In the first chapter, we introduce the central concepts of this book. We clarify our understanding of key terms such as socialist mobility, participants in socialist mobility, socialism and post-socialism, and Vietscape. Since the main reason the Vietnamese stayed in Central Europe was to make a living, in this book, we follow their lives through their income-generating activities, which changed significantly after the political changes of 1989—from employees, they became mainly self-employed. The chapter looks more deeply at what aspects of socialism and post-socialism have affected or directed Vietnamese business or facilitated its relative success. We argue that the simplistic “because socialism” argument itself is an insufficient explanation. Thus, this chapter focuses on two manifestations of (post-)socialism that were crucial to the development and direction of Vietnamese business and which we discuss specifically in the following chapters: (1) the moral setting of (post-)socialist societies, which we call “socialist moral flexibility,” and the silent agreement between sellers and buyers and (2) the socialist state that led to the tolerance of illegal or quasi-legal business practices. We argue that socialist moral flexibility was a by-product of an inefficient, centrally planned economy in which people learned to satisfy their needs even at the cost of compromising their moral standards. However, this socialist moral flexibility extended into the post-socialist era, creating a business environment that was not always clean but allowed dishonest or law-ignoring business practices to thrive, which was not uncommon in Vietnamese business.