Understanding The Journey

Understanding the Journey

Background and Realization of this Website

During the 1995 – 1996 academic year, while a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of California at Davis, I (David Del Testa) received an Institute for International Education Fulbright Doctoral Dissertation Research grant to research the state railroad company of French colonial Indochina and its employees at the Colonial Archives (the Centre des Archives d’Outre-mer des Archives nationales de France in Aix-en-Provence).  This was a fantastic experience. I was fortunate to share the experience with a great group of fellow researchers from around the world, many of whom I can fortunately still call my friends (Dr. Eric Jennings of the University of Toronto, Dr. Michael Vann of Santa Clara University, and Dr. Penny Edwards of The Australia National University, among others).  At the very end of the year, Michael Vann or Eric Jennings – we’re not quite sure which one now – alerted me to the presence of a Diary that might interest me.  This turned out to be the Beaucarnot Diary, filed away in a archival box with otherwise unrelated materials.  I didn’t take the time to look at it then because I still had so much to before leaving Aix.

Time passes, I conduct additional research in Vietnam, I write my dissertation.  However, I always kept the memory of the Diary in the back of my head for future consultation.  In November 1999, with the help of a dissertation research presentation grant from the Center for German and European Studies at UC Berkeley, I traveled back to Aix to present my (nearly finished) dissertation research in the form of a paper to the staff and researchers of the CAOM.  With a little time I had before giving my presentation there, I called up the Beaucarnot Diary and read it through.  Fantastic!  I had the photocopy technicians copy the Diary, and was about to leave to return to the United States, when an idea came to mind.  What if Mrs. Beaucarnot was still alive?  With just a few minutes to spare in the workday, I asked the archival staff if there might be a way to see contact Mrs. Beaucarnot.  They said if I wrote a letter in care of them, they would forward it through the overseer of the archival collection in which the Diary resided, the Fonds Biggi.

Back in the United States, I wrote my letter to the manager of the Biggi Collections, and then promptly became ensnared in teaching and writing back at UC Davis.  I did show the Diary to my dissertation advisor, Dr. Cathy Kudlick, and she thought it sweet and insightful.  In January, I received a surprise letter, from Mrs. Beaucarnot herself.  In it, she announced that she was very much alive and profoundly surprised that a young American discovered the Diary and pursued it.  She also gave me some details about her life after the diary, including her repatriation from Indochina, her marriage to a military doctor who took over a country practice in eastern France, the birth of her children, and the death of her father, Claude Beaucarnot, in 1986.  I wrote back and indicated that I hoped that I might meet her some day, that perhaps we could pursue publishing the Diary at some point, and that I hoped she wouldn’t mind answering some questions in the meantime.

During the Summer and Fall of 2000, I led the University of California Education Abroad Program in Hanoi, Vietnam.  During my term as resident-director, I used some of my spare time to track down the places mentioned in Hanoi, including the former Beaucarnot residence and the Lycée Albert Sarraut.  I couldn’t visit them thoroughly without an official introduction, and I had to devote 99% of my energy to my students and finishing my dissertation, but I did develop a greater sense of Claudie’s world.  Immediately following my return to the United States, in January 2001, I completed job interviews and did a variety of part-time teaching and administrative work until I started my tenure-track position at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California in Fall 2001.  It was then and there I could really begin to push the Beaucarnot Diary project forward.

I had suggested that I might visit Mrs. Beaucarnot several times, but I always had to make excuses for not actually going thorough with my travel plans.  Finances, a new position, lack of time, all got in the way.  Out of understandable frustration with a seemingly mercurial American professor, I received a letter in early Fall 2004 indicating that it was, in a sense, “now or never” for Winter 2002.  Fortunately, as part of their generosity, the Hewlett Faculty Development Grant committee awarded me $1,000 and Dean Michael Brint $500, just enough to make the trip to France.  We met for the first time in January 2002 at her home, and I spent four full days interviewing her.  The family had originally booked a room at a very expensive hotel for me, which was very nice; when I said I thought something more modest would be more appropriate to my budget, they invited me to stay with them at their home.  This was both kind, and more productive.  I departed eastern France with great determination to bring the project to life.

In late Spring 2002, I posted advertisements asking for students who would be interested in joining a yearlong history course in the Fall that would have them learn the History of Vietnam through the Beaucarnot Diary.  We would spend the first semester in a fairly traditional academic course but would spend time preparing the AsiaNetwork grant application together and preparing prospectuses for research projects the students would develop and complete during Spring 2003.  Ideally, Spring Semester would conclude with students traveling to Vietnam to add information and resources to their completed term papers, but I made no promises.  The course would satisfy several requirements at once, which was offered a strong attraction to the course.  About ten students attended the meeting, and five of that group (Stephanie Albee, Michael Barker, Brusta Brown, Brian Weinberger, Ryan Mayfield) took the course.  Another student was added to the course without having her advisor seek permission to do so; although she did well enough, having her forced on the group marked the tensions that began to surround my efforts at CLU.  Some influential faculty thought the project smelled of elitism because not everyone could join by their own choice; I made it clear from the start that the only requirement was dedication and interest, but this challenged the lowest common denominator approach some schools of the university took.

	In any case, my seven students plus Pastor Jerry Swanson as an auditor began out journey through the History of Vietnam together during Fall 2003 (Professor Swanson had helped CLU receive fifty Vietnamese refugee families in Thousand Oaks in 1975).  A copy of the syllabus for this History 482 course is available here.  We had a good course, I think, although I had perhaps assigned too much reading.  We had two guest speakers: Duong Mai Elliott, author of the Sacred Willow: Four Generations of a Vietnamese Family, and Jean-Jacques Maitam, author of House Divided.  CLU supported modest but symbolically important honoraria for these speakers.  Ms. Elliott answered many of the student’s questions about her life and the reception of the book .  Mr. Maitam talked in a very touching way about his life growing up in colonial Hanoi..  During Fall Semester, the class prepared an application for an AsiaNetwork Freeman Faculty-Student Research Grant.  A copy of the grant application may be found here.

During Spring Semester, six of the seven students continued into the research semester of HIS482-02.  The students spent this semester researching, learning and practicing research methodologies, and continuing their study of Vietnamese culture and society.  The visit of Tran Long, a Vietnamese lacquer artist, to CLU and Loyola-Marymount University under the sponsorship of the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the generous support of the Blakemore Foundation, aided in student’s learning about Vietnamese culture.  The class traveled for a day to UCLA to access the important library resources there in support of their projects.  One student, Michael Barker, received the support of the Dean of Letters and Sciences to travel to Colorado Springs, Colorado to use the archives of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the organization his on which he based his research.  By now, the group had developed a working dynamic together, and I felt confident that if we did receive support from the AsiaNetwork, Team Indochine would work well together in Vietnam.

And we were successful!  When I announced our success to the group, everyone seemed simultaneously excited and a little scared.  Also, there was a lot of work to do between the mid-February announcement date and our proposed late May departure.  With some added energy, the students began to work harder on their respective research projects, and I began to plan for our departure.

Unfortunately, life has its disappointments.  At April annual AsiaNetwork meeting in South Carolina, the Board responsible for the Faculty-Student grants announced that because of the raging SARS epidemic in Asia, they would postpone the release of the grant checks until the following summer.  The students were all greatly disappointed.  While I certainly saw the wisdom of the decision, I wish that individual assessments based on conditions within each country could have occurred. 

Without the trip to impel them forward and a mad scramble to find summer work, the students’ research lagged to some degree, and the highly polished luster of the articulation of their work to the impending trip lagged as well.  In my own case, I had a year of leave upcoming, and I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep the project alive from afar.

During the 2003 – 2004 academic year, I traveled to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where I joined my wife, who had begun working at Bryn Mawr College in Fall 2003 (we had been separated for the year...probably why I could accomplish everything I did). I had good experiences working in a temporary capacity at Bryn Mawr College, Villanova University, and the University of Pennsylvania. During this time, I kept in as close contact with Team Indochine as I could. In March 2004, after I had accepted the offer of a job at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, PA, AsiaNetwork released the Faculty-Student grant moneys and I began to plan the trip. Brian Weinberger could no longer join us, as he needed to complete a summer program in Greek before beginning as a seminary student. I departed for Vietnam on 20 May 2004 to lay the groundwork for the students, who arrived on 10 June (Michael and Brusta) and 13 June (Ryan, delayed because of bureaucratic troubles with the Vietnamese Consulate in Washington, D.C.). Then, we began our journey!

Note on Names and Translations

Throughout the translation, its annotations, and supporting material, I refer to the author as Claudie in the context of the diary and Mrs. Beaucarnot when drawing from subsequent materials such as interviews.  Other names are retained in their original form.

This diary was translated with the help of Stephanie Albee and Amber Hart, two students of French at California Lutheran University, with the advice of Lise-Hélène Trouilloud, a graduate student at the University of California at Davis.  The supplemental information found in the footnotes comes from a variety of sources mentioned in the bibliography, but mostly from interviews I conducted with Mrs. Beaucarnot in January 2002 at her home.

Beaucarnot Family History

Claude “Jules” Beaucarnot, Mrs. Beaucarnot’s father, was born on 3 September 1896 in the Morvan region of France (south of Dijon) to a family long involved in ceramics and tile production (Mr. Beaucarnot’s father, Claude (1870-1948) and grandfather had also made tiles).  After primary school, Claude Beaucarnot attended the Verizon Ceramics School, a vocational school.  In 1914, at the start of the Great War, Mr. Beaucarnot volunteered as one of the ‘Marie-Louise’ recruits, that is, before draft age.  He served in the infantry, and almost buried alive by the explosion of a large shell during the Battle of the Somme.  He swore an oath while buried that he would only wear black ties should he be rescued; he did so for the rest of his life, and earned the nickname le curé – parish priest – because of it.  Wounded in the arm, Mr. Beaucarnot spent several months on the hospital, and then asked for training as a pilot, not as a fighter or bomber pilot but in an observation craft.  He had seen enough bloodshed close up, but wanted to continue contributing to the war effort.  Despite some harrowing observation missions, Mr. Beaucarnot mustered out of the war as a sous-officier pilote, translating roughly as an NCO pilot.

As a child, Mr. Beaucarnot by chance received a postcard of the Pagoda of the Grand Buddha in Hanoi, and kept it pinned up in a prominent spot in his room, dreaming of adventure in the East.  Ironically, his home in Hanoi would be located only a few hundred meters from the Pagoda.  After the war, by chance Mr. Beaucarnot read an announcement in a newspaper seeking a ceramist in Hanoi.  His desire to become a test pilot had failed when in 1919, he had almost died flying a bad plane, but he still sought adventure and opportunity.  He responded to the advertisement and traveled to Indochina at the end of 1920 to begin work as the Managing Director of the Hanoi factory of the Société anonyme des Tuileries de l’Indochine (SATIC - The Tileworks Corporation of Indochina).

On 16 April 1909, Henri Bourgouin had founded the Établissments Henri Bourgouin et Compagnie.  In 1920, Bourgouin had reformulated the company into the Tileworks Corporation of Indochina and sold shares in the new company.  The new company consisted of a Mr. Charavy as President, Henri Bourgouin as CEO, and Mr. Beaucarnot as General Director.  The main tileworks for Hanoi were situated next to an important Buddhist temple on Truc Bac (“Little”) Lake in the North part of the city, and after 1924, Mr. Beaucarnot occupied a spacious house adjacent to the main factory of the SATIC.  The SATIC also had factories at Dap Cau (directed by Mr. Triaire), in Tonkin, and Saigon (directed by Mr. Desbuttes).  All three extracted clay from the area around them or, in the case of the two factories in Tonkin, used clay imported from Lang Son.  The SATIC produced all kinds of pipes, roof and floor tiles, toilets, and various forms of tableware and architectural adornment (balustrades, finials, etc.)

Claude Beaucarnot established himself in Indochina and helped contribute to the company’s growing prosperity.  He was particularly well known for criss-crossing the countryside looking for new mineral deposits.  For example, Mr. Beaucarnot discovered deposits of kaolin that enable the SATIC to begin to produce porcelain.  In 1922, Mr. Beaucarnot met his future wife, Marcelle Martin, in the office of the SATIC, and they married soon thereafter. 

Marcelle Martin (1898-1946), Mrs. Beaucarnot’s mother, was the daughter of a Mr. Martin, a mathematics teacher from Brittany, and Nguyen Thi Hong, the daughter of a family of Hà Dông.  Mr. Martin had arrived in Indochina in 1890 to teach at a collège (roughly the equivalent of an American middle school), and he left in 1917.  They had a daughter, Juilette, together.  According to Mrs. Beaucarnot, her grandfather was somewhat eccentric, greeting social callers in Hanoi in a cool bath.  Without resources of her own after her father’s departure, reluctant to return to her home village, and in a difficult social position as a métisse (mixed Franco-Vietnamese), Ms. Martin sought work in the Hanoi match factory of the Compagnie des Tabacs de l’Indochine.  Finding suitable housing was difficult, so Ms. Martin applied for one of the small apartments owned by the Société des Tuileries.  In order to apply for the apartment, she had to meet with Mr. Beaucarnot.  When they met, he fell in love with her instantly, and she agreed to marry in 1922. 

Mrs. Beaucarnot had two children with Claude, Claudie (born 1 May 1924, named with a feminization of Claude) and Nicole (born 18 May 1929).  The family also adopted Paulette Lavaeud (1905-), a woman of a métisse background and Georges Couteau, also a métis, sometime in the 1920s.  Mr. Couteau was adopted out of the Association of Abandoned Métisse Orphans (Association des orphelins métisses), of which the Beaucarnots were founding and supporting members.  He was sent to France to study baking and remained there as an artisan baker.  The Beaucarnots lived in a large, two-story house (expanded to three-stories in 1924) on a small lake in the northern part of Hanoi, next to the tile works.  It still stands and the city government of Hanoi uses it as a youth center.  Nicole and Claudie both attended the elite university-preparation high school, the Lycée Albert Sarraut.  After finishing at Lycée, Claudie enrolled in the School of Arts of Indochina (École des Arts de l’Indochine) in Hanoi.  

Through the Second World War, Mr. Beaucarnot continued to expand the business of the SATIC while devoting considerable attention to his family.  In 1922, Mr. Beaucarnot had invited his father and uncle to Indochina to contribute to the SATIC; they stayed though the 1920s, and started the SATIC’s factory at Long Buu, 30 kilometers outside of Saigon.  Apparently, Mr. Beaucarnot had a weak constitution despite incredible drive; he punctuated his residence in Indochina with trips to France six months out of every four or five years for “cures.”  Most famously, Mr. Beaucarnot led the family to France via North America in 1934, beginning in Indochina and traveling to France via Japan, Hawaii, the United States and eastern Canada.  The Beaucarnot family traveled to the United States on the Tatsu-maru of the NYK Company (Nippon Yensai Kenra).  During this trip, they drove down the 101 Highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  They visited the Grand Canyon by train and gazed at the skyscrapers of Chicago.  During the passage from Halifax to London, their ship rescued the crew of a sinking freighter.  Adventure, both in Indochina and out, filled family life.

The Second World War disrupted completely the society, culture, and economy of Indochina.  For the Beaucarnots, it was no different.  Mrs. Beaucarnot and Nicole had been sent south to Bien Hoa in 1945 to live with the Balicks, some family friends, as life became too difficult in the North.  Mr. Beaucarnot arrived in Bien Hoa to visit Mrs. Beaucarnot and Nicole on 8 March 1945; the next day, the Japanese launched a violent coup against the French, killing hundreds and forcing the rest into hiding.  Mr. Beaucarnot barely escaped with his life when he went to check on the SATIC facilities at Long Buu; all the workers had fled, leaving only Mr. Chavary.  Mr. Chavary had a pistol in a desk drawer; when a Japanese patrol arrived at Long Buu to find Mr. Beaucarnot and Chavary there, they were immediately imprisoned and almost executed because of the pistol.  Fortunately, they were able to talk their way out of prison and, like many Europeans, live with the support of others until the reassertion of European control in September 1945.

The next ten years witnessed the destruction of French Indochina, and difficulties for the Beaucarnot family.  Mrs. Beaucarnot died of typhus in 1946 in Hanoi.  Mrs. Beaucarnot was repatriated to France in 1947, but returned in 1949 to help her father survey damage done to the assets of the SATIC in order to receive compensation from the French government.  During this trip, Mrs. Beaucarnot met her future husband.  Her husband (name withheld) had enlisted in the French military on a scholarship basis, receiving his medical education for free in exchange for a certain number of years of service.  After a brief romance, Mrs. Beaucarnot married in 1949.  After another decade as a military doctor, Mr. Beaucarnot mustered out and purchased a rural practice in eastern France.  Mrs. Beaucarnot had four children with her husband.  The youngest followed his father in the medical profession.  For his part, Claudie’s father definitively returned from Indochina in 1951 and moved to Nice, where he became an amateur mathematician and crossword expert.

A Note on Sources

Few sources give life to the people and conflicts of colonialism in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.[2] And yet, there are many, many stories waiting to be told that would better illuminate the elite political history most scholars have obsessed over for the past forty years.[3] Who are the French besides greedy and domineering? What are the Vietnamese besides oppressed and in revolt? However, in a more general sense, historians of French Indochina need to recuperate and synthesize from a variety of sources, including the few oral sources still available, the story of colonialism in Indochina, from all perspectives, so that this area of inquiry is not left bloodless and doomed to its own limited focus. Inspiration might be drawn from other areas of inquiry to boost the body of material available.[4]

[1]  Literally translated, Chemin des Ecoliers means “The Pupils’” or“The Aspirants’” Road, but this road, from Hanoi to Saigon along the coast of Vietnam, is much better known as The Mandarin Road.’ By “Chemin des Écoliers,” Claudie means taking the slow road someplace.

[2]  Duras, Marguerite. Un barrage contre le Pacifique.  Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1950; ______. The North China Lover. Translated by Leigh Hafrey.  New York: The New Press, 1992; Lockhart, Greg.  "Broken Journey: Nhât Linh's Going to France."  East Asian History, no. 8 (1994): 73-134; Tran Tu Binh, David G. Marr, and Ha An. The Red Earth: a Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation. Vol. 66 Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University, Center for International Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1985.

[3]  Zinoman, Peter, ed.. Dumb Luck.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

[4]  Kuramoto, Kazuko.  Manchurian Legacy: Memories of a Japanese Colonist.  East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999; Naseno, Makiko.  Makiko's Diary: A Merchant Wife in 1910 Kyoto. Translated by Kasuko Smith, Nakano Makiko.  Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995; Tomoko, Yamazaki.  Sandakan Brothel No. 8: an episode in the history of lower-class Japanese women.  Translated by Karen Cooligan-Taylor An East Gate Book.  Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1999; Yosano, Akkiko.  Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.