In this week’s podcast, Michael chats with Yen Vu, PhD Candidate in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University about her research into Vietnamese Francophone Literature. Yen’s Gatty Lecture, “Prodigal sons and disparate selves: Vietnamese youth and intellectuals in colonial transitions,” analyzes “the return of the prodigal son,” of Vietnamese youth, particularly the phenomena of Vietnamese students studying abroad in the France during the 1920s and 1930s. While some Vietnamese would stay for marriage or work, most would eventually return to Vietnam. Yen argues that “contrary to the proverbial parable, the narrators in the imagined returns of these francophone texts are never quite met with forgiveness and resolution.”