ABSTRACT
“Honestly, I don’t think we can ask these questions,” Chi said, shrugging her shoulders. She poured green tea into the cups in front of us, waiting for me to answer. It was a chilly November day, and Chi and I were sitting in the meeting room at Hanoi’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, together with our other research team members, Hạnh, Toàn and Hằng. On this day, we were at the beginning of an ethnographic fieldwork that was to continue for nearly three years, developing the research tools that we planned to use as a first step in exploring the use of ultrasonography at this maternity hospital. For the meeting, I had brought a list of questions that I had developed before arriving in Vietnam. Chi’s comment sparked a long discussion. Is it possible and acceptable to ask a pregnant woman hypothetical questions about what she imagines she would do in case an anomaly in her child-to-be were detected? Such questions had been posed in research conducted in the US and Europe, but would they work in Vietnam? We ended up reframing and rephrasing these questions entirely; keeping some of them, but setting them forth in a softer and less direct manner.
