“There, hovering over a thousand years of culture and glowing with easy riches, what the peasants see is the halo over Hanoi, and they are still leaving their villages for it!” Once there, some became willing collaborators with the colonizers; others became disillusioned and returned to their villages; most sought merely to eke out an existence for themselves and their families. Over time, however, as we’ve seen, many joined the movement for independence, which took a great many forms but which was always centered in the urban areas of Vietnam. More than any place, it came to be centered in
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