When Garcin asked, the men told him they had only sons, 'who were raised Chinese, as their legitimate sons. A secondary literature is emerging that looks at Eurasians in Indochina and explores their uncomfortable legal, cultural and social status in the French colony.
Most recently, Emmanuelle Saada has provided an excellent comparative perspective on half-French colonial subjects. In particular, girls and women with this heritage are surprisingly absent from the colonial discourse, both then and in more recent scholarship.
Tan Liok Ee has presented a serious treatment of the difficulties of studying women of Chinese ancestry in Malaysian history. As she asked, 'Why have we ignored the role of 50 per cent of the ethnic Chinese that we have been talking about? By focusing on the gendered life of Cholon, Saigon's sister-city, with its large Chinese population, this article sheds some light on these women's stories, and analyses the reasons why they were there but not there, seen but not identified.
Studying the invisible has its challenges. I argue that many of these women were in fact Sino-Vietnamese. Although for the most part we cannot identify which were which, I show that invisibility itself could be useful to girls and women under colonialism.
Contemporary critiques of the Chinese community French and Vietnamese sources discussed the Chinese population in the colony as if it were bounded, essentialised, and gendered. In this narrative, Chinese male immigrants, unable or unwilling to bring their original wives with them, took Vietnamese women as concubines, then abandoned those relationships to return home to their real families.
