When I began writing a novel set in 1920s Vietnam, I thought research would be a matter of time—hours logged, books read, facts gathered. I didn’t yet understand that finding the past, especially one pushed to the periphery of global history, isn’t just an intellectual task. It’s a kind of haunting.
French colonial Vietnam often appears only in fragments—photographs, half-remembered stories, thin paragraphs in textbooks. Most English-language sources focus on the decades of war that followed, leaving the 1920s strangely quiet. But I was lucky in two ways: I speak Vietnamese fluently, and I grew up with the country’s history stitched into the rhythm of my schooling. That gave me more than access—it gave me orientation.
With this foundation, I could read deeply into Vietnamese texts and records that many writers might miss. I could chase down memoirs, and essays published in old journals. But just as importantly, I turned to fiction—specifically, the realist works of Nam Cao, Vũ Trọng Phụng, and Ngô Tất Tố. These writers, who captured the undercurrents of colonial society with sharpness and sorrow, offered me a lived texture of the time: how people spoke, how they suffered, how they survived. Fiction became one of my truest tools in recreating the period.
Visual material became just as vital. I combed through black-and-white photographs taken by colonial officials and travelers—images not meant to document history, yet now holding pieces of it: a rickshaw slicing through a tree-lined boulevard, street vendors crouched beside woven baskets. From these, I could trace street layouts, the subtle hierarchies at play in body language and posture.
And sometimes, the past came not from books or archives but memory. The middle school I attended in Vietnam had been built during the French colonial period. At the time, I never thought to question its beauty: the soft, timeworn yellow of its outer walls, the dark emerald-green shutters flung open against the heat. But while writing, these details returned to me like ghosts—the kind that anchor you rather than unsettle. They reminded me that history isn’t always distant. Sometimes, we’ve walked through it unknowingly.
Still, writing historical fiction requires more than immersion—it asks for precision. I spent hours trying to confirm what kind of fan a wealthy household might own, how a servant would address their employer, how much a bowl of noodles might cost. These were small details, but they mattered. They held the weight of the world.
Writing into a lesser-documented past means straddling fact and feeling, memory and imagination. The past begins to breathe. And for a moment, it feels alive again.
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