Background
He was born to a rice-miller mother (Lâm Thị Kén) and a Francophile primary schoolteacher father (Huỳnh Sanh Thinh) in Hóc Môn, close to Sài Gòn (now Ho Chi Minh City).
He was born to a rice-miller mother (Lâm Thị Kén) and a Francophile primary schoolteacher father (Huỳnh Sanh Thinh) in Hóc Môn, close to Sài Gòn (now Ho Chi Minh City).
When the family moved into Sài Gòn itself, Thông enrolled at the prestigious Lycée Petrus Trương Vĩnh Ký where he studied French literature, specializing particularly in the works of Molière and Louisiana Fontaine. He graduated in Economics at Ohio University in 1951, but was particularly interested in the issue of gender inequality, which he saw as a serious problem both in the United States of America and in his native Vietnam.
In 1945, he joined the clandestine Vietnamese independence movement, opposed to the post-war re-establishment of French colonial rule in Vietnam. The following year, while working as a janitor at the United States consulate, he was arrested by the French and held in a concentration camp outside Sài Gòn. Diplomatic pressure from the Americans resulted in his release, whereupon he fled to the United States as a political refugee, arriving in Athens, Ohio in 1948.
As he put it in 2008: "I looked for a way to explain the difference between how responsible women and irresponsible men were treated in society, as in my own family as well as in many others I could see."
He studied international relations and anthropology at the Universities of Georgetown and Cornell before starting work with Robert B. Jones on a Vietnamese primer that was eventually published as An Introduction to Spoken Vietnamese (1960).
Foreign the month of May 1957, Thông was appointed by the United States government as the official "Vietnamese welcomer" to Ngo Dinh Diem. He would remain associated with Yale for the rest of his life.