Ao Dai: Du couvent des Oiseaux à la jungle du Viêt-minh (i)

from revolutionary Xuan Phuong, journalist Danièle Mazingarbe, and Plon

The publishing house writes the title of a book. Plon named this book Ao Dai: Du couvent des Oiseaux à la jungle du Viêt-minh.

Who are the house of Plon? The family arrived from the near edge of German-speaking lands to Mons, in Belgium, about the same time visitors from what was already mainland France arrived to what is now Viet Nam, late in the 1500s.

Across two more centuries the house of Plon typeset and printed ever closer to Paris. They became printers and booksellers to the dynasty of Napoleons who subordinated the court at Hue over the second half of the 1800s.

The family named for a town in Schleswig-Holstein published from Paris through the successive republics of the 1900s. If you read serious French books of wide appeal from the 20C you have handled the wares of the Plon.

These bourgeois published distinguished foreigners while remaining close to power at home, printing both Churchill and DeGaulle. Plon is an appropriate brand for an author from Nguyen aristocracy, a member of the establishment of her revolution, and a woman of business in Viet Nam’s liberalization.

Plon ascended from a family business into the financial heavens through one holding company in media after another starting the year they published this book. It appeared in no particular collection, bearing just the house livery. Their title

Ao Dai: Du couvent des Oiseaux à la jungle du Viêt-minh gets the idea across. Here is the tale of a Vietnamese woman, indeed a schoolgirl from Hue who appears on the first page of her Prologue wearing one of those costumes as she flees into the woods to join the revolution.

Anyone who has eaten in a Vietnamese restaurant outside of Viet Nam has seen the Ao Dai, the long shirt worn with pants, in a bas-relief, drawing, or lacquer painting of 3 different styles to represent women of Ha Noi in the north and Saigon in the south and Hue in the middle. Those women together represent the nation of Viet Nam.

Modernizing nationalists invented the tradition in the first quarter of the 20C, the middle third of the colonial period. Creepy guys, frankly, who did not do much about the French or for women.

This whole book is the representation of her self and her revolution by a woman who walked out on her role in their stage play of subordination. The subtitle as well as the title slapped on her book with the Plon brand is also blunt, evocative, and tone-deaf.

From the convent of the Birds, indeed. Yes, quite, let’s call the book after what the author left behind on the first page.

To the jungle of the Viet-Minh. I never have heard a Vietnamese speak of the jungle. I still haven’t spotted that word in this book. Those who have lived rough speak rather of the forest, the frontier, the mountains, the woods or the name of the specific region where the people hide and fight.

France has got a perfect word for exactly that, maquis. Jungle is instead a colonial word for an exotic forest, as hut is the name of a house you may burn down, and a village is where you may kill everyone in town as counter-insurgency rather than genocide.

No, I don’t like the title, or the subtitle. But I think the publisher responsible for them has proven effective though crude. Hats off. They made her life and work public. Now I get to say what they mean to me.

This was the first Viet Nam letter of 2 so far on Ao Dai: Du couvent des Oiseaux à la jungle du Viêt-minh from Xuan Phuong and Danièle Mazingarbe. The second posted on April 23, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.