Moral Narratives, Fragile Rights and Educational Striving Among Floating Lives in Urban Vietnam

ABSTRACT

This study examines how Vietnamese returnees from Cambodia living on houseboats along a canal in urban Vietnam experience residence and citizenship in everyday life. Water‐based dwelling and cross‐border migration histories combine to produce a grey space in which residents are neither fully recognised nor consistently removed, despite holding Vietnamese nationality. Living on waterways outside planning compliance places households beyond the administrative categories used to distribute welfare, healthcare and residency verification, producing differentiated citizenship in practice. Residents respond through what the study terms moral infrastructure: hardship narratives, accounts of a life that burdens no one, and caregiving responsibilities used as practical grounds for negotiating tolerance with authorities. They also rely on manual work and relationships with ‘quý nhân’ and ‘mạnh thường quân’ (benevolent doctors, donors and volunteers) to meet everyday needs. Education, meanwhile, serves as a future‐oriented strategy through which families hope the next generation will gain the security and recognition they lack. Theoretically, the study extends Yiftachel's grey space framework beyond land‐based contexts and develops Holston's differentiated citizenship by showing that access to welfare depends on residency registration rather than nationality. It also proposes moral infrastructure as a complement to Simone's people‐as‐infrastructure. Practically, it calls for welfare eligibility to be decoupled from residency documentation, governance to be made more consistent and less discretionary and population frameworks to ensure that cross‐border return histories are not treated as a basis for administrative suspicion or unequal treatment.