This article addresses the remarkable growth of Vietnamese market trading in Central and Eastern Europe, notably Slovakia, in the early 1990s, and its subsequent decline. The literature on ethnic entrepreneurship and cross‐border petty trading provides partial insights into this phenomenon, but fails to explain the levels of concentration of the Vietnamese in market trading, or the rapid changes in this sector. We therefore conceptualize them as being at the nexus of shifting flows of capital, goods and people, and draw on the notion of transnational spaces.