Imagine traveling alongside a resident from the outskirts on a beautiful day, weaving through dusty air and dense traffic under the blazing summer sun to study the boundary between the “inner” and the “outer” parts of Hồ Chí Minh—a city defined as having a distinctly dual structure of inside and outside.”
This scenario is not hypothetical. It is precisely what Erik Harms did to write “Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City.”
Harms climbed onto the motorbikes of Hóc Môn residents, accompanying them daily as they traveled from their district into the city center. He applied ethnography—a qualitative anthropological research method combining “ethno” (people) and “graphy” (writing)—to explore the culture, beliefs, values, and lived experiences of the community by listening to their stories and taking rigorous notes.
Described as being “no less than a Vietnamese person” in his local familiarity, Harms examines the contrasts between the “outer city” and the “inner city,” exploring the concepts of “inside” and “outside,” as well as “rural” and “urban.” He anchors his study in Hóc Môn, a district within the administrative boundaries of Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh that sits at the intersection of rural and urban spaces.
Geographically, Hóc Môn marks the city’s edge, but this “edge” is more than a point on a map. It is a space distinctly separated from the so-called “urban civilization” of the modern metropolis.
Here, the notions of “inner” (the “inner city”) and “outer” (the “outskirts”) transcend distance to form a sharply defined hierarchy of social values.
The “inner city” is associated with modernity and order, while the “outer city” is often viewed as a chaotic space functioning simultaneously as the metropolis’s “green lung” and a “dumping ground” for the consequences of urbanization.
Following 18 months of fieldwork, Harms introduces the compelling concept of “social edginess” to describe the lives of these residents. This term captures the intersection between developmental challenges and opportunities for reinvention.
The term “edge” implies a more dynamic and flexible concept, in contrast to the passive connotation of “marginality,” which suggests being pushed aside.
Harms contends that social edginess presents both advantages and disadvantages. This spatial dissonance creates openings that people can “edge into,” leveraging the overlap between rural and urban life for economic survival.
Conversely, it can “cut back,” pushing them out of the power and welfare networks that favor the urban core.
Consequently, the idiom “ngậm bồ hòn làm ngọt” (sucking the bitterness of the soapberry as if it were sweet) serves as a metaphor for a community accepting the dust, noise, and identity erosion of urbanization in exchange for a better future.
For these people, putting on office clothes and riding into the city center every morning is not just a habit. It is a ritual representing a symbolic boundary crossing from the “backward” outskirts into the “civilized” inner city.
Through these profound observations, “Rìa Sài Gòn: Bên lề Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh” invites readers to reconsider previously understood borders, proving that boundaries are sometimes administrative lines, sometimes imagined social divisions, and sometimes, entirely nonexistent.
Hoài Thanh wrote this article in Vietnamese as part of the “Reading with Đoan Trang” column, published every Tuesday in Luật Khoa Magazine on Dec. 23, 2025. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.
Harms, E. (2011). Saigon’s edge: On the margins of Ho Chi Minh City. University of Minnesota Press.
