What Ho Chi Minh City residents worry about as they fall in and out of love reflects neoliberal reconfigurations of the relation between self and society in which both romantic love and anxiety are produced by changing discourses of romance and the powers of the self that have emerged out of economic reforms. I present a close analysis of two case studies in order to understand how individuals draw from and reinvent tropes associated with romance to claim their own versions of a modern identity.
