Reproducing Everyday Culture Under Partial Understanding

Abstract

How does everyday culture continue when shared understanding remains incomplete? Existing studies of transnational families often explain cultural continuity through language acquisition, adaptation, and integration. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with thirty Vietnamese migrant women in Taiwan (China), between 2021 and 2023, this article examines household routines, children’s education, institutional encounters, and community participation. The analysis traces how participants sustain relationships and obligations when linguistic and cultural understanding remains uneven, context-dependent, and only partly transferable across situations. Everyday cultural life persists not through stabilized mutual understanding but through approximation, selective alignment, distributed mediation, repetition, and continual adjustment. Communication functions as one cultural resource among others, while family relationships, obligations, and practices remain viable through the practical management of enduring asymmetry. Cultural continuity is therefore reconceptualized as everyday cultural reproduction under partial understanding, a process in which action can continue without cumulative communicative coherence. This shifts attention from communicative success or eventual integration to the practical cultural work through which family life endures across persistent difference and uncertainty.