Customer Reviews

From a Chinese City: In the Heart of Peacetime Vietnam

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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.