French Indochina

In the late 1800s, long before the start of the Cold War, France took control of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, ruling the three countries as a colony known as French Indochina.

In 1891 a French archaeological team uncovered a stone stele near the village of Sambor on the banks of the Mekong River, in what was then French Indochina, later to become Cambodia/Kampuchea.

The piece emerged from Yang’s fascination with the novelist Marguerite Duras and her “childhood naïveté towards the colonialism that she lived through” in French Indochina, said Joo, who met Yang in 2004.

The women in my family, they’ve had to endure this as witnesses to the French Indochina War, as witnesses to the American war in Vietnam, and they deal with it in their own ways.

Zineb’s tale is set in 1950s French Indochina, where she tells a client about her fateful past as well as her piteous fantasy of becoming a film star in India.