Hanoi at Night: The Press and Sexual Mores in Late Colonial Vietnam

• In Event: Pleasure, Pain and “Perversions” in Modern Vietnam

Abstract

This paper explores public discourse towards prostitution in Tonkin during the late colonial period, from 1932-1941. It focuses on reportage and editorials from Phong Hoá and Ngày Nay, the highest circulating journals in Indochina published by the period’s most prominent writers, to explore the attitudes of the Vietnamese intelligentsia towards the confluence of rapid modernization on the fabric of Vietnamese social and private life. Scholars of the interwar years have argued that press debates about Vietnamese women have served as an implicit way to discuss colonialism and the nation. In his recent revisionist history of writer Vũ Trọng Phụng, Peter Zinoman has suggested that rather than merely discussing women as stand-ins for the larger problem of the nation, intellectuals of the interwar years were genuinely interested in their plight. A close reading of the reportage of the period reveals that attitudes and sensibilities of mainstream intellectuals were much more nuanced and ambiguous, going beyond morbid fascination, discussion of the colonized nation, or even sympathy for the women themselves. The paper argues that the main preoccupation of the intelligentsia was modernization itself; the “working women of the night” were seen as an undesirable embodiment of the large economic and social transformations overwhelming Vietnam as a result of colonial submission.

Author

• Martina Nguyen, Baruch College - CUNY