Vietnamese spoof on French colonial era translated in US

A Vietnamese book written in the 1930s by a master satirist has recently been published in English by Cornell University based in New York, the US.

“The Industry of Marrying Europeans” by Vu Trong Phung, on marrying off Vietnamese women to Europeans in the early 20th century, is a tale full of sharp observations, pointed humor, and unconventional mix of non-fictional and fictional narration. It has been translated into English by Tran Viet Thuy, a Vietnamese-American teaching Vietnamese at the university. Though there is no official word on it the book is likely to have posed great difficulty in translation because the writer uses numerous dialects including French-Vietnamese pidgin. In 2002 another novel by the same author which was published in the US, Dumb Luck, was a bestseller. Source: Tuoi Tre – Translated by Hoang Bao

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