From war-torn Vietnam to Ecolint
Juliette Triozon (LGB, 1971) warns us, “my mother’s life is like Gone with the Wind,“ and indeed it is an epic story that deserves to be told in a book. This is exactly what Juliette did after her mother passed away. She wrote: Waltzing with the Dragons: The true story of a mother and daughter in war-torn Vietnam. Through interviews with her family, she managed to retrace her mother’s life, including her short-lived marriage to a French officer killed in action and escaping a Japanese officer who took her prisoner. Writing the book has been an emotional journey, but also very therapeutic, as the relationship between mother and daughter was strained.
Juliette née Mai-Tâm was born in Saigon as the result of a love affair between her mother and a French surgeon. Her father went back to France, promising to come back, but never did. So little Juliette grew up as a mixed-race child in Vietnam, suffering from the comments of the other kids. She was mocked as being a “big nose”, the nickname for the Westerners. As the Vietnam war intensified and the situation became too dangerous, her mother and her new husband, Mr Triozon, decided to send Juliette to Europe. At 15, she lived for a year on her own on a farm in France until her parents joined her. The family went directly to Geneva, where Juliette enrolled at La Grande Boissière.
This uprooting – leaving her Vietnamese family and all that she had ever known for a new country and new culture – was a terrible shock. Juliette still remembers her first day of school at Ecolint: “I was wearing a long pleated skirt with my long hair. Everybody was staring at me! This was 1968, so all the girls had short pixie hair, mini skirts and make-up!”. After the initial consternation, Juliette found her place at Ecolint and admits that everybody was nice to her. She discovered theatre at Ecolint, started to play chess and made friends for life. After living in the USA, Juliette now lives in the South of France with her husband and has two children from her first marriage.
Waltzing with the Dragons: The true story of a mother and daughter in war-torn Vietnam is available on Amazon.
