Summary

This chapter examines the physical and emotional experience and representation of Vietnamese student migrants between metrópole and home within the first decades of the twentieth century. Amongst the circulation of ideas on civilization, individualism, and nationalism, newspaper debates questioned the meaning and role of ‘the student’ within the discourse on Vietnamese nationhood and modernity. However, rather than assume colonial study as simply a producer of radical intelligentsia, this chapter considers how the discourse of ‘the student’ was shaped both by the obligation to return to Vietnam and the students’ rejection of that cultural world. For some individuals, civilizational discourse and the opportunity for education abroad was the emancipation from both family and outmoded social expectations. For others, this sense of individuality inherent within student migration reified the feeling of apartness brought by physical distance and cultural estrangement. Through studying the rhetoric of sending Vietnamese abroad, this chapter demonstrates the symbolic power and responsibility that an educated youth carried in relation to shifting definitions of the home – both familial and national.

Introduction

In the period after the First World War and the repatriation of Vietnamese soldiers and workers in the 1920s, a substantial number of Vietnamese continued to move relatively freely between France and Vietnam, remaining in France for varying periods of weeks, months, or even permanent resettlement for some. The French and colonial government loosely classified many of these individuals as students – as many of the Vietnamese youth attended French schools, seeking to earn a French degree. Aside from an administrative classification, the ‘student’ also emerged as a particular social category throughout Vietnamese intellectual and political debates on modernity, nationhood, and education. The Vietnamese ‘student’ became a social type, infused with overlapping expectations for socio-economic prestige or political activism on their return to the colony. The student’s journey and obligation to return functioned as indications of family success, and opportunities for individual freedom and social achievement. Furthermore, often throughout these discussions the student became an illusive subject in need of financial or ideological guidance; ultimately ‘the student’ served as vehicles for depicting broader discontent in Vietnamese politics and colonial society. In other words, inherent within the definition of French study abroad was the expectation that they would return to the colony and engage within the currents of political and social change.