Hoang Mai Nguyen-Ton Nu, linguist

Hoàng-Mai Tôn Nu was born on 22 November 1956 in Nha Trang (South Vietnam). Her parents, who both received a French education and came from distinguished Mandarin lineages, worked for French businesses and enrolled their daughter in the local French secondary school. Continuing her studies, she went to France with one of her sisters to attend university, prior to the fall of Saigon in April 1975, ushering in the communists to power.

Hoàng-Mai decided against coming back, as the family was considered enemies of the new regime. On 16 September 1981, under the guise of a temporary pass for Belgium obtained through a relative, Hoàng-Mai's mother left Vietnam with her other sister. Her father died just before departure.
Hoàng-Mai, a refugee in France, obtained a degree in linguistics. She specialises in the Vietnamese language and works at the Louis-le-Grand High School in Paris.

She founded two organisations with the students of the high school's Vietnamese classes. Firstly, in 1984, Thư Viện Diên Hồng (Diên Hồng Library), whose primary vocation is to preserve and perpetuate South Vietnamese culture and freedom through books published in South Vietnam before 1975 and re-published abroad after 1975. Secondly, in 1994, the association École sauvage (“Wild School”), which aims to foster a solidarity chain between young people in France and Vietnam, by implementing a literacy strategy and primary education to aid in Vietnam’s growth. 

The Wild School association also seeks to promote Franco-Vietnamese exchanges, whether through cultural events or by offering a comprehensive range of Vietnamese language courses in Paris, for both students and beginners.

Since 2003, in addition to teaching Vietnamese, Hoàng Mai has been teaching French as a Foreign Language at the Jean de la Fontaine High School, as well as training foreign high school students in reception centre classes to master the French language, culture and literature as well as French secular and republican values.

In 1994, Hoàng-Mai published Luyện thi tú tài, a collection of literary analyses of excerpts from texts intended for future baccalaureate students. In 1998, she developed a method for learning Vietnamese, Parlons vietnamien, langue et culture (Let's talk Vietnamese, Language and Culture) (L'Harmattan Publications), which quickly became a leading reference book in the field.