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From: Sascha wölck
Date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 1:14 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear list,
a friend of mine lis looking for articles or books that deal with the Chinese in colonial Vietnam in the 1920s-30s (see below). Do you have any recommendations?
Thanks in advance
sascha
PhD-student, european university viadrina, frankfurt, oder
Hi, Sascha
I'm revising my chapter on the film The Lover (based on Marguerite
Duras's novel 'L'amant').
A friend of mine suggested that I provide more historical context for
the setting of the film: Vietnam in 1929, especially in relation to
Chinese presence in VN as well as French presence. Here is my friend's
suggestion:
"details of the colonial situation in 1929 might matter to the
analysis. I wonder whether the position of the Chinese in colonial
Vietnam is different from the Vietnamese also in official status,
rights, etc. And is there Vietnamese anti-Chineseness at this time? In
addition, I saw the film very much as the story of how one imperial
power—and one type of masculinity and economic power—comes to supplant
another (or announces that it will in the future). The French seem so
very much on their way out in this film!"
Do you know of articles or books that deal with the Chinese in
colonial Vietnam in the 1920s-30s? what their official status was and
whether there were anti-Chinese sentiments at that time?
In the film, there is a love affair between a rich Chinese playboy and
a young French girl; it is not about Vietnamese people at all, but
about Chinese and French.
Any suggestions you can suggest would be great. Thanks!
Hoang
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From: Tobias RETTIG
Date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 1:45 AM
To: Sascha wölck <sascha.woelck@yahoo.com>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Sascha,
Prof Thomas Engelbert in Hamburg is working on the Chinese in colonial Vietnam.
Best regards,
Tobias
School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University
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From: Grace Chew
Date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 5:19 AM
To: Sascha wölck <sascha.woelck@yahoo.com>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Sascha,
I wonder whether your friend would be interested in reading an article on the person, l'amant, and his Chinese background?
I have written a short article on him after conducting some face-to-face interviews and also reading from some stele and remainings (written in Chinese, of course). The article is now in print.
If your friend thinks that it can be of help to him/her, please ask him to write directly to me.
Grace
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From: Shawn McHale
Date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 5:31 AM
To: Sascha wölck <sascha.woelck@yahoo.com>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
There isn't much on the Chinese in southern Vietnam in that period. But perhaps a good place to start would be Brocheux and Hemery, Ambiguous Colonialism/ Une colonisation ambigue.
That being said, I think that the argument your friend is trying to make is misdirected -- he wrote that " I saw the film very much as the story of how one imperial power—and one type of masculinity and economic power—comes to supplantTwo points on this reading. First, it strikes me as an example of projecting onto the past an interpretation on a story that does not really make sense for the time. China was not rising, and France falling, at the time covered by the film. China was riven by warlordism! It was a mess. It would soon find parts of itself swallowed up by Japan. Second, it does violence to the book itself. Actually, I have read North China Lover more, which is Duras's more explicit "rewrite" of the Lover. But in North China Lover, her Chinese lover comes across as a surprisingly weak character, one who was born into wealth but lacks any direction in life. The Chinese lover will ultimately cave in to his traditional father and marry the woman his father chooses. Finally, and most importantly, this story appears to be based on Duras's own experience. I doubt that she said to herself, at age 14, that she wanted to take part in a story of France's decline and China's rise. More important than such generic contrasts is the fact that Duras was from a marginal white family teetering on the edge of poverty, whereas her Chinese lover was rich. Colonial and hierarchies, then, are turned upside down in the book, but in an unusual way . . . .
Shawn McHale
--
Shawn McHale
Associate Professor of History
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam
Date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 6:08 AM
To: "mchale@gwu.edu" <mchale@gwu.edu>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
The Chinese in colonial Vietnam, as in other Southeast Asian countries, did enjoy a different (and more beneficial) legal status from that of Vietnamese. Ann Laura Stoler has written on this subject. I don't have the correct citation to hand, but the article appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History. This different legal status was the subject of negotiations at the Bandung conference of 1955 between the PRC and the newly independent Southeast Asian countries in which ethnic Chinese were urged to adopt the nationality of their country of residence. Vietnam, both North and South and for different reasons, was not a party to the resulting policies.
2. Yes, there was tensions between Vietnamese and Chinese in colonial Saigon. Bui Quang Chieu, for instance, spearheaded a Chinese boycott in 1919 in his Tribune Indigene on the grounds that Chinese merchants enjoyed an undue advantage over Vietnamese entrepreneurs.
3. I agree with Shawn McHale's point about reading the future into the past. In 1929, there was absolutely no inkling that France was on its way out in Vietnam. And China was in deep crisis, as he points out.
4. There were many French people who struggled (to put it mildly) in Vietnam. Duras' family was just one of many. They did not symbolize failure on a national scale. It would be wrong to read The Lover as an allegory for the fate of France. Nonetheless, the racial and gender dimensions of the story are important.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Kenneth T. Young Professor
of Sino-Vietnamese History
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From: Nhung Tran
Date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 7:11 AM
To: Sascha wölck <sascha.woelck@yahoo.com>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi Sashca,
Tracy Barrett's book _The Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia: the Overseas Chinese in Indochina_ should be out any day now. She's also written a number of articles on the topic. I'm not sure that she's on the list, but you can contact me offline using her email address at North Dakota State.
Best,
Nhung
**************
Nhung Tuyet Tran
Associate Professor &
Canada Research Chair in Southeast Asian History
University of Toronto
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From: Erica J. Peters
Date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 7:56 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi Sashca,
Here are some other sources on the Chinese in colonial Vietnam:
Marie-Paule Ha, "The Chinese and the White Man’s Burden in Indochina," China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces, Elaine Yee Lin Ho and Julia Kuehn, eds. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2009)
Micheline Lessard, "'Organisons-nous!' Racial Antagonism and Vietnamese Economic Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century," French Colonial History 8 (March 2007)
Julia Waters, "'Cholen, la capital chinoise de l’Indochine française': Rereading Marguerite Duras’s (Indo)Chinese Novels," France and 'Indochina': Cultural Representations, Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee, eds. (New York: Lexington, 2005)
Alain G. Marsot, The Chinese Community in Vietnam Under the French (San Francisco: EM Press, 1993)
Clifton Gilbert Barton, Credit and Commercial Control: Strategies and Methods of Chinese Businessmen in South Vietnam (Cornell University: Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology, 1977)
Erica
Erica J. Peters
Director, Culinary Historians of Northern California
Author, Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century (AltaMira Press, 2012)
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From: Kimberly Kay Hoang
Date: Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 6:15 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi Sashca,
You might want to look at the work done by Haydon Cherry. He received his Ph.D from Yale last year and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. See link below
http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/?q=node/127
Kimberly
Kimberly Kay Hoang, PhD Candidate
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Sociology
410 Barrows Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
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