Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments This book has taken me a long time to write, and I owe many people and institutions a great deal of thanks for their help along the way. I began this project during my time at yale University, where John merriman and ben Kiernan helped me learn how to think about the intersections between European history and Southeast Asian history that this book explores. I would not be where I am today without their ongoing guidance and friendship. Jay Winter was not only a formative intellectual influence during this time; I also have him to thank for this book’s title. Quang Phu Van has done more than anyone to teach me Vietnamese, and I, like many others, benefited greatly from his efforts to build a Vietnamese studies community at yale. my wonderful fellow graduate students at yale—far too many to thank individually here—were a constant source of inspiration and support. Special thanks to George r. trumbull IV for his help and friendship since the very beginning, and to haydon Cherry for good conversations and good times on three continents. The knowledge, advice, and support of scholars of Vietnam and of French colonialism contributed enormously to this book. my deepest thanks to mitch Aso, Jennifer boittin, Pascal bourdeaux, trang Cao, Joshua Cole, J.P. daughton, naomi davidson, George dutton, Christina Firpo, Elizabeth Foster, henri Francq, Gilles de Gantès, Christoph Giebel, Chi ha, Alec holcombe, Eric Jennings, mark Lawrence , Christian Lentz, Jim Le Seuer, Pamela mcElwee, Ed miller, michael montesano , Cindy nguyen, Lien-hang nguyen, martina nguyen, nguyen nguyet Cam, Lorraine Paterson, Jason Picard, helen Pho, Paul Sager, Gerard Sasges, hue-tam ho tai, Keith taylor, michele Thompson, nhung tuyet tran, tuong Vu, Chris Wheeler, owen White, John Whitmore, and Peter Zinoman for their help over x Acknowledgments the years. A few other people deserve special thanks. I am particularly grateful to Claire trần Thị Liên and Peter hansen, both for their groundbreaking work on twentieth-century Vietnamese Catholic history and for sharing with me their knowledge and ideas about our mutual research interest for many years. Shawn mchale kindly served as a reader for the dissertation on which this book is based. Christopher Goscha read the entire manuscript and offered crucial comments and encouragement, as he has done for so many people in the field of Vietnamese studies . Finally, thanks to bradley davis for our occasionally meandering and irreverent but always memorable conversations about Vietnamese history, all too many of them at our favorite bia hơi on dã tượng Street in hanoi, now a casualty of the inexorable march of history (it is now a branch of Vietcom bank). This book would not exist without the generous financial support of many institutions . I am particularly grateful to the blakemore-Freeman Foundation for allowing me to spend 2004–5 studying Vietnamese in hanoi and ho Chi minh City, and to the Fulbright-hays program and the Social Science research Council for the funding that allowed me to carry out the bulk of the research for this book. At yale, my thanks to the department of history, the Council on Southeast Asian Studies, the macmillan Center, and International Security Studies for grants allowing me to study Vietnamese at the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute and to carry out early research, and to the mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for its support during the year I wrote my dissertation. At michigan State University, the department of history and the College of Social Science provided essential support during later stages of the research and writing. my research for this book has taken me to many wonderful archives and libraries . In Vietnam, I would especially like to thank the Viện Việt nam học và Khoa học Phát triển for sponsoring my visas to study Vietnamese and for facilitating introductions to the institutions where I worked. my thanks to the directors and staffs of the national Archives Center I in hanoi and Center II in ho Chi minh City, the national Library of Vietnam in hanoi, and the General Sciences Library in ho Chi minh City for access to their collections. The Institute of religion and the Ecole Française d’Extrême-orient in hanoi are wonderful places to work and to meet other scholars, and I would like to thank their directors, Đỗ Quang hưng and Andrew hardy, for welcoming me. I would also like to thank the former archbishop...