Across Colonial Borders: Patriarchal Constraints and Vietnamese Women in the Novels of Ly Thu Ho

Abstract

Ly Thu Ho moved to France as part of the 1950s Vietnamese diaspora. For three decades, from the 1960s to the 1980s, she was the only Vietnamese woman to write and publish novels in France. Returning to Vietnam frequently, she became an observer of postcolonial Vietnam. As a writer, she was shaped not only by her upbringing and education in colonial Vietnam, but by her long years of residence in Paris as well. In her work, she depicts a Vietnamese society destabilized by war and political unrest and still in transition, with its younger generation looking toward the West as its older one clings still to traditional cultural values. More specifically, Ly Thu Ho’s novels expose the condition of different generations of women in Vietnamese society over a period of six decades, from the 1930s to the 1970s. Rather than attempt to disrupt patriarchal discourse, as some women writing in the same period in France did, she examines the actual situation of women under patriarchy.