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Christina Schwenkel, "Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi" (U California Press, 2025)
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
welcome to the New Books Network
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
hello
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
everyone and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Camelia Pham and I am a host here on the New Books Network. In an era dominated by visual information, what can sounds of a pandemic reveal about crisis and care? How might attuning to sonic atmosphere uncover new dimensions to states of emergency and their implications for collective life? In Sonic Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, Christina Shkwenko examines the use of sound in COVID 19 response efforts in urban Vietnam. Based on sound work conducted in Hanoi in 2020 during the pandemic's first year, she shows how acoustic technologies played a pivotal yet overlooked role in state efforts to achieve record low infection rates worldwide. Across lived experience of quarantine, lockdown and spatial distancing, Cuenco explores sound based interventions to curb virus transmission and the public's response to these auditory measures. From instance messaging alerts to public health videos and neighborhood loudspeakers, Sonic governance sought to transform urban sounds and listening practices to mobilize action, drawing people into network networks of care and control. As anthropology stands at a crossroads, sonic socialism makes the compelling case for the value of sensory autoethnography in reimagining a more careful and Caring Ethnographic Practice in a Post Pandemic World Today I have the pleasure of speaking with the author of Sonic Socialism, Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi, Christina Schwinkel. She is a social cultural anthropologist who works in the fields of Cold War science and technology studies, critical urban theory, decolonization, affect theory, and new materialisms. Over the past 20 years, her work has examined the cultural and infrastructural impacts of war and American imperialism in Vietnam. Schwenkel's first project, the American War in Contemporary Transnational remembrance and Representation, focused on transnational contestations over historical memory in post war Vietnam, examining how commemorative objects, sites, and practices shape historical knowledge production. Her second book, Building the Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam, which has won multiple awards, examines legacies of socialist humanitarian practices and transnational mobilities between Vietnam and former East Germany. In particular, Vietnamese contract labor programs in German factories and East Germany architectural and urban planning projects in Vietnam. Strengl has published widely in scholarly journals, magazines, and edited volumes in English, German, and Vietnamese. She is professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside and former co editor in chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. She currently serves on the editorial committee at the University of California Press and is board member of Cultural Anthropology as well as member of the editorial team of Roadsides, a collaborative e journal on the social life of infrastructure. Professor Skrinko, welcome.
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Thank you very much for this opportunity. Really appreciate it.
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
Thank you. I would love to start with your relationship with Hanoi itself. The book feels inseparable from the city, almost as if it thinks and acts through the infrastructure and collective rhythm. Could you take us back to the beginning of that relationship? What first drew you to Hanoi as a site of inquiry and what kept you there, especially during the uncertainty of the pandemic? And how has that sustained engagement transformed the kinds of questions you ask about socialism and everyday life?
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Thanks for that great question. You're asking me to go back quite far in time, so I have two ways I want to two things I want to share in response. First is, well, I started my relationship with Hanoi in the late 1990s, right. So it's been a while. It's been over 25 years. And it's part of my ethnographic practice, right. Is to maintain those long term relationships. It gives us such a kind of vantage point for being able to be a witness to social transformation across time. Right. And so now as I become kind of a, you know, a more senior anthropologist of Vietnam, I'm able to think Back to that time when I was first in Hanoi and how it looked, you know, completely different, and the questions that pulled me there and other places. Right. I mean, I've spent maybe close to 10 years living in Vietnam and in places not only in Hanoi, but also in Bing Hai, Phong, Cao Bang. Right. So getting that kind of mostly the north, also Saigon, but being able then to continue that relationship over time was really important to me. And there's another thing I want to add. Here is the second city that's very important to my life and also pulls me into thinking and asking questions about social infrastructure, socialist infrastructure is Berlin. And the significant amount of time that I have spent also as an undergraduate student in eastern Berlin after the fall of the Wall. So I actually came to Hanoi with that perspective. And I very closely see the kinds of overlaps and the relationships, the nodes right. Between and the people and the objects and the technologies that are always flowing between Hanoi in Berlin. And you'll see, maybe even in this conversation, I often mix them up and use them interchangeably because to me, they're just so similar. And they're similar. Questions we can ask about socialism, socialist infrastructure, and post socialist transform that make it really important for me to kind of be deeply embedded in both of those sites as I move forward in my work.
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
Thank you. This book is deeply shaped by the temporal structure of the COVID 19 pandemic, but it isn't read simply as a pandemic ethnography. If I would say, how did the conditions of lockdown, restricted mobility, and heightened state coordination in Hanoi transform your research process and perhaps even your positionality as a scholar.
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Obviously, in the midst of a pandemic, we could no longer do the kinds of deep ethnography, ethnographic work that anthropologists like to do. Right. The engagements that we have with everyday life, the participant observations, the interviews, it just was no longer possible. Right. So we really had to think about reconfiguring our approaches. Right. So at that time, it was clear to me, actually I had no interest in doing anything on the pandemic. I was in Hanoi. I was finishing revisions on my book, Building Socialism, and the kind of quietude of the city and the fact that I had been put into quarantine home. Quarantine gave me the opportunity, and then we went into lockdown, gave me the opportunity to just focus on that book. But it became clear across time, especially with the outbreak of the most famous case, patient 17, who coincidentally ended up being my neighbor. And this is A real interesting kind of perspective because so often anthropology happens because of these kinds of co instances, right, where we don't start out on a path. But it became clear to me across time that actually, as I mentioned in the book, my office window overlooks out onto the property of patient 17. And so I was able to see every day that whole street that had been put into lockdown, the first one in Hanoi, right. Was visible for me from my office window. And so that gave me a kind of unique vantage point, literally, right. I was on my seventh floor looking down into the park and seeing when they let people out, seeing when they were doing medical checks, distributing food, these sorts of things. And then I came to the realization that this was an incredible moment that I was able. That I was a part of. I had originally returned to Hanoi to be with my family during the pandemic. I knew that things were going to shut down, so I got out. I think we'll talk about this later. I left the US as quickly as I could. But then I realized that this was going to be an opportunity for me to think with people about how they respond to disaster and crises.
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
I would love to turn your engagement with sound, what first drew you to sound studies and to theorizing, listening as a social and political practice? Because I know that your work has long sat in the intersection of anthropology, urban studies, and post war and social studies of Vietnam. But Sonic Socialism feels like a real methodological and conceptual expansion. Could you walk us through how your earlier research on memory infrastructure and transnational urban development evolved into this more kind of sensorial and acoustic approach? What did listening allow you to access that your previous frameworks perhaps couldn't?
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah, that's such a great question because as you kind of, as you pointed out in the beginning, that the. Well, first of all, movement restrictions. Right. The movement restrictions really rendered our usual approaches and visual media largely ineffective, Right. I mean, you could hang up as many poses as you want, but nobody's outside because we're on lockdown, who are going to see it, right? So there was this kind of crisis media infrastructure shift to sound, to reach people in isolation, right. So we had to kind of. And I had to kind of set aside and really think deeply about our urban ocular centrisms and how much that had also informed my own work, which was very much based on materiality, very much based on visual anthropology, Right. Thinking through images, the visual world around us. But, you know, the pandemic really, I think, forced all of us to have these kinds of intense sensory Reorientations, Right. I mean, cities went silent, for example, and we all noticed this. So we have some ways in which we experienced those soundscape changes in similar sorts of ways, and then they were very, very divergent. Of course, we all listen differently, right? So we all hear things differently. We understand what we hear differently. So I think the pandemic itself really required, I guess I would say, a fundamental shift from visual to auditory ways of knowing. And so, in that sense, I embraced that practice. When I was thinking about the speaking with you today, I had no intention of turning this. First I said I had no intention of making this a project. And then second, I had no intention of making this a sound project. But it became so apparent to me that the ways in which I remain connected to the government, to my neighbors, to the world. Right. And to thinking ethnographically was going to be through sonic technologies.
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
I see. That is so wonderful. Could you give our listeners a general overview of sonic socialism, like the central questions that drive the book, its overall structure, and what you are ultimately hoping to achieve?
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah. Okay. I've been thinking about this too, because I feel like there's so many questions that I ask in the book, and it's always like, bring it down to the two major things that I was doing. I think, theoretically, one of the most important things that I. I was asking is a thread that's woven throughout all the three books that it is, how do people respond collectively to crisis? Okay. And as I've asked in my work, how do they rebuild? Right. My second book was how do they Rebuild? How do people rebuild collectively rebuild their material worlds and their social worlds after disaster. And the disaster in that book is American protracted American bombing. Right. Ten years of US Bombing raids on northern Vietnam. And then how do they remember those disasters? Right. I mean, that was the first book. This project provides me, again, that unique advantage that I was on the ground and was able to see how people and governments respond to crises collectively. Okay. And then I wanted to know, what do those responses say about readiness? Right. Larger kinds of ways of anticipatory kinds of governance, preparation, but also what do they reveal about our cultural values? Right. As an anthropologist, I think the ways in which people respond and governments respond to crises reveal and ask questions, raise questions about values. Right. Our cultural values and who or what is important? Right. Who matters and why? So that was kind of the first question that kind of motivated the book. The second question was a very kind of empirically based, practical question, is how was it possible in the pandemic's first year, that a nation with very few resources, like Vietnam, that historically has been a country of scarcity, became a country of plenitude. Right. I discussed this in the first act, right. Became a country of abundance when scarcity was being experienced across the global North. And the global north was the place that was experiencing staggering deaths and infection rates, right? Where Vietnam, as I discuss in the book, and I'll say this for listeners, because they might not know this, that at the end of 2020, Vietnam, approximately. These are always approximate numbers, but they had only a few dozen deaths, right? Compared to the several hundred thousand deaths in the United States and only a couple thousand infections at the end of 2020 compared to the tens of millions of infections in the United States and in the global North. Marginality. So my question was asking how was this possible that a country with less resources could in the first year of the pandemic fare so much better?
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
Thank you. And I also want to turn our attention to the phrase sonic socialism, because the phrase is very striking. It seem seems to hold together both like a political project and also an effective everyday experience. I'm curious about when and how that concept kind of crystallized for you. Was it something that emerged inductively from your field work in Hanoi and particularly through your encounters with the city sounds and urban infrastructures, or did it develop more kind of dialogically through existing theoretically, through existing theoretical conversations around sound studies, socialism and urban life?
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah, that's such a great question. And I would say both, right? Both. Because I'm a novice in sound studies, right? This is my foray into sound studies. That's the first thing I say in the book, teach me. I had originally wanted the book, as a small aside, to be something that could be short, right. When I went into this, I thought, okay, this is something I could, I could share. I have a lot to share here. I mean, I have a lot of value to thinking about how the pandemic was not a universal experience and it wasn't one event, but a series of unfolding events. And as I argue in the book, a series of unfolding sonic events. And to kind of bring that attention like back to place based ethnography, but having to do it very differently. So I start. So I would answer to that is both. I didn't go in. And you would know this with the questions I asked had nothing to do with sound in the beginning, right? This is like one of the things that people say. What's most surprising, what did you find with your research? It was that it was going to take me into the realm of the sonic. And that became so exciting to me as I delved deeper, deeper into the research right. In the scholarship and then saw that the book was not going to be a simple kind of share with the world the kinds of cultural assumptions, undo the cultural assumptions around the pandemic by using Vietnam as example. But it was going to be pushing much further, a kind of a crisis based way of thinking about disaster response, media, infrastructure and the ways in which then sound came to play a vital role in state governance. So because this is the context of socialism and because I'm grappling and I'm thinking very deeply about the ways in which historically it has been possible to mobilize Vietnamese society, 100 million people in the face of disasters collectively, right. Doesn't mean that there aren't people who don't disagree and don't jump on board, but for the most part you have people who are ready to respond. That's part of the history of how Vietnam came together to win wars. We know this. Right? How is this happening in disasters? And how was the state facilitating that? And how is the relationship between people and the state and built on a notion of cooperation, right. And I use that term, cooperation because I want to move away from a top down, bottom up, which is often how the research frames it. It's either state control, and in the book I speak very strongly back, it's either state control authoritarianism, which removes agency. Right. Or it's bottom up, which is all about resistance and it doesn't see the middle ground. And that middle ground of cooperation is always shifting and coordination. It's always shifting, right. It's never fixed. And that's why I talk about, in the book about non compliant compliance, right? Like we were complying at some sense, but we were doing it while not being compliant in another sense. Right. And I think that's like sums up what life is like in Hanoi, in Vietnamese society more broadly, right. Of finding that kind of balance. So that's kind of what was motivating. And through that thinking about the ways in which historically, and I call it in the book, I developed this concept. I would love to take it further outside the book, right. Because the book is sometimes used to kind of think through certain ideas and then leave them there and develop them later. The idea of disaster socialism, right. And what I'm kind of trying to speak back to is the disaster capitalism that Naomi Klein identifies, like as the ways in which capitalists, the global north responds very much Right. Through prioritizing corporate interests over public welfare. Okay. So I was thinking about the ways in which there's this kind of. And I don't mean to idealize this, but I'm thinking through this kind of like people before economy approach. The government was very clear about this in Covid. Like we were going to make sure that we do put people first. That is, we're not going to keep factories open if people are going to die in them. Right. It's like if we have to sell it down and people are going to be suffering economically, we'll figure that out. But we have to put people first. And emphasizing cooperation over competition. Right. Shared resources over market driven solutions. There's something different going on here and it's the ways in which many countries in the global south, especially countries aligned with socialism or have socialist kinds of infrastructures have responded to. And there's a large literature of this also in Cuba, right. It's like, why has Cuba been. Why do people don't die in hurricanes in Cuba? Why is that? And why did so many people die in the United States in hurricane, et cetera? Asking these ways in which the government is able to mobilize people. Right. But also giving people agency to see that they are willing to cooperate. And I think that's a really important point for listeners, especially because people are going to be listening to this in the United States where there was very little cooperation outside of maybe local initiatives. But we all know that what happened in the United States was very, very divisive and it has contributed to where we are today as a country. Right? Oh, and I'll say in there, in looking at that, that socialist infrastructure and the ways in which these mechanisms legitimize state power and ideology was reinforced through sound. That was one of the main things within this context of the pandemic. So I started asking larger questions of what does then sound play in disaster socialism and in the kinds of reproduction of state power and ways of reaffirming its legitim in society.
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
One thing I found so compelling in the opening of the book is that you begin with a very familiar sound to many Vietnamese youth, myself included. This catchy participatory hand washing song that transforms public health messaging into what you describe as a kind of musicing of collectivity. Starting from that moment, you invite us to think about the pandemic through sound affect and everyday coordination. What does this sonic entry point allow you to review about pandemic governance in Vietnam? And how does attending to sound allow you to reveal a more complex picture of how care, surveillance, discipline, blame, participation and exclusion were actually lived and negotiated on the Ground, Yeah.
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Kinko V was a brilliant government move, right? I mean, because it spoke to people around the world, a lot of people around the world. Like it has millions and millions of viewers. I actually was showing it in my classroom one week before classes went online. And we were looking at it, we were singing it because, as you know, it was a catchy tune. And then it, you know, it blossomed into the hand washing dance that went global and it drew on famous musicians from Vietnam, right? Public figures and that, you know, in and of itself. And it made these very cute figures who were fighting against this embodiment, right, of the coronavirus. So it had a public health message, right, raising awareness, how to wash your hands, how to watch out for the virus, right? And it at the same time brought people together through song and through singing and dancing, right? And then because Vietnam kind of went famous, it got famous for this. The song that was being played on NPR in the U.S. right? It was being played on late night shows, you know, and all these things were happening with it, I thought was a brilliant way in which the state also showed its preemptive approach. Because that was released very early on, right? And it got people involved, right, In a sense, in a way in which. And it kind of put out there these ideas of sonic practices of care, right? I mean, it's audio, visual, but it has a lot to do with the audio and the ways in which they crafted the sound that people were going to be singing. And that was later as well as I talk about later in the book with Vietnam. Oi. Right. It's this way in which, like these ear worms and once they're in your head, you're thinking and you're doing it and you're washing your hands and you're in your dancing to it. So it was very brilliant way to kind of lay out the ways in which people, you know, the state and also public figures, that's super important there as well, because it's bringing together the public and the private and also corporations, because it was also sponsored, right? And the ways in which these were all coming together to work together, to, quote, unquote, collectively fight against an invading enemy. And that was so interesting too because it was clearly relying on mobilization strategies that had been used in the war. And many of those strategies used in the war, as I document in the book, were also sonic techniques. But it was updating them to show that the government was actually hip and getting involved in digital governance, digital E governance and circulating this using these new technologies. So that in of itself is the foray right into the book. And it lays out. But what was interesting about this too is with the handwashing dance, people took it in a different direction. So I also use it to think about, even when people are cooperating, they are also doing their own thing and repurposing. And that's a super important point, right? Because again, it goes back to the compliance, non compliance rethinking that people are not just passive puppets. And keep in mind, many people in the United States still think that about Vietnamese people, right? That the government kind of controls them. They have no agency. Of course, it looks very different. It's much more complex on the ground. And I try to capture that kind of complexity and the nuances.
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
Using Genkovi in your introduction, you frame Vietnam as what you call the other Covid exception, and you invite readers to rethink why its response was so often overlooked or reduced to a story about authoritarian control. As you know, though, it depended on widespread, as you show, it depended on widespread coordination, public trust, and what you call a sonic governance of care. I love that phrase. At the same time, in pandemic Figure 1, the case of a patient 17, who was your neighbor, we also see how that same sonic environment can become saturated with fear, stigma, and gendered moral judgment as information, rumor, and public scrutiny circulate so intensely. So I'd love to hear you expand on that framing. What are we missing when we rely on those more familiar narratives of state control to explain Vietnam's pandemic response?
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Well, we miss, like I said, we miss complexity and nuance, right? And we miss the ways in which people themselves. There was no. There's a coordinated response, but there is no. And there's a collective response, but there's also an individual response, right? And it became very, you know, important for me to. To see that. Right? And now we know over time, this, this, the. The fear that existed at multiple levels was a fear that was driving that kind of sense of, we need to work together, right? I mean, you cannot forget that at that time, there was a really deep fear. I. And I talk about that fear myself in chapter one, and I will get to in a moment when I was subject to state intervention willingly, right? There was that sense of, oh, my God, how lucky I am to be in a place where I actually have a state nurse, a nurse checking on me. I felt secure, you know, I felt like I was going to be okay regardless of what happened. So there's this way in which I think we have to be really attentive to the diversity of experiences. And of course, the book is an autoethnography. So I'm not saying I'm speaking for everyone. I can't say what people, how they listened or not. I can respond to the ways in which I was responding, listening, and later in talking with people and later what I called the sound walking. Co sound walking and being co present with people, how I saw and experienced people listening. So I'm trying to capture that as well in the book that we can say there was this collective response, but we all know that there's ways in which people were doing all sorts of things on the ground where they weren't following. And that there was that kind of collective fear at the time of being called out, of being written in the paper, which was at the same time letting you know where you should not go. Because there were outbreaks, right. And they changed that over time. That was very interesting. I mean, the book is about how pandemic governance changes over time and the soundscapes themselves change, right? So there's this constant response to people like supplying all this, like private data on all these apps, being willingness, willing to do that, but at the same time then starting to be a bit more skeptical about it when they were seeing the ways in which stigma, the gendered stigma was working and the racialized stigma. We have to be clear about that, because the case of the pilot, the Scottish pilot really, and all the resources that went into saving him showed the ways in which stigma shifted when it was a white man. So that's really important to point out too, the case of patient 17, you know, the case of patient 17 was important too, because it was fundamentally a response to what people saw as the kind of immorality of wealth because she was so wealthy, right? And she was not contributing to the society, she was actually, through her actions, undermining it. And there's one thing in Vietnamese society, as people get wealthier, you're still expected to be contributing to the collective right, not undermining the collective right. And there's multiple ways in which people demonstrate that right, whether it's for the redistribution of wealth, whether it's for, you know, following the regulations, whatever. And so she was very ostracized partly because of the ways in which she was stigmatized for her wealth as way and not behaving properly as she should have. In a society that values collectivity, in
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Interviewer Camelia Pham
Act 1, quarantine comes through as a whole social and sensory arrangement. And you talked about like scheduled food distribution, medical checks up, text alerts, sound Trucks stamped, paperwork, you know, this whole orchestrated routine of pandemic governance that regulated the rhythms of everyday life while also making the state feel newly intimate and familiar. And then there's pandemic figure 2, also the security guard, who I found really compelling because he is, you know, someone who is everywhere standing at the threshold between public and private life and who suddenly becomes a frontline interpreter of risk through coughs, thermomet beeps, and other like, techniques of medical listening. I'd love to hear you talk about this movement in Act 1. What does this ordinary but also highly exposed worker allow you to see how the pandemic care in Hanoi was actually organized? To what extent did this system present itself as a form of collective protection while also relying on very uneven distribution of labor vulnerability, vulnerability and responsibility.
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yes, and you just summarized that last line was precisely why I have the pandemic figures in general, right? So because it's an autoethnography, I'm trying to kind of get people to flow through pandemic time across the three acts, right? And I make them acts because they feel like they're kind of part of this kind of unfolding of shifts between experiences of isolation, right? From quarantine to lockdown to social distancing, and so trying to. Between those. To highlight those kinds of vulnerable figures who were at the front lines, who are not typically recognized as being at the front lines. So the Anglibal V was so important because they were people who were trained to do one thing and suddenly were responsible for monitoring public health. Right? And what did that mean for them to be. And so I, you know, in that, in that vignette, I have them, like, trying to figure out, like, is she ill or not? Relying on other, Other ways in which they're trying to gauge illness by listening to coughs, right? By looking and waiting for the beep. Like, all the ways in which. And then thinking and through different kinds of, like, cultural ways in which could raise somebody's temperature. You know, like they would say, go sit in the shade and come back, right? Like all these ways in which suddenly they were put on the front lines and they were so unrecognized, right? Because, you know, the images that were being circulated on stamps, right? The visual images. There were visual images, right. I argue in the book, it's not that they didn't exist. It was just that sounds, Sounds tended to take precedence when you're in your home. So the ways in which, like, when the images would come through the photographs, like, say, in newspapers, online newspapers, we're always coming back to the same people, right. Who are so important. Of course, the healthcare workers, definitely. But we are missing the people that were more vulnerable on the ground. And some of them, they didn't have training in this, and they were at the front lines because they were coming right up and having to take your temperature. Right? They were making sure you sanitize. They were doing visual also looking at you, listening for the coughs, how you're breathing. But they were also kind of looking at, did you look like you were ill? These sorts of things. And they had so much power. Power because they would grant you access. Right. And so there was so much. I had so much respect for them, but I felt that they were so invisibilized because they were actually controlling public spaces, monitoring and protecting society in ways in which they weren't recognized. So I thought was so important to point to the figures that enabled the rest of us to feel more secure when we would, you know, go about our daily lives.
- [36:48]
Interviewer Camelia Pham
Now, if I rewind to 2020, what I understood about lockdown was very limited. It felt at the time like, perhaps very simplistically, a policy of staying at home. But in Act 2 of your book, lockdown in socialist Hanoi comes through as something much more complex, like a reorganization of everyday life through sound, intimacy and obligations. We hear it in the phone chime announcing total social quarantine, in the renewed force of the public loudspeaker raphoon, in police sound drugs. And also in your own shift from listening for state care to listening with others in a newly collective acoustic environment. I was also really moved by the pandemic Figure 3, the figure of the housekeeper, which complicates the language of collective self care. And through Hyein, I can see how staying at home was never equally possible and how the burden of making lockdown livable often fell on women doing highly precarious, informal, and also deeply gendered care labor for other households while still carrying responsibilities for their own families. Could you talk more about this? And what does quarantine reveal about the productive, but also deeply uneven relationship between care and control?
- [38:17]
Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah, that's great. Thank you. So I will go back to first, what you said that I think is that listening. So in chapter in Act 1, the Listening for state care as I became a subject of the mythical, the medical circ days. Right. But here I'm trying to emphasize the sonic aspect of that. Right. And so that was through my state nurse and I having. Building this relationship over text messages as I had to. I had to report back to my state nurse twice a day. And because I was in isolation in my house with my spouse there as well, but largely in isolation, they were able to go out. I was not. I built this relationship with my state nurse and I really like relied on those sounds of them sending me text messages. And they became more intimate over time. That's why I talk about the intimacy of the state. So that's why I say that's listening for the states, like when they were reaching out and contacting me. The irony is the state nurse could have been three or four people, I don't know who was on the other side sending me those messages. And it didn't care, right? Because the ways that there was, you know, the relationship builds and it shifts over time. How we're talking, it becomes joking, it becomes emoji based. And you know, so I'm very much participating in this, but I'm also getting this deep sense of security from it. I think that's super important, right? That really the fact of getting out of the United States, which just felt like everything was going to go down and people were going to die into a place where I knew that monitoring was going to happen, right? And I was more than happy to comply for the general good of society, right? Thinking about the general good. And that was driving a lot of people and a lot of the narratives when I was communicating online with people about that fear of somehow impacting the common good. And so then we move into the lockdown, right? And when everybody's inside, right? And we start doing this kind of collective co listening, we're all co listening to what's happening, what's coming across the loudspeakers, speakers, what's coming across the soundtracks, right? What's being said to us online. Radio. People were listening to radio, right? Some people were listening to tv. There's this ways in which we had this collective co listening moment. So that's what I call listening with kind of co present listening. But then we have to think about the people who took those risks to leak. Now, at that time, lockdown was a kind of semi lockdown. The state was saying, this is not a permanent thing, right? The state was, and I talk about this in chapter two. It was very flexible, right? There was a lot of flexibility written into the order. The decree to stay at home, for example. We were allowed at that time in 2020 to go out shopping when we needed to, to get food. There were no restrictions on that. We had to justify why we were out, right? And so that's where we started kind of pushing. And I say we because I saw my neighbors doing this too, where we would, you know, walk to the, you know, trash bin rather than giving it to the woman who goes around and clings the bell and collects it. We, you know, then they leave the bins and many people would go out at night to bring their trash out. And I saw that that was giving a lot of people the opportunity to walk a little bit outside, right? Because we all had the trash to prove we were doing something. We had an objective. We weren't just randomly outside. And then some people started to go on their bikes, right? There's all these ways in which that we were able to navigate that mobility while staying within the decree, Right. Not violating the mandates, but there are other ways in which people who are more vulnerable, they had to violate that. And so I focus on the case of the Muizupiak, Right, the housekeeper, to highlight exactly what you said. I mean, you said that really beautifully, right. But the ways in which people had to take additional risks in order for them to survive at that time. And again, it's another one of those invisibleized figures that was involved very deeply in care practices that has not been, that has not been kind of focused enough as another kind of frontline worker that allowed for families to be able to continue to do their work, to have their children continue to do schooling online. Right. So to continue to let middle class families live, quote, unquote, as normal as life if they possibly could in their home. Right? So that was one of the ways in which I wanted us to think more deeply about the importance of the housekeepers and the risks that they took at this time. So good. So good. So good.
- [42:55]
Interviewer Camelia Pham
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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- [43:24]
Interviewer Camelia Pham
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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Professor Christina Schwenkel
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- [45:37]
Interviewer Camelia Pham
In Act 3, you show how social distancing in Hanoi was about learning new forms of ethical coexistence in public space. It was a moment when people had to recalibrate proximity to attune themselves to bodily sounds like coughing and even loud talking as potential auditory prompts. And of course, when we think about the urban landscapes of Vietnam, it's hard not to picture the green jackets of grav drivers everywhere. But for grab drivers, the quieter city become both a space of collective vigilance and also, as you put it, the sound of suspended livelihood. Can you talk more about how social distancing was not only about isolation, but also about learning new ways of coexisting with others in public space? And what does the figure of grab driver allow you to see about the limits of mutual care, especially when an ethics of public protection was experienced so unevenly?
- [46:38]
Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah. Thank you again for pointing to the unevenness of vulnerability, because that was my primary goal in including the pandemic figures. Right. Is to show the ways in which the pandemic, of course, impacted people disproportionately. Right. And I feel like, because the autoethnography is focused on my experience in relationship to this unfolding crisis, I wanted to make sure that those important ethnographic elements were captured. So I really deeply apprec. You bringing them into the figures, bringing them into the discussion. They're super important here. Let me say something about Act 3, because Act 3 as social distancing, of course, was the major period that started in May and extended through the rest of the year. That really kind of is not one period, but shifts. And what we see during this period is several things. We have a different kind of sensory re. Engagement with the world. Right. Because we're all coming out of lockdown, we're in close proximity, but people are implementing different kinds of techniques of how we can be co. Present and move through the world collectively while respecting each other's proximity. Right. The distance between us and the ways in which people had different thresholds for interaction. And I was also being very careful as you. As you know, if you've read the book about my own positionality, you've mentioned that earlier. My own positionality. Right. As a white woman, in a moment when illness and disease was linked to foreign bodies. Right. This was a disease that was originally linked, as we know, stereotypically to Wuhan. And that was interesting to me because over time, the government, the Vietnamese government, moved away from calling it the Wuhan virus. It had called that that in the beginning. And because of its kind of racialized undertones and the ways in which it was being weaponized against, you know, to. To mobilize anti. Anti Chinese sentiment and anti immigrant sentiment, they very much changed their framing on that. And that was interesting as well. I mean, I think when we're thinking at all about pandemic governance, we need to see how the government was constantly responding to changing conditions. Right. I think that's a super important aspect of the book that I, That I tried to bring out. At the same time, people themselves are playing with boundaries. Right. That's constantly shifting. And in Act 2, during lockdown, it leads to the moments where we're all, for the most part, complying. Everything's fine. People fled the city, people went right to rural areas, they went to the provinces. And I spent some time up in Sapa, actually in July, as the country was open and people were traveling again during social distancing, as people had less fear over time. And so at the beginning, when we're really kind of looking and thinking about how close should we go, we're walking. So a lot of that chapter takes place through my daily sound walks around Chupac Lake, because in and of itself, this book is an ethnography of Chupac, right? This area, this beautiful historical area of Hanoi. And I think that gets to your question of the deep, deep connections there. I lived there for eight years in Chuk Pak, right? It's a very big part of my life, my history of working in Vietnam. And every day, at least once a day at that time, it was walking around in the morning at 6:00am and doing bike rides around in the afternoon. So I'm very familiar with the flows of the soundscapes and the people who are also doing the same thing, right? And so it was very important for me to see how we are all navigating this, this new world together as things like, as I highlight in this chapter, aerobics groups came back out, right? And the aerobics groups were so interesting to me because they were doing a couple things. They were at the one time, as I. As I say, they were appropriating the state music such as Vietnam Oi. And dancing to it, right? The state song about the pandemic that has superheroes who are saying, don't do this, don't do this, right? Which is just a fantastic video. And it's another earworm that you can't get out of your head. It was playing everywhere in Hanoi at that time, right? And beyond Hanoi, by the way, and see and seeing how people were. Because one of the. Part of the mandate was not only to wash your hands, to keep your floors clean, to wear a mask and. But it was also to exercise, right? And that's historically been part of the socialist mandate is we need healthy, fit bodies, right? So if you go back to one of the most famous images of Ho Chi Minh, you know, who was small and skinny as can be, is him holding weights, pushing weights, right? And everybody loves that photo because we cannot even imagine that he was actually pumping iron, right? But that's the most Famous photo of him, like sports. And I talk about this in tech. The way that sports and fitness were such a part of creating the socialist person. And they're drawing on that again, right. In these loudspeaker scripts that are coming over every morning and afternoon. You've got to be healthy, stay healthy, build that immune system. And part of that was exercise, okay? So everybody goes out and exercise. So they're following the state mandate, but suddenly we're all together, right? In close proximity. So there's way. And then getting closer and closer. Right? So then there's ways in which people were then challenging the mandate by doing it by, you know, fulfilling the mandate. Right. And reconnecting. I think that chapter really gets at the reconnecting. Okay? So that's the kind of background and seeing how all that was taking place. How do we shop again? Like, people had tape up that you were not allowed to, you know, to protect their families. So you were negotiating at a distance. Right. So sound change. And when we had, you know, masks on, it was already muffled. But when we had distance, it became even harder to hear. Right. So listening practices had to kind of shift as well. And against that backdrop, as we became more, you know, reintegrated into society, people started traveling again with grap, right. Which was the main transportation at that time. E transportation, app transportation at that. At that time. And so I spent a lot of time with grab drivers driving around and them telling me how the impact on their life. And that's really important because they themselves were trying to establish boundaries. So in Ho Chi Minh City, which I'm sure you're familiar with, people had actually put up plastic, right. Especially in year two, so that, you know, try anything to kind of keep the distance. Hanoi didn't have that kind of deep fear at that time. Actually, people were, like, losing fear. And that was part of the issue. Like, people knew that it was under control. And I talk about that in chapter three, that while certain places of the city remain, quote, unquote, dead, I call them the, you know, ghost cities. Right. And part of that had to do with international tourism because Vietnam was closed, right? It was an enclosed island which gave people a sense of security. So when people were kind of like immigrants were coming over the border illegally, Right. You know, that was being highlighted in the. In the. In the press, Right. I had left Vietnam and come back in 2021. And they were only letting in experts at that time. Right. So it highly, highly regulated who was coming in. They were letting some people in, some flights in, but Very few. And it was very regulated. You had to go to a hotel for several weeks. This was happening. So the grab drivers became really important for me to see the ways in which they were trying to maintain their. Their. Their. Their dignity. Right. And at the same time, they were extremely vulnerable. And they were also. The ways in which they were kind of navigating that place as people were reintegrating into society, starting to be. I know we'll talk about this in a moment, but at the same time, people didn't want to get in the cars, right? People were. Because that was just too close proximity. So they also realized that, like, they had less than 50% of the population of their clientele than that they had before. So I also wanted to highlight that vulnerability and the ways in which they were practicing care within their cars, in relationship. Right. And how that changed, actually, through the conversations that we are having. How we had conversations. I thought, for me, that was really important to bring them into the conversation because they are such a large part of the scene, and they played a really important role for people and mobility at that time. That's another person that I would call a frontline, under invisible eyes, frontline worker that allowed everybody, myself included, to be able to kind of live our lives again, again. And who are unrecognized
- [55:48]
Interviewer Camelia Pham
in pandemic. Figure 5, the Philippine singer allows you to move beyond Hanoi as a bounded urban story and also into a much more, as you also mentioned and emphasized, uneven transnational world, one where the comfort of Vietnam's staycation depends on the strandedness in effective labor of migrant performers like Cecilia. And then in the coda, the terms of sonic socialism to me seem to shift again as the state adapts, official messaging evolves, and musicians become more visibly part of both public health communication and mutual aid. And also for me, this moment resonates with the upbeat, patriotic, sonic atmosphere you open the book with. Like, you know, we talk about Ginkgo V and Vietnam Covid. But now in what you describe as both an epidemic and an epic ending. I love that so much. Can you say more about the ending of the book?
- [56:53]
Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah. Oh, gosh. Okay, I will. Can I step. Take a step back to Cecilia? Okay. There's so much there. All right, let me go back a little bit to say that one of the interesting things that's happening that again, I think might interest your readers is, or I'm sorry, your listeners, is, is by May June, Vietnamese life was pretty much, quote, unquote, back to normal. And I say that as. As people trying to Carve out a new normal. Right, and what do I mean by that? I mean that cafes were open again. Certain places like karaoke's massage bars are still being regulated. But for the most part, Chupac Lake was full of people, right? And people were doing social distancing. That was still a part of it. But there was definitely a shift in the kind of threshold of fears. People were getting more comfortable being together again, right. So the government started to promote staycations, right? Because there were no foreigners. So that was super interesting because what that meant was you had five star hotels or most people are not staying, let's be honest. Like people are not going to go to five star hotels in Hanoi. But suddenly they had these amazing specials for about a hundred dollars and night, right? And for, you know, middle class Vietnamese, they could afford that, right? Especially upper class Vietnamese. And we could at the time afford that. So we started saying, okay, every weekend we'll choose one hotel we'd never stayed at before because we couldn't afford it. And because we lived in Hanoi, we didn't need to. And we'll have access to things like a pool. Like we'll have, you know, we'll experience this. Well, what was. So, so we kind of did this experiment and we went around to, you know, Latte, which is the tallest at the time, tower, right? And you know, what does it look like from. We were experiencing all this. And as we did so, we were just amazed at the number of Vietnamese families who were staying there as well. So the pools were packed with kids because they weren't studying online. They were studying online, right? And their families were taking these. It was just wonderful to see. Right? It was just wonderful to see. And then we went to Sapa and it was full of Vietnamese families. So there's a sense people were traveling to Da Lat at the time. Like, you know, the beaches were just full. So there's this way in which life kind of normalized around a new normal, which is what people were striving to kind of get back to. But then there would be an outbreak, right? There'd be this outbreak. Like as it happened in July 25, it was actually my birthday, which is why we were in Sapa at this eco resort, which again was all Vietnamese families and kids swimming and. And then we had to. Everybody had to leave quickly and get back to Hanoi because things were going to shut down again because of the serious nature of it. This was an interesting time because I spoke with a number of Hmong women in Sapa and they had Said to me, oh, we weren't affected by the lockdown, because that's a disease of King people, right? And that was super interesting to me that they were seeing it the dominant. For listeners, the dominant ethnic minority. Majority. The dominant group. Minority group. Ethnic group, sorry, the Viet people. And the homage seemed like, no, that's a disease of urbaner. Of urban King people, right? So they also had their narratives as the outsider having. Bringing in the disease. Just as, you know, urban Vietnamese had the narrative of the outsider bringing in the disease to the border. Here the Hmong were seeing the kind of ethnic boundaries and how the disease was penetrating into the areas. So they were like, you know, up here, we really didn't have to follow anything. They had some signs up and the speakers and stuff like that, but they. It was more relaxed and it was less. Less regul. So that's the kind of scenario for what was happening when I met Cecilia. And I think that was a really interesting encounter because I was, first of all. And it shows the ways in which people are trying to kind of normalize life again while also having some of the most vulnerable. We know there's been so much research done on some of the most vulnerable transnational migrant workers were Filipino workers, right. That they were caught on the ships and the boats, right? They were overseas and couldn't get back. And in this case in Hanoi, it was the Filipino bands. And Cecilia and Cecilia's band were playing several of these venues. So as we were staying at them, we would bump into them over and over and got to know them. And so I talk about the kind of musical caretaking that Cecelia was in for people who were there. And that was super interesting at one place in particular, because these hotels were divided between staycationers, right? They were getting these really great deals. And then they would have one ward that was the COVID The quarantine ward, right? And that was super interesting, too, because the musical caretaking was not only for the staycationers, but for the ways in which the hotels are set up, that the people who are in quarantine couldn't hear it as well, right? And they couldn't come out of their rooms, and we were not allowed into those. Those wings, right? That was very clear division. But we could see them, like, leave out their laundry and do things like that. And we could see the whole, you know, the whole governance going on of regulating that wing and those. Those bodies in those rooms. So for me, that was a really another sign of the ways in which unrecognized Workers. And there was something very critical with Cecilia is that she couldn't get home. Right. She was separated from her family. And that kind of angst. Right. And the ways in which she expressed that to me as I met her over time and talked about that relationship of like, I have to stay. I have to stay here, made me really reflect on in the book my choice to want to be in Vietnam. I made the choice to go to Vietnam as my haven, to be with my family. Right. And here was somebody who had desperately wanted to get out and they couldn't. And I highlight that too, also to highlight my positionality in relationship to Cecilia and to the other forms of lack of mobility that really impacted workers or certain. The migrants. That leads you me into your question about the coda, the conclusion from what I have. Yes. So things continue to shift. And that's one of the main arguments of the book. Right. That the sonic practices of care was iterative, it was responsive, it was always changing. I also want to point out something I think is really interesting in this time was that there was a shift from fighting against the enemy. That was a part of the discourse, huge part of the discourse. As I mentioned, during the first, oh, maybe five months, six months of 2020, and by the time we got into August, there was a recovery from the period of the outbreak in Da Nang where there was the first death. I think people might be interested to hear the first death In Vietnam was July 25th. Right. So, you know, six months into the pandemic was the first death. And of course, that was just like, oh, my gosh. And that sparked a number of other deaths. At the end of the year, I said there was only a couple dozen deaths. So again, it was another moment that. That because you had thousands and thousands of vacationers in Da Nang, everybody had to be evacuated or, you know, in. In quarantine. And somehow they stopped that outbreak too. I mean, it was incredible to see. Every time there was an outbreak that could have spread, potentially the tens of thousands was stopped immediately. Right. So there's that. That was kind of the background. And then there was this shift by the time we got to Taekjungu, right. Mid Autumn festival. I talk about this in the book. In September, suddenly everybody was in the streets and there was a huge festival at the market, right. At Hang Ma street in Hanoi. There are thousands of people. And I was just like, I can't go. I mean, I. And you know, and not everybody was wearing masks and people were obviously getting more comfortable. But there's A really important shift in government discourse at that time that I want to point out. And that was we're no longer fighting an enemy, okay? We're not now living with, with the virus. And that shift was super important, right? Because if we're going to live with the virus, we're going to coexist and cohabit with the virus. We just need to change how we're living, right? And that influenced then the soundscapes as well. And so I capture that in the book over time. And then as you get into the end of the book with the coda where I allude to too, but don't say too much about Delta in the second year where just everything collapsed, right? I mean, and there were, you know, you know, staggering number of deaths, staggering number of infections. But also immunization came in by September, right? And got, you know, whatever 90 million plus people immunized within six weeks. That's incredible that that could happen, right? But again, that's how society works. The social organization, the hierarchical organization, right? Where the responsibility is placed down to the grassroots, right? To the neighborhoods to make sure a everybody's okay, nobody's sick, everybody has food to the best of their ability. At that time, the lockdowns in 2021 were long and extreme and there were a lot of problems with those lockdowns, like as you know, very well. Well, I was not in Ho Chi Minh City at that time. I came after actually, right, the tail end. So I don't talk about that much in the book because that wasn't my experience, but I do refer to it and coming in right after it. But what I do there as well is I end on bringing in the musicians, right? And the ways in which the so called underground rap village it, right? How the rappers became a really important collaborator of the government was fascinating to me and in their music, right? And music to stamp out the pandemic and the ways in which then they applied their music and their resources towards redistributing rice, while at the same time using, you know, another form of musicing to encourage people in rapping and singing about people. I don't give up, up don't give into your desires Think about the common good and stay home. Right? And so that whole music scene that emerged was amazing because at the one hand they were emphasizing, right, it was kind of like a grassroots organization responding, but it wasn't top down. But they were obviously in conversation with, with the, the government as well, right? And so I end the book thinking about what does that say about that kind of, you know, that again, that middle ground between the grassroots. Right. The state and those ways in which the ever shifting line between cooperation, state control and care and to some extent resistance. But finding that middle ground between is what the goal of the book is.
- [68:03]
Interviewer Camelia Pham
Thank you so much. This is such an amazing book. Sadly, we are running out of time. But before we conclude and hopefully inspire our listeners to rush out and greet your book, can I ask what comes next for you after Sonic Socialism? I know that is a recently published book too, but what are you working on now?
- [68:25]
Professor Christina Schwenkel
Yeah, thank you. I'm continuing doing some of my work on collective housing and taking the kind of multisensory engagements with collective housing as people come together to transform and repurpose socialist infrastructural spaces from industrial, industrial sites to collective housing and the role that the senses play there in particular sound, but even beyond sound. So I'm continuing with that work bringing the kind of sonic elements to my work with architecture in industrial spaces, the ways in which creative spaces are being made with youth. It's just so exciting, right? Like the kind of rethinking of what do these sites have for us? What role do they play in society? Because collective housing, as old and decrepit as it can be. This has been one of my main arguments all along in my work. Are these vibrant spaces of community, right. And are there ways in which we can attend to and see people's investments in these communities as acts of care? Right. For example, building extensions onto the houses rather than acts of violence against architecture or contributing the so called light. So I'm continuing to engage at that level. I'm also doing work on the history of the relationship of design. And that's why I showed you my. For people who can't see, I've got a Biahoy Glass. If you've been to Hanoi, everybody knows the Biahoi Glass, which was designed by one of my main interlocutors and friends. And there's these deep histories of design for social justice, right? And asking how can we build a new future? This has been one of my main questions in my work Through Everyday Objects. And that's another transnational project because the Industrial Arts School was built during the French and then it was supported by East Germany. And so many of the designers were trained in the Bauhaus tradition in Germany and brought those ideas back. And that's what I'm looking at right now in a new project called Bauhaus Vietnamese. Thank you for this conversation. In closing, I would like to share with your listeners that this is an open access book. So if you're interested in sonic socialism, please go to the luminos.org website through UC Press and you can download the ebook version or a PDF version. And what's exciting about those versions is you can access the sounds. The print version as well has QR codes and the ebook version has the sound and audio visual, the videos embedded in the text itself. This was experimental, so I invite readers to please read and download and enjoy and be in touch if anybody has any questions. Thank you.
- [71:17]
Interviewer Camelia Pham
Thank you so much for joining me today. I've been speaking with Professor Christina Schwenkel about her third book, Sonic Socialism Crisis in Care in Pandemic Hanoi. A truly insightful resource for students, scholars and anyone interested in sound urban life and socialist form of care. The book was published by the University of California Press in 2025. Thank you all for listening.