Article Migration and cultural flows between Vietnam and Poland Grazyna Szymanska-Matusiewicz University of Warsaw Abstract Based on anthropological multi-sited fieldwork, this article examines the chan- ging flows of Vietnamese migration to Poland, starting with educational migration in the 1950s up to the current economic-oriented migration. Changes in the geopolitical order, such as the collapse following the Cold War and the reorientation of foreign policy of both countries, affected the nature of Vietnamese migration and cultural transmission. The biographical narratives of Vietnamese migrants in Poland were examined to analyze the interconnections between macro-structural factors, micro-level individual experiences and meso-level of transnational connections maintained by the Vietnamese community in Poland with their country of origin. Keywords Vietnam, Poland, Soviet Bloc, educational migration, labor migration, cultural flows Introduction Currently, the Vietnamese are the biggest migrant community originating from Asia in Eastern European countries, such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. In Poland, they are the second largest population of foreigners, numbering around 25,000–30,000, including irregular migrants (Wysien ´ ska, 2012). Despite this fact, the literature on the Vietnamese in Eastern Europe is still scarce and most of the available scholarly works are written in Polish, Czech or Russian. To date, most studies by researchers in Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia tend to concentrate on such issues as integration and adaptation of the migrants to the majority society (see Go ´rny Corresponding author: Grazyna Szymanska-Matusiewicz, Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Karowa 18 Street, 00-027 Warsaw, Poland. Email: szymanskag@is.uw.edu.pl Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 0(0) 1–21 ! Scalabrini Migration Center 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0117196816654617 apmj.sagepub.com by guest on June 27, 2016 amj.sagepub.com Downloaded from