O N the night of June 18, 1944, colonial police arrived at the home of Nguyen T.T., the widow of a white French man, and forcibly removed her fourteen-year-old son, Charles L., under orders from a local society for the protection of fatherless mixed-race children. The boy's crime? Reading newspapers and falling asleep in class. French authorities sent him to a "correctional" facility in Tonkin, in presentday northern Vietnam. Distraught, Nguyen T.T. wrote repeatedly to the Governor of Cochinchina, the second-highest ranking political office in the French colony of Indochina, begging him to exercise his authority to return her son to her. In one heartbreaking letter she pleaded: "I would betray my deceased husband if today I did not take my child from this sorrowful place." She assured the governor that "Even though I am . . . poor, I would always consider it a duty to make sure I take care of my child." 1 Nguyen T.T. is just one of many Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao women whose mixed-race children were seized by French authorities. From 1870 to 1975, the French colonial government and French non-governmental charity organizations removed more than 4,000 fatherless mixed-race children-at times 1 All names are pseudonyms to respect privacy laws; Letter to Governor of
During World War I male French citizens in Cochinchina whom the colonial government had drafted to fight in Europe left their families behind in the colony. Through a complicated subsidies process, the government offered financial assistance to families impoverished by the draftee's departure and the concomitant loss of income. Far from being a monolithic category, the colony's poor white applicants, also known as petits-blancs, received varying government subsidies, depending on their family configurations. This article argues that the military allocations council's judgments correlate with the petits-blancs applicants' relationships to indigenous people and their adherence to traditional gender roles. To guard white prestige, the colonial government effectively penalized petits-blancs applicants who deviated from behavior associated with whiteness. In 1917 a mobilized soldier named Pierre L.-a resident of Cochinchina, a French colony in southern Vietnam-received an allocation of 45.0 piastres per month, or 1.5 piastres per day, with which to support his family while he was on duty in Europe.1 Military allocations were part of a colonial program to support families suffering economic hardship after their male heads of household had been drafted to fight in Europe.2 As wives assumed the leadership role of their homes, the families suffered financially. Because Pierre L. was a French citizen, his family was eligible for this program. His wife, T. Thi Hay, appealed to the military allocations council for an increase in her subsidy, which she
This article looks at French Indochina, metropolitan France, and French West Africa from 1914 through 1946 to illustrate specifi c ways in which French colonial authority operated across the French empire. We look at how colonized people challenged the complex formal and informal hierarchies of race, class, and gender that French administrators and colonizers sought to impose upon them. We argue that both the French imperial prerogatives and colonized peoples' responses to them are revealed through directly comparing and contrasting various locales across the empire. Our case studies explore interracial families and single white women seeking compensation from the French in Indochina, black men defi ning their masculinity, and Africans debating women's suff rage rights.
This chapter introduces the black market sex industry in late colonial Vietnam. It argues that the interwar black market sex industry thrived in spaces of tension, which were created by the confluence of economic, demographic, and cultural changes sweeping late colonial Tonkin. Tension developed in sites of legal inconsistency, cultural changes, economic disparity, rural–urban division, and demographic shifts, brought about by colonial policies. An investigation of this black market shows how a particular population of impoverished women — a group regrettably understudied by historians — experienced the tensions. Marginalized by the colonial economy and swayed by new cultural trends, these women came to participate in black market sex work by choice, by force, or, more often, by some combination of the two.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.