"We Are Not Family! We Are Just Their Social Workers!" Belonging and Becoming in Professionalized Care Encounters of Vietnamese Berlin
Poser, Anita von – 2023
On a cold evening in February of 2016, I unexpectedly found myself sitting in the living room of Mrs. Thanh, a social worker whom, up to this point in time, I had known only superficially.1 We had met a few times before during formal encounters in a growing psychosocial care network whose members mainly belong to the realm of helping professionals and who jointly work at diversi- fying Berlin’s health care landscape with regard to Vietnamese lives and real- ities in the city (Ta et al. 2021). The network currently embraces around 100 members, and it is linked with a specialised clinic that offers psy-treatments and therapies in the Vietnamese language.2 Now, however, I was here in Mrs. Thanh’s private rooms. Ms. Phuong, a female interlocutor in her mid-sixties, whom I had met during research in the specialised clinic, had brought me here. I had accompanied her to a party, when she received a phone call by Mrs. Thanh who told her to meet quickly; to get the frozen blood sample she had brought with her from Vietnam.