From a Chinese City: In the Heart of Peacetime Vietnam [Hardcover]

Gontran De Poncins (Author), Poncins (Author), Bernard Frechtman (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1994

Gontran de Poncins, a solitary traveler recording with pen and brush the genius of cultures hidden away in remote corners of the world, wrote this journal almost fifty years ago in his walk-up room in the Sun Wah Hotel in Cholon. He chose Cholon, the Chinese riverbank community snuggled up to Saigon, because he suspected the ancient customs of a national culture endure longer in remote colonies than in the motherland. In effect, he was studying a bit of ancient China, using the same intimate process he had used his best-selling Arctic account, Kabloona, reissued recently by Graywolf Press.

Everything he saw intrigued him-Chinese eating habits, their medical practices, their elaborate theater, their aesthetic talents, their varied physiognomies, their rich philosophy- indeed everything. All this is laid out for the reader, written with a light and humorous hand, just as it was lived by the author. As a writer and an artist, de Poncins also shows us the beauty in commonplace things: the street vendor's display of lettuce; the water-lily leaf folded into a sack to carry a live fish; the artistry of motion of the sampans on the river, poled by bent figures with supple reeds. He glories in the same texture caught in the film Indochine.

De Poncins' 42 sketches offers short-clad truck drivers, water-carriers, the simple lines of Chinese shears, and a bicycle-mounted night fritter stand lit by lantern light. Lewis Galantire writes "he had the rare gift of infusing with excitement the very meaning- spiritual or social-of what he described."

Editorial Reviews

Review

A different species of travel is recorded in this charming book by the author of Home is the Hunter and Kabloona.. For this is a portrait in miniature of a life that will soon vanish. The city is Cholon, in Vietnam, a city that has retained the traditions and spirit of ancient China in a day when China itself is being radically changed. Old China still survives, with its theaters and restaurants and people, and its smells and dirt as well, and its love of beauty in everyday life. Four miles from Saigon, Cholon is the Chinese pleasure city, the night city with taxi girls and gambling dens and neon signs in Chinese characters. -- Kirkus Reviews MAY 15, 1958

In 1955 he was 54 years old, but still young enough in spirit to think nothing of settling down to live as the Chinese did in a Cholon hotel, the Sun Wah. ... And he steeped himself with intense relish in Chinese life, eating the food, conforming to the customs and studying the ancient culture. Out of this rich experience has come From a Chinese City, a lively and enthusiastic introduction to Chinese civilization. -- The New York Times, November 29, 1957

About the Author

About fifty years ago in New York City, the manuscript of Kabloona was being considered for publication by the judges of the Book of the Month Club. The author, Gontran de Poncins, after knocking about the South Seas and Asia, had recently returned from living for 15 months with 25 Nesilik in Canada's King William Land. "Kabloona," which means "outsider" or "white man." was what de Poncins was called by the Nesilik. The BOMC judges wanted to verify the authenticity of the manuscript. Serendipity prevailed; the chairman of the BOMC, Henry Seidel Canby, ran into de Poncin's collaborator, Lewis Galantire, a few hours before the judges were to vote on the book. Galantire assured Canby the book was authentic. He knew, because he had edited into a readable narrative the 1200 pages of observations and diary entries of de Poncins. Kabloona went to press, was proclaimed a "literary masterpiece" by the Saturday Review and sold two million copies.

Being a best-selling author was but one of dozens of personae of this remarkable man. Before best sellerdom, he had been a soldier, linguist, London manager of an Italian silk concern, reporter, parachutist, anthropologist, and painter. His full name was Vicomte Gontran Jean-Pierre de Montaigne de Poncins, a direct descendant of the most widely read writer of the French Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne. He was born August 19, 1900 on his family's nine-hundred-year-old estate in Southeast France. Educated by clerics on the family estate until age fourteen, he followed the usual aristocratic path to military school and, finally, Saint Cyr, the French equivalent of West Point. World War I ended before he could enter the conflict, so he joined the army as a private ( scandalizing his family, his widow reveals) and served with the French mission assigned to the American Army of Occupation of Germany. He grew increasingly interested in human psychology, searching, he said, for what is that helps people make their way through life. He joined the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts and painted there for six years, then entered an Italian silk concern and rose to become its manager in London. But something in the business world disenchanted him, and he left to travel, restlessly, though India and China and the South Seas, writing of his experiences for newspapers and magazines.

While a freelancer in the United States in 1938, he arranged to visit the Netsilik Eskimo north of the Arctic Circle which resulted in the appearance in the early forties of Kabloona. When World War II broke out, rather than "shooting craps in the Marginot Line" he joined a US Army paratrooper unit. A bad jump, breaking his leg, resulted in his assignment to a training unit for the duration.

Madame Therizol de Poncins, the author's widow, wrote in October 1990 to the editor of the Trackless Sands edition of From a Chinese City: " It will be difficult," she said, " to express in a few sentences the essentials of a life that was full of sentiment, suffering, and reversals yet rich in action, and rich, as well, in a search for inner peace. My husband's early life was comfortable, opulent, and pleasurable. Yet he was given a strict moral upbringing by a private religious tutor, who, among others, taught him the principles that were such a part of the aristocracy. Hence, his sense of honor, and I suggest, his introspection. He sought the unity and simplicity of what is essential. He died having had the courage to intensely live life, accepting its joys and hardships as signposts toward fulfillment and destiny.

"After World War II, finding his baronial estate looted, he wanted to start again, someplace far away. He sought out some of the famous lone explorers and visionaries of his day, including Teilhard de Chardin in China. It was after his last trip to China that he met up with his parents again. There were soon to die in their castle. He agreed to part with the estate in a financial arrangement that turned sour. He turned his back on the old aristocracy and on his childhood friends, who seemed obsessed with deer-stalking and duck-shooting parties.

"It was during this period of his life that we met and were married. I encouraged him to think about what was truly important in his life: what he had learned in travel, his hardships, his self-discovery. He started to look for a place where he could spend his last years -- he had become ill. Quite by chance, he found a small estate in our luminous Provence, a Southeast part of France where I am from, in a magical scenic spot: the kind of place he could best assess his life's journey. He tried to say, in his last book, Le Matin de L'Homme, published six months after his death, that rather than living in an "illusionary cone," you can find, in nature, in the stillness of this bounteous country, some of the answers to a lifelong search. it must have been his most significant expedition."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 262 pages
• Publisher: Trackless Sands Press (December 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1879434016
• ISBN-13: 978-1879434011
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,449,959 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Adventure Memoir Stained by Orientalism, August 29, 2004

By 

Sir Charles Panther "Life is hard. It's hard... (Alexandria, Virginny, USandA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: From a Chinese City: In the Heart of Peacetime Vietnam (Hardcover)

This book is an acceptable and quick read for the beginning student of Vietnam or Southeast Asia. It is dated and flawed in some respects, but nevertheless captures some valuable observations of Vietnam and its embedded Chinese Cholon society in the period after World War II and before the massive American interventions in the 1960s.

First, note the dates of the warm reviews-the late 1950s. This book came out in 1957, from de Poncins' stay in Cholon in 1955. Of course, this is the year after the crushing French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the first clear indication that what was then a more or less regionalized northern insurgency was going to be much more than a remote colonial disgrace. De Poncins was aware of this, and presciently predicts here that there will be more to come in Vietnam.

de Poncins was a pedigreed aristocrat and comes across as such. He was an adventurer and observer, with that restless wanderlust of the idle/privileged, a self-styled professional, although trained neither in sociology or anthropology. You could call him a travel writer as well, but more correctly he was an instructive memoir-writer, undertaking difficult and unique travels and situations for consumption by the less-traveled. He almost comes across as a dandy. The back cover photo tells it all, de Poncins with his pipe, sitting jauntily backwards in a four-legged chair, in his herringbone tweed pants, tailored jacket and tie, with the pants tucked perfectly into his high wool socks. He is our cultural, intellectual and moral better, and his travels and observations providing the reader with insights and experiences to enrich our sad, pedestrian lives.

In this adventure he was looking for the "essence of Chinese motivation and behavior," and it appears that he thinks he's found it, at least what he perceives as the "ancient Chinese culture" that existed outside of China after what clearly is his opinion that China was ruined and forever altered (as well as off-limits) by the 1949 Communist victory. In Cholon he observes his surroundings and its population with delight and wonder; it's clear he is observing something totally foreign and new.

Cholon was a Chinese city, very much like Malaysia's Penang. More accurately, Cholon was an expatriate Chinese city, an offshore slice of Chinese culture and society outside of China itself. Cholon apparently had retained most of its Chinese character, societal structures, customs, and attitudes, and it was this de Poncins came to study. de Poncins' foreword-from 1955-describes Cholon as retaining the old culture and "old ways." I visited Vietnam and Cholon in 1997, and virtually none of this remains. Yes, the script on the signs are Chinese, as is the language spoken among the residents, but this all takes place amid the Coke signs, the Energizer batteries and Fuji film for sale to the tourists, and the Western-logo'd trash choking the sewers so badly that every time it rains the sewage backs up ankle-deep.

The book is filled with daily observations, from his shabby hotel room to the filth on the street, prostitutes, intellectuals, businessmen and hawkers, theater, medicine, and customs and practices. He describes a funeral, the contents of a Chinese house, what it's like to get a haircut, and provides a very basic description of what he sees to be Chinese philosophy and cosmology, describing the eight basic elements, and how the Yin and Yang, when depicted graphically, "penetrate each other in undulatory and `spermatic' fashion."

Orientalism at best and racism at worst run rampant through the book. Even "old China hand" Edward Robinson's glowing intro to this 1991 edition speaks of how "the energetic and frugal Chinese tend to monopolize the local world of trade." de Poncins' sketches, of which there are dozens in the book, are the easiest way to detect this. In every one, the Chinese profile is unflattering and denigrating, with heavy brows, jutting lower jaws, the stereotypical buck teeth. None of his portraits convey the intelligence or dignity of the subjects, or the respect of the artist. At one point de Poncins muses, "What human species are they? . . . They seemed to be the word of a moon-struck Rodin . . ." He specifically notes the "slits of eyes," "terrifying bone structure," describing a taxi driver as reminding him of a "Chinese torturer of legend . . .," and another "like a circus monkey riding around a ring." This is disappointing and surprisingly rampant in a book from as late as the 1950s. It betrays de Poncins' Western-oriented arrogance, his sheltered and aristocratic upbringing. This fault stains what would otherwise be an enjoyable and easy read of a foreign traveler's memoir in a strange land.

In conclusion, this is an interesting and easy read. It's a simple memoir of a true foreigner, both to Vietnam and to China, an outsider attempting to observe and report in his own way on what he saw, for the benefit of those who could not do the same. Although packaged as travel writing, it is no longer that. It is now an historical sociological/anthropological observation, and an amateur one at that. For the student of Vietnam and SE Asian history, this is a quick and entertaining albeit flawed read, providing context and observations on life in general in and around Saigon in the middle 1950s, near the end of the Diem era, as the insurgencies and conflict of the South began to give way to the larger North-South struggle which would rage for another 20 years.