subject of these negotiations is over the concept of child care. Modern
anthropological kinship theory emphasizes the formative role of care in the maintenance and
reproduction of kinship/family ties and in defining what a family is—who is included in it,
and who is not. Ever since the definition of kinship was detached from biology in the 1970’s
(Schneider 1984), scholarship has focused on the notion that ideas about the family are
formed on what is done rather than on the basis of what is given (see the emphasis on the
“kinning process” in Howell 2006 for an example). This approach is applied in the second
part of this work as it briefly outlines what happened in the relationship between the nanny
and the family.
This essay relates the partial findings of qualitative research in fifty in-depth
interviews with Vietnamese mothers, their children, and Czech women working as nannies in
Vietnamese families. The research was carried out from spring 2010 to fall 2012 in the
Czech-German/Czech-Austrian border regions where concentrations of Vietnamese
immigrants have become greatest and some of the largest Czech cities (Prague, Brno, Opava,
and Zlín). I focused on the questions: What are the motivations for becoming/seeking a
nanny? What ideas about child care are embedded in the relationship, what is their source and
how are they articulated and practiced in everyday care? How is the paid child care
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contextualized in relation to family ties? Joan Tronto’s prominent article on the “nanny
question in feminism” emphasizes three perspectives through which we can approach the
nanny question: those of the families (mothers), the children, and the nannies. My strategy
was to cover all three perspectives in order to capture the complexity of the entire relationship
and the contradictions contained within it. The following is a basic description of my
interviewees, and a description of the actors included in the triangular mother-child-nanny
relationship.
The families I met during the research varied widely, both in their experience
of immigration, as well as (to a lesser extent) their current situation (employment and type of
residence). They all arrived between the 1980s era of socialist cooperation between
Czechoslovakia and Vietnam (see below) and 2005. A large proportion of my interviewees
came to the Czech Republic because they already had some relatives here; while a frequent
pattern was that the man came in the 1980s to study, returned to Vietnam and got married, and
then came back to the CR with his wife (and children). Their legal status depended on when
they arrived: most of them had permanent residence permits, but a few had temporary
residence permits. None of my informants (or their parents) had Czech citizenship, the main
reason being that they did not want it and assumed the parents (the first generation
immigrants) would return to Vietnam after the children are grown and are financially secure.
In selecting “child” interviewees I took two criteria into account. First was age,
which I limited to 16-23 years in view of the need for in-depth interviews and the fact that I
was interested in capturing the long-term aspect of the entire relationship. These interviews
focused on recollections of childhood and a description of their current relationship to the
nanny. I am not working here with “children” as an age category, but rather as a role in the
mother-nanny-child relationship. A second criterion was place of birth. My goal was to carry
out interviews with children who were born in the Czech Republic (10 subjects), and with
children who had come to the CR with (or to) their parents at the age of 6 or younger, i.e.
before mandatory schooling began (also 10 subjects).
I also carried out sixteen interviews with fourteen nannies. All of them shared
one basic characteristic: they were dependent on the social state. The majority (nine) were
retirees with pensions, two were on disability, two others were getting unemployment
benefits, and one was on maternity leave. Indeed, four of the women lived by themselves
(either divorced or widowed), and were thus the only breadwinners in their household. It turns
out that this relationship to the state is generally crucial to understanding the entire
5
relationship between the Vietnamese families and the Czech nannies—though four of my
child interviewees had had nannies who had been actively employed, two elementary school
teachers, a pre-school teacher and a janitor.
The last group included those close to the Vietnamese “community” – they had
experience with migration, and had a relative, friend, or acquaintance who had sought a nanny
in the past. These interviews had a more informational character, as these were the individuals
who got me into contact with members of the other groups. My interviewees were contacted
through the “snowball” method. Most of the initial contacts took place via the second
generation – I asked university students whether they had had a Czech nanny or knew
someone that had. The “children” led me to the nannies and parents. In light of the intimate
character of the entire study I had to rely on recommendations to find people suitable for the
research, and even more so because their recommendation of me as a person who can be
trusted was essential. This was especially true with the Vietnamese mothers, as it was not
possible to contact them ad hoc through the “market” (so to speak), I had to rely on insiders to
locate them for me.
The question of trust or mistrust was not the only obstacle that I had to face during the
study. The atmosphere “in the field” was clouded by negative media portrayal of the
Vietnamese, something which led several of the mothers to change their minds and refuse to
speak with me after having agreed to a meeting. Another reason that some meetings did not
take place was the parents’ busy work schedules; they simply did not have the time, energy,
and will to chat with a curious researcher after a twelve-hour work day. The last problem that
should be mentioned was the language barrier, as I had no Vietnamese and my interviewees
often had a very limited knowledge of Czech. So the interviews were conducted through an
interpreter, whose role in the research was considerable and active in providing insight and
emphasis (Temple and Edwards 2002, Esposito 2001). Interviews with mothers were affected
by the so-called triple subjectivity, the interaction between three actors: subject, interpreter,
and researcher (Temple and Edwards 2002).
All interviews were recorded with the agreement of the subjects, and later
transcribed. To preserve anonymity only pseudonyms are used here. Analysis of the
interviews started while gathering the data as the interviews were transcribed and through
open and focused coding of the transcriptions. The decision to study the care work
relationship from three perspectives – mother, nanny, and child – was a great challenge for
analysis because the combination of various perspectives on the same
6
phenomenon/relationship involved perspectives based in very different social and cultural
worlds. The analysis of motivations focuses on three main aspects: the view of the mothers as
they describe their own motivations; the ideas of the nanny about what motivates Vietnamese
mothers to hire a nanny; and the stories of children, whose accounts are more founded in real
experience than the responses of the nannies, but who experienced the relationship from a
different perspective than the Vietnamese mothers.
When my informants were asked about their migration experience and/or that of their
parents I heard a number of different stories. A very common pattern reported by many
families is found in the interview with Thi, a 22-year-old university student who was born in
Vietnam and came to the Czech Republic at the age of three:
My dad studied here in 1980s, then he came back to Vietnam and in 1990s the big
boom of Vietnamese markets started so he decided to return here... And me and my
mum, we joined him in 1994 thanks to the family reunification allowance.
Thi’s story sums up the basic experience of Vietnamese migration to the Czech Republic. The
experience of migration to this country differs fundamentally from that of Vietnamese
migrants to the capitalist countries that began in the 1970s. The geopolitical situation at that
time produced two parallel, but very different, streams of migration from Vietnam
corresponding to the two sides of the Cold War. The turning point in Vietnamese migration to
the CR and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe was 1989, when the Soviet bloc fell
apart and the nature of the migration to what was then still Czechoslovakia changed
completely. Migration from Vietnam was thus shaped by two radically differing migration
regimes: before 1989 it was a strictly state-managed migration between two Communist
countries with closed borders (personified by Thi’s father who studied in Communist
Czechoslovakia); after 1989 it became a classic labour migration shaped by privatization and
open markets (which Thi describes as “the Vietnamese outdoor market boom”; see Baláž and
Williams 2007, Brouček 2003). As Baláž and Williams (2007: 43) noted, and as we can see
from Thi’s case the two phases were not unconnected; instead “the pathway(s) of the first
phase migrants intersected with and informed pathway of the second phase – especially via
social network and migrant-host community relationships – shaping opportunities and
constraints for both groups.”
The first contacts between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Czechoslovakia
date back to the 1950s, when a bilateral treaty was signed allowing for the arrival of around a
hundred war orphans. In the mid 1950s several treaties were signed to promote mutual
7
cooperation between the two countries (Martínková 2006). They drew even closer in 1973
when “the Vietnamese side became very significantly more active in urging the Czechoslovak
side to accept increased numbers of Vietnamese labourers and give them education, training,
and subsequent experience in various trades on a larger scale than previously” (Brouček 2003:
10, italics in original). That same year a Vietnamese delegation travelled around the Eastern
bloc requesting specialized training for their citizens. They asked the CSR to train 12 000
apprentices, but this was turned down as unrealistic (Brouček 2009). A year later 5000
apprentices aged 17-25 arrived in Czechoslovakia. Their stays were divided into several
phases: a six-month language course, a three-year study stay, and up to three years’ practical
experience in the factories—where 60-70 % of them had the opportunity later to work under
the same conditions as Czech workers (Brouček 2003). The benefit of the last stage benefited
the CSR by providing workers for the metal, construction, and energy industries where there
was a shortage of labour.
Subsequent agreements between 1976 and 1980 further reinforced this
fraternal cooperation and the integration of Vietnam into the Soviet bloc was cemented when
Vietnam became a member of the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance in July 1978.
These raised the numbers of interns and students in Czechoslovakia to a peak of around
30,000 between 1980 and 1983. These treaties expired in the mid-1980s, and new agreements
reduced the numbers of Vietnamese in the CSR; by 1985 there were only 19,350 Vietnamese
left (c. 15,000 men and 4,000 women). By the end of the 1980s there were only about 10,000
left.
The year 1989 was the major turning point. The disintegration of the existing
partnership, combined with the disappearance of jobs and the difficulty of finding new ones
on the regular labour market, threw the Vietnamese living in Czechoslovakia into uncertainty
in terms of their future life/migration strategies. They were presented with three alternatives:
return to Vietnam, secondary migration to a neighbouring country, or legalization of their
residence in Czechoslovakia. As Brouček (2003) shows, despite financial compensation by
the government for Vietnamese immigrants working in factories that were no longer able to
pay them, the pressure to return to Vietnam was inconsistent. Many Vietnamese chose
secondary migration to Germany, Holland, or Austria. Those who wanted to stay in
Czechoslovakia had to find a way to legalize their residence. One solution was to set up a
limited-liability corporation with a business license, which could then be used to obtain
permanent residence permits (Brouček 2003, Nekorjak a Hofírek 2009).
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A new chapter began in the lives of Vietnamese in Czechoslovakia (and then
the Czech Republic and Slovakia) in the early 1990s due to the post-1989 economic collapse.
Legalization of residence through business licenses paid off, especially in trans-border petty
trading. Rising consumption combined with limited international trade and insufficient
domestic production led to gaps in the clothing market that could be filled by new small
businesses (Williams and Baláž 2005). Sales of textile and assorted products became the core
economic activity for Vietnamese after 1989, followed by other business activity such as
translating, publishing, groceries, etc. (Hofírek and Nekorjak 2009). Occupational
concentration is one of the main features of the Vietnamese population in the CR, currently
36,000 of the 60,000 immigrants hold business licenses (25,000 men and 11,000 women).2
Starting in the early 1990s, the original core of the immigrant community grew
continually to include Vietnamese from other countries, particularly Germany after the
agreements with the GDR ended in 1993 and the German government forced many
Vietnamese to leave (Brouček 2003). Others came from Poland and Slovakia, and newcomers
arrived from Vietnam. Nevertheless, many of newcomers were not new to the CR –they were
people who had been trainees and students before 1989. Another key characteristic of the
migration flow was a legal clause allowing for reuniting families. That was the way the
majority of Vietnamese women come to the CR given that the original pre-1989 migration
was overwhelmingly male-dominated, “gendered around the discourse on training men in
socialist ways of work” (Williams and Baláž 2005: 537). Immigrants sponsored friends and
relatives as well as wives and children, while other newcomers arrived independently of any
family/kinship networks. State-managed migration morphed into classic work-related
migration, very often channelled into petty trading which combined “welfare maximization
and risk minimization” (Baláž and Williams 2007). The work-related nature of the migration
can also be seen in the demographic structure of the population. According to the Czech
Statistical Office, 21 % of Vietnamese residents were children 0-14 years old in 2005 (vs. 15
% of the Czech population), while 78 % were of productive age (15 – 64) and only 1 % were
over 65. Compared to other groups of immigrants, the demographic structure of Vietnamese
immigrant group has a high percentage of women and children and low percentage of people
in unproductive age. And it is the employment and demographic structure of the Vietnamese
2
The 60,000 Vietnamese are the third-largest group of immigrants in the Czech Republic, which has a
population of 10.3 million. There are 430,000 foreigners—the Vietnamese make up some 15 % of the immigrant
population and 0.6 % of the overall population.
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immigrant population that is the key structural pre-condition shaping family life and the
demand for Czech nannies.
My main source of inspiration for trying to understand why Vietnamese immigrants in
the CR hire nannies was Nazli Kibria’s Family Tightrope (1993). Her book examined
generational and gender relations in Vietnamese immigrant families in the US and described
how their new economic and social context produced complicated family situations (the
family tightrope) as they balanced between the Vietnamese and American cultures. It led to
complicated negotiations over the meaning of family/household and relationships within it. I
argue here that the recruitment of nannies by Vietnamese families in the CR is part of a
complex process of settlement, balancing between here and there, between then and now, and
negotiating a new family life in the new country. I focus on three main turning points
encountered in the arrival in a new country: the change in work environment, which raises the
question of how to combine work and family life; on a transnational balancing between two
cultural worlds that leads to rethinking family models from the country of origin and
combining them with those of the new country of residence; and the displacement from old
social networks which creates the dilemma of how to deal with the new family situation
without the support of the broader family. The combined effect of these three factors is a new
constellation of relationships within the family which results in the decision to hire a Czech
nanny.
In the initial phase of research (spring 2010) I contacted Ms. Veselá (born Nguyen), a
woman from Vietnam who came to the former Czechoslovakia before 1989, married a Czech,
and works as a Czech-Vietnamese translator. She agreed immediately to my request for an
interview and gave me the following instructions: “Let’s meet tomorrow and I will take you
somewhere where you’ll understand why Vietnamese do this”. The next day she picked me up
and took me to Brno’s biggest outdoor market. We walked past stands selling clothing and
food, operated by Vietnamese of every age and family status, to a small fast-food place where
we ordered strong Vietnamese coffee. As we were drinking the coffee Ms. Veselá told me to
look around carefully, and asked, “Now you understand it all, don’t you?” At that point I
realized that the commitment to their work on the part of small business owners should be
understood as the main reason why Vietnamese families hire women to watch their children.
In case I had any doubts, she explained in detail:
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Generally, Vietnamese are taught that people of productive age must work, and being
on maternity leave is not work. Everybody must work, parents, grandparents, and
older children and kids have all done it since childhood. Here [in the Czech Republic]
they have their shops, they are entrepreneurs, so that they do not want or they cannot
close the shop. For them, when the shop is closed, the goods are not sold, there is no
profit, and the clients do not come again. It is impossible to close the shop for a week
or two and go for a holiday with the family. They are able to pay for education for
their kids; they send them to England for three weeks to learn English, which is very
expensive. They are able to pay for that; but to close the shop and go for holiday with
kids, that is a waste of time, they would say.
Many of my other interviewees also cited work commitments as the most important reason for
seeking a nanny. Thus my understanding of the role of the nanny in the lives of Vietnamese
immigrants began with understanding their work commitments which created three common
issues that are often mentioned in interviews with children and mothers.
First is the difference between working in Vietnam and working in the Czech
Republic. All my adult interviewees (the parents of my children-interviewees and employers
of my nanny-interviewees) were in dual-earner households in the CR. The majority of the
parental couples were owners of shops or stands (either they worked together in a jointly
operated one or each of them had their own), one of the parents was a translator, and one
couple worked in a factory. But it would be wrong to take the dual-earner household as a
manifestation of geographical mobility and life in the host country. What Ms. Veselá
describes when she says that the Vietnamese learn that everybody must work when they are of
productive age, is something that I heard often from my interviewees. They explained the
“natural diligence” of Vietnamese immigrants as either a result of Confucian philosophy or,
more often, as a reaction to experience with war and poverty. Dual-earner households were
normal in Vietnam before they moved to the Czech Republic; but work life changed radically
for both men and women after the move. Above all, there were qualitative changes when they
shifted from their previous occupations (whether skilled or unskilled) and became
entrepreneurs in the immigrant economy. This involved de-skilling. In addition, their new
occupation required quantitative changes in work patterns and led to work intensifying at the
expense of private life, as the logic of “close the shop and you earn nothing” shaped their
existence. They experienced what Wall and José (2004) called pressures to work – because
the migration project aims at maximizing income – and pressures from work like atypical or
long hours, and the pressure not to miss work.
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The second issue is closely connected to the first, and encompasses the adjustment of
being Vietnamese and working in the Czech Republic. Interviewees said that “if I was in
Vietnam, I would work less,” but they also said “if I was Czech, I would work less”. If the
goal of migration is to ensure a better future for the children, work is the means to achieve this
goal. Vietnamese parents must work more than Czech parents because their children enter the
society with the stigma of foreignness. Ms. Ho made the following comment which expresses
the link between parents’ work life and the children’s future: “We are foreigners here, and it
will be hard for them to prove that they are not worse than others. We want them to have a
better life than we have now.” Despite the fact that they are financially very burdensome
activities, private education, additional courses after school, and holidays in English-speaking
countries are considered important ways to do the best thing for the children—as well as the
parents’ own future as the children’s education reflects the status of the family (see also
Kibria 1993).
The third issue appears more often in the statements of my interviewee-children, and
captures the nature of balancing everyday life between work and family. This is the tension
between working versus living in the Czech Republic. These families experience conflicts
between work and child care, they “have so much to do that they feel they have a hard time
managing everyday life” (Forsberg 2009: 162). Ms Veselá’s statement, which was very much
echoed in the interviews with children, demonstrates that for Vietnamese immigrants
everyday life is work life. Vietnamese parents are both admired and castigated by their
children for sacrificing their private lives to earn money. The struggle for family life is
conducted when parents negotiate work-life strategies built upon the patterns learnt in
Vietnam, but played with the cards dealt out in the Czech Republic. The efforts to reconcile
the two are understood and experienced differently by parents and children: for the parents the
Czech Republic is a place of work, while for the children it is the place of life. The pervasive
ambivalence of a family life overwhelmed by work life reflects the fact that parents are in the
Czech Republic because of and for their kids; however, they are not here with them.
Nazli Kibria (1993) emphasizes that immigrants reconstruct their family lives on the
basis of their “cultural baggage”: the experience, ideology, and understanding of the world
brought with them from their country of origin. In this text I postulate that part of this
baggage is the model of child care; in other words, ideas about what child care should be and
how it should be carried out, which are confronted with structural opportunities and obstacles
12
in the new society. Lise Widdig Isaksen (2010) showed how this works in her analysis of
transnational care practices describing how Ukrainian migrant women contrast care strategies
in the country of origin with strategies in the host country and that they prefer the practices
that are normal in their homeland. Here I illustrate how Vietnamese families metaphorically
“unpack” their cultural baggage and adapt to the new environment. First, however, we must
look at what this baggage contains; that is, the ideas about caring for children that the
Vietnamese migrants bring with them.
When I asked my mother-interviewees how they would handle child care if
they were in Vietnam, most of them named three logical possibilities: they could stay home,
put the child into day care, or find a third person. The first possibility, to stay home, was
described by my interviewees as the least realistic as it’s only a privilege of those rich enough
for the husband to support the family alone. The early return of mothers to the work force in
Vietnam is set by the length of paid maternity leave. This ranges from four months (for
normal work), to five months (for jobs that entail a dangerous environment or difficult shifts,
for example women police or soldiers), and up to six months (if the woman is physically
handicapped). Women receive 100% of their pay and can apply for unpaid leave in addition
(Nguyen 2012: 7). This model of maternity leave produces demand for both formal and
informal child care. Formal care in Vietnam is provided by a relatively dense network of
private and public schools and centers – nursery schools (for 3 month to 3 year olds),
kindergarten (3–5 year olds) and pre-primary schools (5–6). As Nguyen concludes, however,
despite the density of this network the majority of families with children less than 3 years old
rely on informal child care – richer people pay for nannies (mostly in urban areas), while
others rely on the grandparents.
After coming to the Czech Republic, Vietnamese migrants – accustomed in
their home country to four-month paid maternity leave and a strong network of pre-school
child care facilities – find themselves in a social state which has pursued re-familization
policies since 1989 (Sirovátka and Saxonberg 2006, Lister et al 2007).
[W]hen the communist walls came tumbling down, Central European women
found themselves in a historically unique situation. On the one hand, they
experienced the highest employment levels in the entire world, with only the
Scandinavian social democratic countries coming close. On the other hand, in
contrast to the Scandinavian countries, little discussion arose about the need
for men to share in the household and child-rearing chores. As a result, the
household remained strictly the domain of the woman. (Sirovátka and
Saxonberg 2006: 185).
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What are the signs of this re-familization, and what impact does it have on the lives of
Vietnamese families? There are two types of paid parental support in the Czech Republic and
other Central and Eastern European countries. First is maternity leave which has remained
unchanged during the transformation in the Czech Republic, and is now available for 28
weeks, with a replacement rate of 69 % (Sirovátka and Saxonberg 2006). The second is called
family leave, which can be taken until the child is four years old. An explicit re-familization
policy is evident in the cuts in state nursery schools for children under four years old. Since
1989 the number of these facilities has been reduced from 1,043 facilities (serving c. 40 000
children) to just 45 facilities (for fewer than 1500 children). The majority of the remaining
facilities are located in the larger towns and there are few of them in the border regions where
there are many Vietnamese. But the lack of nursery schools is not the only factor that shapes
the child care decisions of Vietnamese parents. Even where child care facilities are available,
their lack of flexibility creates an important barrier. Nursery schools are usually open only
until 5 pm and that doesn’t meet the needs of parents who work until 8 or 9 pm. Even if they
were able to place their children in a nursery school, these parents would still need someone
to pick them up at 5 and watch them until they come from work.
Thus Vietnamese parents experience big differences between child care models
in Vietnam and the Czech Republic. In contrast to the model familiar to them from Vietnam
(returning to work after four months of maternal leave), now they must deal with a radically
different setting. First, the relatively long paid family leaves and negative mythologies around
collective child care shape the discourse of what Ann Oakley called “myth of motherhood”
(1974) and Sharon Hays called the ideology of intensive mothering (1996). Re-familization
policy in the Czech Republic strengthened the ideology of a gendered division of reproductive
labour with a permanent individual carer (i.e. mother). This is radically different from the
previous conceptions about motherhood and child care of the majority of Vietnamese
immigrants. Secondly, the kind of child care facilities which provide important institutional
support in Vietnam, are either too far away, have no vacancies, or have inadequate hours in
the Czech Republic. The final option, which would have been the main option back in
Vietnam, is to delegate child care to relatives within the family.
Nguyet is a twenty-year-old university student who came to the Czech
Republic when she was 4 years old. Her mother went to work immediately after a four-month
maternity leave before she moved to the Czech Republic. After that Nguyet was taken care of
by her maternal grandmother. After the family moved to the CR Nguyet’s mother had to take
14
a job again and she needed to find a substitute for her mother who to look after Nguyet. So
she found her daughter a nanny.
The role of kinship relations in delegated care has been described in a few
studies (such as Utall 1999), some of which are devoted to the role of social/kinship relations
in the post-migration harmonization of employment and family life (Moon 2003). The
absence of a network of relatives influences many different areas of post-migration life and
my interviewees often spoke of it in terms of a lack of economic and emotional support. But
in view of the important role played in childcare by grandparents in Vietnam the separation
from kinship networks is most keenly felt when it comes to taking care of children. Hiring a
nanny represents an alternative strategy for Nguyet’s mother and other interviewees, one that
simulates the Vietnamese model of child care in which the task is delegated to grandparents.
When asked “How would you deal with looking after the children if you were in Vietnam?”
the majority answered that the grandmother would take over for the mother when the latter
had to return to work. As one of the nannies put it, “They don’t have their grandmothers here,
so they have to find some.”
Basically the nanny supplements the mother and supplants the grand-mother
(Nelson 1990). This leads to the potential formation of family/kinship bonds that are
significantly different from relationships described in most studies on care/domestic work
(Anderson 2000, Hess and Puckhaber 2004, Búriková and Miller 2010, Akalin 2008).3
These
studies looked at the relationships that emerged between nanny/domestic workers and their
employers as a pseudo-family, a fictive or false kinship in which the rhetoric of “one of the
family” masked inequality and functioned as a moral economy that allowed families to
demand unpaid overtime and so on (Hess and Puckhaber 2004). Nevertheless family
dynamics function very differently in the case of Vietnamese families in the CR—mainly for
two reasons. The first is that there is a different logic regarding who is a member of which
family. While in research elsewhere it is the nannies who became part of the family they
work for, here it is the children (and sometimes the parents as well) who become part of the
nanny’s family. At the same time the nannies become part of the family life of Vietnamese
migrants so closer ties develop between both families.
3
The degree of intensity in the relationship; that is, to what degree a kinship relationship is formed between the
family/child and the nanny/family of the nanny, depends on several factors: first, the age of the child when the
nanny began, secondly the intensity of contact (whether every day/all day or just 3 hours a day for example),
third, the nanny’s care biography (i.e. relations with her children/grandchildren and her relationship to children
in general; see Souralová 2012).
15
A second factor is the change in family dynamics caused by the separation
from relatives back in Vietnam. Kibria highlights the impact of separation from kin on
“shifting and expanding the criteria for inclusion in the family circle” and demonstrates how
migration alters the substance of family life (1993: 8). For the Vietnamese families in my
sample the main change involves the nanny’s inclusion in the family circle. She not only fills
the role of grandmother, she becomes a grandmother. “Grandma” is not just the word used by
both parents and children to address the nanny, it is a performative term that determines her
position in the family and her relationship to the children she looks after—given their
everyday contact, the transfer of Czech social and cultural capital, sharing holidays and
vacations, celebrating birthdays, and buying presents. For many Vietnamese children the
Czech grandma is their main anchor in the new society as well as their main caregiver and
teacher. She is “simply” the person who is called “grandma” and with whom they experience
“typical grandma things” that they cannot experience with their real grandparents who are too
far away.
The intensity of the work commitment, balancing between the Czech and
Vietnamese ideologies of child care, and separation from the kinship network are three main
reasons why some Vietnamese families in the Czech Republic hire nannies to look after their
children. Nevertheless these three factors still do not explain why Vietnamese families hire
Czech nannies (and not Vietnamese or Ukrainian) so we must examine the ethnic logic of
selecting a nanny.
First we must look into the substantive characteristics of this labour—the
contents of the child care that Vietnamese families desire for their children. When a
Vietnamese family advertises for a nanny, it often looks something like this: “Looking for
woman to look after our one-year-old daughter. Monday through Sunday. Nanny can look
after child in nanny’s own home. Pay: 8000 CZK (300 Euro)”, or “Seeking woman to look
after our six-year-old son – pick him up from school, help with homework. Monday through
Friday, sometimes weekends and holidays. Pay: 6000 CZK (230 Euro).” This illustrates that
Vietnamese parents require a major commitment of time from their nannies for relatively low
pay. While in 2012 the average monthly wage was over 24,000 CZK (€ 920) and the
minimum wage was 8,000 CZK (€ 300), my nanny interviewees often looked after children
all day or all week for an average of 6–10,000 CZK a month (€ 230–380). Typical nanny
work in a Vietnamese family thus involves long working hours for a small financial reward.
16
All of the nannies acknowledged this, as did Mrs. Křepelková who was on disability
retirement and working with her fifth Vietnamese family when our interview took place:
“You cannot count the hourly wage. That is simply impossible. You have less than 20 CZK (€
0.75). And it’s deal or no deal. But if you like doing it, then why not?” Here Ms. Křepelková
refers to two aspects essential to the (self-) selection of a nanny. First is the economic side of
paid child care; that is, who can afford to work as a nanny in a Vietnamese family. Second,
and more important, is the issue of wanting to become a nanny and liking the job. Keeping
this in mind, we can now proceed to two interconnected questions: first, why don’t
Vietnamese families hire Vietnamese nannies to look after their children, and second, why do
they hire Czech nannies.
Three interrelated factors provide an answer to why Vietnamese families don’t
hire Vietnamese nannies. First there is the demographic composition of the Vietnamese
population in the CR. As I have already pointed out only 1 % are over 65 years of age because
this is a work-related migration and few elderly take part to begin with—and then many return
to their home country after their productive time is finished so those who age into this cohort
tend to leave. In other words, older Vietnamese women are generally unavailable in the CR.
And because they came to the CR to work, even the 1 % of women who are over 65 are
working and have no time to look after children. During my research I encountered only one
example of a family that had grandparents in the CR – and both of them were working so that
the children were taken care of by a Czech grandmother during the week; the Vietnamese
grandparents only saw them sometimes on Sunday. Finally, there is the cultural (symbolic)
value of child rearing and how it is valued in relation to work in the Vietnamese community.
We can see this in the attitude towards maternity leave expressed by Ms. Veselá. As she
emphasized during the interview “maternity leave is not work” for the Vietnamese; and when
asked about what kind of Vietnamese women look after children, she answered, “women who
don’t have better work than looking after some kids (…) and are incapable of doing business,
so they have to do something worse that pays less.” So in the context of the Vietnamese
community being a nanny is not highly valued from either symbolically or financially.
As to why Vietnamese families hire Czech nannies we return to the basic
characteristics of these women’s lives. The fact that these are women dependent on the social
state makes them suitable and available candidates for two reasons: they have sufficient free
time, and thanks to the support of the social state they need less financial compensation.
Working as a nanny is a side job for them and isn’t their main source of income. Unlike the
17
Vietnamese women they can afford to work for so little. In addition to the availability of
Czech women, it is important that they are Czech; that is, they can teach the children things
that their Vietnamese parents (or nannies from other immigrant groups) cannot. All the
mothers and nannies I interviewed understood child care –whether performed by mothers or
nannies – not only as nurturance, but above all as the transmission of social and cultural
capital (Macdonald 2010, Bourdieu 2001). Teaching the Czech language to children whose
parents speak only Vietnamese, helping them with homework, passing along an authentic
view into Czech culture (as my children interviewees describe it), and helping them form
social ties with members of the majority society, were all mentioned as major reasons for
recruiting Czech nannies.
Having a Czech nanny is becoming a post-migration norm in the Vietnamese
community. While only 1-2 % of Czech families make use of individual private paid child
care (Hašková 2008), my interviewees report that the number of Vietnamese families seeking
nannies for their children is around 80–95%. Most of them add that this is a “common”,
“normal”, or “matter-of-fact” thing. Some nannies go from family to family, or are asked
whether they have a friend who would take care of some friends’ children. But it is also true
that taking care of Vietnamese children has become a norm for some Czech women – several
of my interviewees worked as nannies for a number of Vietnamese families in succession.
Experience taking care of Vietnamese children sometimes sets off a chain of other nanny jobs.
For example Xuan tells of how much her Czech grandmother cried when she and her brother
stopped living with her (they lived with her from Monday to Friday and with their parents on
weekends). Soon after they left, the grandma, who lived in western Bohemia where there is a
concentration of Vietnamese families, began taking care of other small children (provoking
anger and jealously in Xuan’s brother). According to Xuan the grandma had become so
accustomed to caring for Vietnamese children that she couldn’t live without them.
The model in which Vietnamese families take on Czech nannies to watch their
children can be seen in two different ways. It can be just a strategy for reconciling working
and family life when a dual-earner couple needs a third person to take care of the children.
But, on the basis of my analysis I tend to conclude that for most of these families hiring a
nanny fulfils an ideal of where relatives belong in family life. Two findings lead me to this
conclusion: First regarding the “unpacking of cultural baggage” (i.e. ideas about the family
and child care) we can see that Vietnamese migrants in the CR “simply do what they would
18
do at home in Vietnam.” Neither the formation of the dual-earner household nor the
delegation of child rearing to a third person is result of migration–both of these customs were
established long before migration. Finding a Czech granny thus simulates the existing family
model as adapted to the post-migration reality. In other words, the game does not change. In
both the pre-migration and post-migration context the mother and father both work, and the
children are looked after by someone else; only the players are changed under the new rules
as a nanny is brought in for a grandma. Secondly, the relationship that arises between the
family (mainly the children) and the nanny-granny is such that the nanny replaces the
Vietnamese grandma in more than just looking after the kids, she becomes their “real
grandmother.” Children often talk about having two different grandmothers and about being
closer to their Czech granny with whom they have spent much more time and shared more
experiences.
The Czech granny is sometimes more important than the parents. For example Hanh, a
17-year-old secondary school student, sums up the babicka’s role like this:
I can say that she gave me the feeling of home that time. Now she cannot give it to me
anymore because I think differently about things. But then she simply was my home. I
would have not left the Czech Republic because of her. You know, not because of my
friends or teachers at school that I liked, but because of my granny. Because my granny
was here for me… she was the home for me.
Thus in many Vietnamese families the Czech grandmother plays an important role in the
process of settling down in the new country –for both children and parents. For a while the
families are dependent on the Czech grandmother both socially and culturally. Social
dependency arises mainly because of the parents’ insufficient language skills. Thus until the
children grow up and can manage everything themselves the nannies are the ones responsible
for communicating with schools (going to parent-teacher meetings and even signing the
students’ report card in some cases) or with doctors. In this way nannies pass their own social
capital on to the children (and to a lesser extent to the parents), introducing them to their
friends and relatives, substituting for their missing social network, and providing a certain
foundation for the entire family. Cultural dependency is most evident in the passing down of
language skills and Czech traditions and customs. The children themselves say that thanks to
their nanny they are better integrated into Czech society – both through “learning the Czech
way of life” (for example how to spend time at Christmas, how to go mushroom hunting), and
– as the excerpt above shows – by helping them find a new sense of home.
19
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