Christina E. Firpo, "Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Okay, so I guess my intellectual trajectory is I started with this book about mixed race kids who are being taken abroad.

from their mothers.

And in the process, the mothers were being accused of sex work.

And of course, that piqued my interest.

And a lot of the women were saying they didn't do it.

Some may have, some may not have.

And then the other thing that I was finding in there is there were a lot of discussions about soldiers, French Foreign Legion soldiers in the countryside, giving these women like, you know, perfume and whatnot, like as you give A lover, you give your lover these kinds of things.

So those two things were sort of rattling around in the back of my brain.

And then as I was going through some newspapers, I started finding these like crime reports.

You know, prostitution was legal in Vietnam under the French, but I started finding these crime reports about clandestine prostitution, clandestine sex work.

And I was like, oh, this is even more interesting because my question is like, why would somebody... do it clandestinely than not and of course like i found the reasons um but um and then when doing my book on sex work um i was so fascinated by taxi dancers and they had this like They basically, you know, sex work is, it's a business.

And I teach this class on history, prostitution for my students.

And I always talk to them about like how you have to consider this as a business.

There's marketing, there's selling your product, there's pricing your products, or there's that like mirage of like, this is the best product ever.

So you have to really think about it in business terms.

And one of the things that fascinated me about the taxi dancing, like sex work in these dance halls was that they were selling this image of modernity.

These were the very same women who would go next door, quickly change their outfit, and be in an ad-hoc singing, which was considered traditional women and modern women, right next door to each other, oftentimes the same owner.

I was like, oh, wow, this.

The erotic response of the men was like, You know, it was fantastic to see.

And I was very interested in the clothing that they wore.

And so that sort of, again, rattled around in the back of my mind.

So let me say, it's a beauty culture.

But I didn't get to it until much later.

I'll be honest with you.

It was during the pandemic.