Abstract
In 1933, a young urbanite married and took his new bride to live in a simple thatched hut in a village near Hanoi’s West Lake. This would not have been a remarkable event to be recorded by historians, except that the young man was Thạch Lam, a famous writer of the Tự Lực Văn Đòan (the Self-Reliance Literary Group) (Hồ Sĩ Hiệp, 1996, p. 64). The Tự Lực writers were all educated, well-to-do urbanites who wrote about the modernizing and globalizing effects of colonialism on Vietnamese society. Thạch Lam’s older brother Nhất Linh, after dabbling in medicine and fine arts, went to Paris to study science. Thạch Lam himself attended the prestigious Lycée Albert Sarraut and then became a journalist and writer. His choice of a thatched hut for his matrimonial abode was a deliberate act to demonstrate his love for simple and rural living—to show that even though he could speak fluent French, drink wine, and frequent trendy cafes, he also knew how to appreciate a supposedly traditional peasant life. Furthermore, his rustication was a demonstration of his artistic ability to transform simplicity and coarseness into comfort and elegance.
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Acknowledgements
This collection originated in a set of panels presented at the Canadian Asian Studies Association 2008 annual conference. The editors are grateful to this volume’s excellent contributors, whose enthusiasm and respect of deadlines made the project move quickly and (almost) painlessly. We would like to thank the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and series editor, Tim Bunnell, for their support. We also appreciate the comments and suggestions provided by three anonymous reviewers.
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Bélanger, D., Drummond, L.B.W., Van Nguyen-Marshall (2012). Introduction: Who Are the Urban Middle Class in Vietnam?. In: Nguyen-Marshall, V., Drummond, L., Bélanger, D. (eds) The Reinvention of Distinction. ARI - Springer Asia Series, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2306-1_1
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