2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting,it captures the true essence of the New Vietnam, August 5, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Romancing Vietnam (Hardcover)
Having lived in, and visited Vietnam many times over the last ten years, I read Justin Wintle's travelogue with great interest. He really captures the day to day experience of living and travelling in this wonderful country, without the pretentious and condescending attitude prevalent amongst most Westerners. I am sick of books written by people who forget that this is a progressive and caring country battling to improve its economic situation, and where travel is now easy and unrestricted. Many travellers and writers seem to believe (falsely!) that they are God's answer to the problems of a downtrodden and oppressed Vietnamese people, and falsely represent themselves as intrepid explorers and saviours battling against a maniacal state regime (read Mariah Carey's "3 Moons in Vietnam" is you want this drivel!) Vietnam's people are amongst the brightest and most resilient in the world and love their country - Hell! They fought the Chinese for 1000 years, the French for 100 years and the Americans for 10 years and endured incredible suffering just to have the right to call it their own. They have their problems - so would you if the Americans had ensured that your country was bankrupted and impoverished for the last 25 years, but, for sure, they'll get over them. Bravo Mr. Wintle, you really get to the heart of the country and its people and I'd love to read a follow up now that the US embargo has (in theory at least) gone.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
3.0 out of 5 stars
Honest,likeable but unrevealing memoir, August 10, 2008
Between October 1989 and January 1990, Justin Wintle spent three months travelling down the coast of Vietnam with an assortment of translators and drivers. His purpose was to learn about life in the Vietnam of that moment; however he was given almost no freedom to choose the people whom he would interview or the places where he would go. His requests to interview members of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects--of tremendous political importance in Vietnam's past--were ignored. Merely chatting with an "unapproved" artist produces the veiled threat that his visit will be cut short. A visit to an unapproved writer is only made possible by one of the rare instances of Mr. Wintle's insisting upon his own agenda, but nothing comes of the visit: the writer is too afraid of Wintle's official entourage--one suspects with good reason--to say anything meaningful. Wintle is taken to the pagoda where Ho Chi Minh's father is buried, but when he actually begins a conversation with the resident monk he is abruptly whisked away. In one town he is actually locked in his hotel room at night to prevent him from going out on his own at night. As a result just about everyone he meets is a loyal party cadre and there are very few surprises in the interview results.
This book is in essense a travelogue, and as such makes decent if unexciting reading. But it purports to be an account of life in Vietnam, and as such it can hardly be considered a success--Mr. Wintle never leaves the bubble created by his "minders" long enough to learn much more than they want him to learn. Whether he should have protested more vigourously or made more efforts to strike out on his own is a difficult question; probably nobody, without speaking the language, would have been able to get much of an uncensored view. But at least he might have interviewed a few emigres upon his return home to get their side of the story.
As travel narrative, then, the book must stand or fall. It is to a curious degree the opposite of conventional travel writing: unlike writers who go out of their way to get into dangerous and exciting situations (so as to have something fun to write about) Mr. Wintle is shielded by his "minders" from virtually even the hint of danger and, therefore, of excitement. The programme to which he more or less meekly submits is, in addition, almost painfully monotonous: rise at dawn, get driven somewhere, sit at a long table while a presentation is made. The interest of the book comes to involve Wintles relationship with his "minders". Bonding occurs, and much is made of it, but it doesn't seem so much like the formation of relationships between individuals as the almost inevitable result of a small group of men spending day after day in close proximity to one another. As a result I felt a curious sadness when I finished the book--what had it all been about, really?
I hesitated for a long time between giving this book two stars and three. I finally settled on three because Mr. Wintle is clearly a decent guy who chose to do a very small thing--chronicle his experiences during three months, nothing more--and did it well. But it could have been far more interested had it been written by someone with greater knowledge and curiosity, someone who did some research. Mr. Wintle seems to have no interest in Vietnam's many ethnic minorities. His own open prejudice against religion, probably as much as that of the officials who planned his journey, probably accounts for the almost total silence on the Buddhist, Catholic, and other faiths which have played such a dramatic role in modern Vietnamese history. Art and architecture are given very pallid descriptions, literature and music never appear, and the cuisine is given very limited space indeed. What we get instead reads at times like the memoirs of a fraternity boy: drinking, beautiful women, more drinking, more beautiful women. It is not only the monotony of the programme which caused the monotony of the narrative.
There is a point at which I think Mr. Wintle reveals the problem. Upon arriving at Hue, he recalls W. Somerset Maugham's description of it as "a pleasant town...with something of the air of a Cathedral town in the west of England". He then goes on: "He was being either exceedingly facetious or exceedingly silly." Cathedral town in England, he explains, have neither tropical canals, nor tropical weather, nor tropical people, and concludes that the "poor sod" was "probably tanked up on gin slings at the time". He also oddly enough considers the comparison of Hue to an English cathedral town as an attempt to "laud the East". But he's missing the point entirely. Maugham never said that Hue physically resembled an English town; he said it had something of the air thereof. In other words, the essence, the tone is similar. Wintle's inability to see this goes a long way towards explaining why we come away from his book feeling as if we haven't learned very much.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
