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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gentle but persuasive protocol..., August 28, 2008
..is, as Lewis says, the right way to do everything in Vietnam. This book is a travelogue and more, an erudite one, written with profound philosophical insights, and clean, original prose. At the beginning Lewis is quite clear what motivated him to undertake this unusual, and at times dangerous trip - the Chinese Civil War had just ended, the Communists had won, the door was closed, both literally and figuratively on a way of life that would be no more. He wanted to see Indochina before the same occurred. His concerns were prescient.
After a glancing view of the "universal religion," the Cao-Dai, with its wild pastiche of saints that include Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo and Confucius, Lewis moves to the Central Highlands of what would become South Vietnam, and for almost half the book reports on the colonial arrangements involving the aboriginal peoples the French called the Montangards, the Moi, the Rhades, and the Jarai. It was these people, in particular, who would have their way of life completely destroyed in the French, and later, the American wars. Lewis scathingly described the American missionaries, living quite well, trying to collect a "few souls," and utterly indifferent to the physical life of their would-be converts. As he said: "I waited in vain for the quotation beginning, `Render unto Caesar'...." His portrait of French colonial officials is more nuanced. He reports that they were often sympathetic, and even helpful to the "natives," yet when push came to shove, as it does so often from the rapacious planter's need for ever more (slave) labor for their plantations, they invariably knuckled under. Of personal interest to me was the unfavorable description of the French owner of the tea plantation near Pleiku. When I was there during the "American War", in 1968, he was still there, and still protected - we had strict orders that the plantation could not be fired upon, even if fire was received. Concerning this arrangement, Lewis says: "... were the nation's interests sacrificed to the short-term ambitions of a small, powerful group of its citizens." is as relevant today as it was then.
After the Highlands, he returns to the Chinese section of Saigon - Cholon - and goes south into the delta (Cochin-China). He reports on the French effort to grant "independence" within the French Union, yet on such matters as club membership, the natives are still excluded. As he says: "Perhaps, if the French - and the English - had been gentler with their colonial subjects' amour-propre (self-respect) in the matter of such things as club memberships, their position in the Far East might have been a lot less precarious than it is."
Through the serendipity that dominates his travel arrangements, he visits Cambodia and Angkor Vat. There are precise descriptions, and spot-on philosophical musing on the energy expended to build these monuments, and now their abandonment. The Khmers were indeed a gentle people, who frustrated French General des Essars efforts to build an Army by taking "Thou Shall not Kill" literally. In the forward, written 32 years after this trip, he concludes with: "What could these people have suffered to have transformed the sons and brothers of General des Esssars' reluctant conscripts, formed in the ambulatories of monasteries rather than on the barracks' square into those terrible and implacable warriors who flocked to the standards of the Khmer Rouge?"
Due to the insecurity of the roads, Lewis had to fly to the third of the three countries, Laos. At the time it was viewed as an ideal assignment for French colonial officials, who invariably seem to "go native," marrying a Laotian wife, and getting through the night with a bowl of opium. Lewis succinctly describes this as: "Laos-ized Frenchmen are like the results of successful lobotomy operations - untroubled and mildly libidinous." And despite those insecure roads, Lewis takes a wild ride with one of those Frenchmen to Luang Prabang.
The book concludes with a chapter involving his return to Saigon, and "going over to the other side," spending a couple of days with the Viet-Minh. He mentioned his exhaustion in Laos, and I'm afraid it carried over to this escapade, since his description of it was flat, and without insight.
Overall, a wonderful, essential book for anyone still contemplating the immense tragedy that was the Vietnam experience for almost 50 years. And in that contemplation, consider how differently the world might be today if the US government had decided, in 1946, to back the one force in Indochina that fought with it during World War II, Ho Chi Minh and his partisans, and told the 40,000 French colonials that the "good life" was now over, and it was time to go home.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb account, August 10, 2008
First, the negative. Norman Lewis is a travel writer; he is not a researcher or a historian. He sometimes relies on what other people tell him for background information, and as a result his chapters are of varying degrees of trustworthiness: the worst point, probably, is his account of the Hmong (whom he, following the traditional nomenclature, calles the Meo) is probably the worst for misinformation. On the other hand, when he has access to first-class information--say, having learned about the Moi from a major anthropologist--his account is riveting.
The truth about this book is almost precisely the opposite of what another reviewer has said. On the surface it is a mere travelogue, occasionally exciting, usually interesting, sometimes dull. Only towards the middle does one realise that one is in the company of a man of wit, imagination, insight, philosophy, humanity, and a keen passion to get to the heart of things coupled with an uncanny capacity to succeed in doing so. A visit to Ankor Wat produces a meditation on history and the nature of politics which could stand proudly on a shelf with Ruskin. His visits to primitive tribes are as revealing as those of Levi-Strauss and more readable. In a few deft incisive sentences he can lay bare the technique of the skilled propagandist or reveal the true motives behind an economic arrangment. He spends much time with humane French officials whose interest in and work on behalf of the local population--these are men who devoted their time to eradicating malaria, committing oral traditions to print, and growing vegetable gardens to improve the health of the malnourished--almost convince us that the French presense was indeed a good thing: and then we learn that half the local people on whose behalf these men did these things were taken and used as slaves on French plantations. His brief and courageous sojourn in Viet Minh-controlled territory says more about the virtues and shortcomings of the socialist imagination than Justin Wintle's entire book about Communist Vietnam would do exactly fifty years later.
What starts out as mere travelogue turns into a nuanced and profound statement about the modern condition; about the tragic impossibility of any attempt to defend nature and traditional arts from the encroachments of cheap modern commercial culture. But any attempt on my part to summarise Mr. Lewis' vision will result in reducing it to a cliche. Like all individual and sensitive writing, this has to be read for itself, in its entirety. And to do so is a pleasure given Mr. Lewis' command of English prose; one puts this book down, turns with reluctance to more current writing, and says with a sigh: "they still knew how to write then!" I recommend this book, certainly to anyone who enjoys travel writing or anyone interested in anthropology or in the recent history of South-East Asia, but to also to anyone who enjoys seeing cultures and human lives described with warmth and wit.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
brilliant writing and observation, April 12, 2008
This is a brilliantly written book. Keen observations of the tragic occupation of Vietnam by the French that are relevant to our occupation of Iraq. His tone is wise and witty. I plan on reading all of his writings after this experience.
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