The Introduction sets out the core puzzle of the book, its central question and argument, and the research setting. It begins with a brief story about a Vietnamese female worker’s struggle to make ends meet, and her attempt to withdraw her pension early to meet pressing family demands. The anecdote raises a striking issue about the paradoxical nature of citizens’ use of the law, or resistance to it, in their daily life: While their behaviour represents an attempt to overcome certain conditions of uncertainty and instability in work and life, their action ironically puts them in another challenging, precarious situation. This chapter introduces the notion of precarity and outlines key elements of the conceptual framework that shed light on the mutual relationship between precarity and law as developed from the author's ethnographic observations of Vietnamese low-income workers and residents.