Abstract
‘Dear friend, we understand each other, and our hearts beat in unison’ wrote Vu Hien, a young Vietnamese student of medicine at the University of Hanoi to his friend Hoàng Văn Bích, a student at the University of Nancy, France, late in the summer of 1926. ‘My decision is irreversible’, he informed his correspondent, ‘and that is why I have already made all of the necessary arrangements’. The arrangements to which Vu Hien referred involved travel. He planned to discontinue his studies in Hanoi (the main center of the ‘protectorate’ Tonkin and capital of French Indochina), cross the Chinese border clandestinely to reach the leftist stronghold of Canton and then head on to Europe to rejoin his friend in France.1
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Notes
On the earlier influence of the Chinese examination system in Vietnam see A. B. Woodside (1971) Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
On colonial-era language policy in Indochina see B. Anderson (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso), pp. 125–30.
G. P. Kelly (1987) ‘Conflict in the Classroom: A Case Study from Vietnam, 1918–38’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 8 (2), 191–212.
ANOM RSTNF R74, Rl, R2 07033, letter, Vu Hien to Hoàng Văn Bích, 3 August 1926, Chef de la Sûreté au Tonkin to Résident Supérieur au Tonkin, 10 February 1927; D. G. Marr (1981) Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 35–44.
The term ‘Annamite’ was used by the French in the period under discussion to refer to Vietnamese. S. McConnell (1989) Leftward Journey: The Education of Vietnamese Students in France 1919–1939 (New Brunswick: Transaction), pp. 171–3.
Kim Khánh Huỳnh (1982) Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
See for example P. Fussell (1988) ‘Travel, Tourism and “International Understanding”’ in Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit Books), pp. 151–76;
L. Coons (2003) Tourist Third Cabin: Steamship Travel in the Interwar Years (New York: Palgrave Macmillan);
E. J. Leed (1991) The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books);
H. Levenstein (1998), Seductive Journey: American Tourism in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press);
H. Levenstein (2004), We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in France since 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
When turn-of-the-century immigration restrictions obstructed pathways into America they traveled to Japan and, to a lesser extent, Europe instead. Hongshan Li (2008) U.S.-China Educational Exchange: State, Society and Intercultural Relations, 1905–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press);
Zhang Yufa, ‘Returned Chinese Students from America and the Chinese Leadership (1846–1949)’, Chinese Studies in History, 35 (3), 52–86.
J. Harmand (1910) Domination et colonisation (Paris: Flammarion), p. 274; The former colonial administrator Louis Salaün also criticized the move from the rizière paternelle to dismal boarding schools in France for producing among the expatriated student a ‘sort of malaise that gets even worse on his return’, when the returnee ‘found himsell, agitated and discontented, on the margins ol a French society ol which he was no longer part, and on the margins ol an Asian society to which he hardly [belonged] any longer’.
L. Salaün (1903) L’Indochine (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale), pp. 348–9.
G. Pelletier and L. Roubaud (c. 1931) Images et réalités coloniales (Paris: Tournon), p. 301.
On the opening ol the Petit Lycée see D. M. Pomfret (2013) ‘“Beyond Risk of Contagion”: Childhood, Hill Stations, and the Planning of British and French Colonial Cities’ in R. Peckham and D. M. Pomfret (eds) Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), pp. 81–104.
As a consequence, by 1927 only 341 ol the 731 students enrolled at the Lycée Sarraut in Hanoi were Vietnamese. In 1925 only 25 BAs graduated from Hanoi University, and in 1926 only nine. V. Thompson (1937) French Indochina (London: George Allen and Unwin Limited), pp. 295–6;
G. P. Kelly (1982) Franco-Vietnamese Schools, 1918–1938: Regional Development and Implications for National Integration (Madison, WI: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University ol Wisconsin), p. 64;
H. Lebovics (1992) True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 114.
C. Drevet (1928) Les Annamites chez eux (Paris: Imprimerie de la Société Nouvelle d’editions Franco-Slaves), p. 22.
P. Edwards (2002) ‘“Propagender”: Marianne, Joan of Arc, and the Export of French Gender Ideology to Colonial Cambodia (1863–1954)’ in T. Chafer and A. Sackur (eds) Promoting the Colonial Idea (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 116–30.
As Shawn McHale notes, ‘quite clearly, women had made strides since 1918, but they were still seen as lamps which shone best inside the home’. S. McHale (1995) ‘Printing and Power: Vietnamese Debates over Women’s Place in Society, 1918–1934’ in K. W. Taylor and J. K. Whitmore (eds) Essays into Vietnamese Pasts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program), pp. 174–5, 179. See also Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, p. 191.
Peasant rebels formerly organized by scholars were in the 1930s organized by insurgents with Communist sympathies, some of whom had been educated in France. The most famous, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was in France from 1917 to 1923, where he mingled in union and leftist circles. At the Congress of Tours, when Communists and Socialists split, he followed the Communist line, because of the latter’s position on imperialism. In the 1920s he, like many others, went to Canton, which had become, in David Marr’s words, a kind of ‘anti-imperialist mecca’. Nguyễn Ái Quốc, as quoted in Nguyễn Hữu Ninh (1928)’Notre journal’, L’Avenir de l’Annam 1, 1 March 1928, 1; D. G. Marr (1971) Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 256–9.
The ‘old youth’ of the serialized novel was a well-traveled individual, and a guide to the ‘Civilized World’. Liang Qichao influenced by Guiseppe Mazzini’s program, ‘La Giovine Italia’ (Young Italy). Fabio Lanza (2012) ‘Springtime and Morning Suns: “Youth” as a Political Category in Twentieth-Century China’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 5 (1), 31–51.
In the novel, Dumb Luck, Vũ Trọng Phụng refers to a ‘contempt for foreign diplomas common among Vietnamese students who had returned from six or seven years in France without ever actually earning one’. Vũ Trọng Phụng (2002) Dumb Luck, A Novel by Vũ Trọng Phụng, P. Zinoman (ed.), Trans. Nguyên Nguyệt Cầm and P. Zinoman (trans.) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), p. 39.
Nguyễn Hữu Ninh (1928) ‘Nôtre journal’, L’Avenir de l’Annam 1, 1 March 1928, 5.
P. Zinoman (2001) The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 200–40.
P. Pasquier (1930) Circulaire aux familles au sujet de l’envoi des étudiants Indochinois en France (Hanoi: Lê Van Tân), pp. 2–3.
Nguyễn Trung Thu (1938) ‘Collaboration’, Les Cahiers de la jeunesse, 15, January 1938, 214.
Cited in Dr P-H. Tribouillet, ‘Essais Franco-annamites’, Les Cahiers de la jeunesse 15, January 1938, 227.
Nguyễn Mạnh Tướng (1937) Sourires et larmes d’une jeunesse (Hanoi: Trung-Bac Tan-Van), pp. 90–1, 105.
R. Serène (1938) ‘A propos de l’Indochine’, Les Cahiers de la jeunesse 19, May 1938, 359.
R. Sérene (1937) ‘Elites intellectuelles de l’Indochine’, Les Cahiers de la jeunesse 10, July 1937, 581.
At the Fourth Congress of Childhood in Saigon in 1940 Cung Giũ Nguyên presented a paper on ‘Scouting Applied to Annamite Children’. Cung Giũ Nguyên (1940) ‘Scoutisme, application à l’enlance annamite’, Rapports présentés au 4è congrès de l’enfance 1940. Publiés sous les auspices du Comité central d’aide mutuelle et d’assistance sociale de Cochinchine (Saigon: Imprimerie de l’Union), p. 69.
A substantial body of scholarly work dealing with the Scout movement in colonial contexts has appeared in recent years. See, for example, M. Derouiche (1985) Scoutisme école du patriotisme (Alger: Enterprise Nationale du Livre);
T. H. Parsons (2004) Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press);
T. M. Proctor (2000) ‘“A Separate Path”, Scouting and Guiding in Interwar South Alrica’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42 (3), 605–31;
C. A. Watt (1999) ‘The Promise of “Character” and the Spectre ol Sedition: The Boy Scout Movement and Colonial Consternation in India, 1908–1921’, South Asia, XII (2), 37–62;
K. Y. L. Tan and M. Wan (2002), Scouting in Singapore, 1910–2000 (Singapore: Singapore Scout Association), and the chapter by Christina Wu in this volume.
In relation to French Indochina, Ann Raffin’s and Eric Jennings’s work has illuminated the history of uniformed youth movements during the Vichy period, and a set of reflections has shed light upon youthful experiences in the Scout movement during the 1930s. N. Bancel, D. Denis and Y. Fates (eds)> (2003) De l’Indochine à l’Algérie: la Jeunesse en mouvements des deux côtés du mirroir colonial, 1940–1962 (Paris: Éditions La Découverte);
A. Raffin (2005) Youth Mobilization in Vichy Indochina and its Legacies, 1940–1970 (Lanham: Lexington Books);
E. Jennings (2001) Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940–44 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
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Pomfret, D.M. (2015). ‘Colonial Circulations’: Vietnamese Youth, Travel, and Empire, 1919–40. In: Jobs, R.I., Pomfret, D.M. (eds) Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469908_6
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