Saigon Sisters

D. Norland Patricia

Description

The Saigon Sisters offers the narratives of a group of privileged women who were immersed in a French lycee and later rebelled and fought for independence, starting with France's occupation of Vietnam and continuing through US involvement and life after war ends in 1975.Tracing the lives of nine women, The Saigon Sisters reveals these women's stories as they forsook safety and comfort to struggle for independence, and describes how they adapted to life in the jungle, whether facing bombing raids, malaria, deadly snakes, or other trials. How did they juggle double lives working for the resistance in Saigon? How could they endure having to rely on family members to raise their own children? Why, after being sent to study abroad by anxious parents, did several women choose to return to serve their country? How could they bear open-ended separation from their husbands? How did they cope with sending their children to villages to escape the bombings of Hanoi? In spite of the maelstrom of war, how did they forge careers? And how, in spite of dislocation and distrust following the end of the war in 1975, did these women find each other and rekindle their friendships? Patricia D. Norland answers these questions and more in this powerful and personal approach to history.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Vietnam
• Vietnam War
• History of Asia
• Viêt Nam

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501749759
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

THE SAIGON SISTERS

A volume in the NIU Southeast Asian Series Edited by Kenton Clymer

For a list of books in the series, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

THESAIGON SISTERS Privileged Women in the Resistance

PàTRicià D. NORLànd

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell .edu.

First published 2020 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Norland, Patricia, author. Title: The Saigon sisters : privileged women in the resistance / Patricia D. Norland. Description: Ithaca : Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell  University Press, 2020. | Series: NIU series in Southeast Asian studies |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019046479 (print) | LCCN 2019046480 (ebook) |  ISBN 9781501749735 (cloth) | ISBN 9781501749742 (epub) |  ISBN 9781501749759 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Indochinese War, 1946–1954—Personal narratives, Vietnamese. |  Indochinese War, 1946–1954—Women—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City. |  Women revolutionaries—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City—Biography. |  Upper class women—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City—Biography. |  Upper class women—Political activity—Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh City. |  Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)—History—20th century. Classification: LCC DS553.5 .N67 2020 (print) | LCC DS553.5 (ebook) |  DDC 959.704/1109252095977—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046479 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046480

Cover image: Nguyen Thi Oanh (right) and a friend, c. 1948. Courtesy of Nguyen Thi Oanh.

To my mother and father, with eternal gratitude

Contents

Foreword by Christopher Goscha Preface Timeline

Par t 1THE CAUSE: YOUTH AT LYCÉE MARIE CURIE  TO THE GENEVA ACCORDS, 1954  1.  Thanh: “Our Hearts Beating for the Cause”  2.  Trang: “Living a Contradiction”  3.  Minh: “Generation at a Crossroads”  4.  Le An: “The University of Life”  5.  Sen: “A Question of Habit”  6.  Tuyen: “A Chance to Succeed”  7.  Lien An: “Deep Down, We Remained Vietnamese”  8.  Xuan: “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality Were Not for Our People”  9.  Oanh: “I Did Not Become a Refugee”

Par t 2WAR AND AFTERMATH: GENEVA ACCORDS  TO TODAY  10.  Thanh: “We Are, After All, Human Beings”  11.  Trang: “Prepared for Any Sacrifice or Risk”  12.  Minh: “I Led Two Lives”  13.  Le An: “The Theme of Our Work . . . Was Revolution”  14.  Sen: “Working for the People, Not a Particular Party”  15.  Tuyen: “Everyone Was Wrong”  16.  Lien An: “We Understood What We Had to Do”  17.  Xuan: “We Could Not Stay Indifferent”

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CoNteNts

18.  Oanh: “French Are Very Nice in France and Very Colonialist in the Colonies” 19.  Reuniting

Epilogue

Bibliography Index

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Foreword

In 1988, Patricia Norland landed at Tan Son Nhat airport outside of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, as part of a nonprofit organization working to promote bet ter understanding between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Viet nam in the absence of formal diplomatic ties between Washington and Hanoi. During her visit, Norland struck up a friendship with Nguyen Thi Oanh, a for mer revolutionary during the two wars that tore Vietnam apart between 1945 and 1975, first against the French, then against the Americans. The two women kept in touch, and the friendship between them was such that Oanh introduced Nor land to a “band of sisters” with whom she had gone to high school in Saigon in the late 1940s before they joined the resistance war against the French in 1950. The Saigon sisters, as Norland calls them, form the basis of this remarkable book about the trials and tribulations of these women through two decades of war. Nguyen Thi Oanh and her fellow classmates at a then allgirls elite colonial high school in Saigon, Lycée Marie Curie, were not necessarily destined to become rev olutionaries during the First Indochina War, pitting the French against the Viet nam that Ho Chi Minh had declared independent in September 1945. After all, these young women had all grown up in welloff Vietnamese families, spoke French fluently, and followed the latest trends in the films they watched and the clothes they wore. They had little or no contact with the countryside or the major ity peasant population living there. Nor did they know much about the finer points of MarxismLeninism or even the intricacies of French colonial policies in Indo china since 1945. Overall, they enjoyed privileged, rather cloistered lives. Most of their parents and certainly the French colonial authorities would have preferred that they continue to do so. The reality of their relationship to their up bringing and their milieu, however, would prove to be more complicated. For one, as the war dragged on, these Saigon sisters became politically more active. While some parents kept their heads down and avoided politics in the hope that things would work out, others taught their children of Vietnam’s glorious past and filled them in on the major political events missing in their school manuals—Ho Chi Minh’s creation of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and, that same year, the French execution of the leader of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Nguyen Thai Hoc. One of the sisters had a father who had not only pulled himself out of crushing poverty to become a selfmade man in colonial Saigon but had also

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