Ladies selling breakfast: COVID-19 disruption of intimate socialities among street-engaged food traders in Ho Chi Minh city

Abstract

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, supports a vibrant street food culture. Most of the city’s street-engaged food traders are poor and unskilled women, and there is scant research about how they build social networks and social capital that sustain their micro-businesses. This article focusses on the intimate socialities that street-engaged food traders develop with customers, shop owners and sister-traders in order to stabilise their incomes while their informal street-trading activities are policed and potentially shut down. Recent COVID-19 lockdown and social-distancing measures disrupted the crucial interpersonal relations of street trading and left the traders with no income. This article explores traders’ strate-gies for achieving economic security, and outlines transformations of intimate socialities into mediated and digital relations after the lockdown.