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E-book Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam
The French incorporated Vietnam into the larger Southeast Asian colony of French Indochina, along with Cambodia and Laos. Cities flourished in the new colony and people of very different backgrounds jostled each other in the streets every day. Everyone in this colonial world—whether Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Indian, Cambodian, Hmong, Malay, Cham, or a mix of ethnicities and cultural experiences—saw other people eating different foods with different table manners. They recognized that they could borrow from each other’s cuisines, whether with careful preparation and significant expense or else spontaneously, in the street, away from one’s home village and the judgment of one’s extended family. One was only lim-ited by the prices charged in stores and restaurants in relation to one’s purse, by anxiety over others’ views, and by one’s willingness to try the unfamiliar.Textual evidence suggests French people bore the most anxiety in the colonial environment, as seen in the cultural norm they established against eating local dishes. After losing to the Prussians in 1870, French national pride tumbled. As they tried to rebuild, French nationalists relied on touchstones such as the international reputation of grand French cuisine (Ferguson 2004, 124; Laudan 2013, 280–290).In colonial Indochina, French people wrote about their French dining practices as if they had accurately recreated familiar dishes in the colony, eliding the many culinary compromises they had to make due to the distance from France. French hotels in the colony, for instance, avoided any trace of Asian cuisine on their menus. In 1894 one French publisher stressed to readers back in France that white people in the colony only ate proper French food: “we do not live on rice, fish and bananas” (Le Mékong: April 2, 1894, 2).1 As late as 1927, a young French soldier refused to try a bowl of pho??, writing to a friend that although the soup looked appetiz-ing, “I wouldn’t taste it ‘for an empire’” (Tardieu and Heurgon 2004, 76). The jocular idiom he chose has a bitter aftertaste, since he had come to Hanoi as an active agent of French imperial power.
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