Abstract

This article explores how the residents of Móng Cái—a coastal border city in northeastern Vietnam—live with climatic uncertainty through their everyday moral and emotional practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 across Trà Cổ, Ka Long, and Vạn Ninh, it argues that climate anxiety functions not merely as a psychological condition but as an emotional infrastructure binding society together. Through rituals of sea invocation, the act of “watching the water,” and the collective circulation of storm information, local people sustain networks of mutual care in which risk becomes a moral performance. The study proposes the framework of “everyday adaptation as emotional infrastructure” to capture the community’s capacity to transform uncertainty into moral sensibility. This reconceptualization broadens understandings of climate adaptation—not as a managerial technique but as an ethics of coexistence—offering insights for coastal societies worldwide amid planetary turbulence.