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Understanding Vietnam
To better understand ourselves, we must understand the Vietnam War. We must learn more about Vietnamese culture and Vietnamese paradigms in order to untangle the muddled debates about our own. Realizing that we must do this is the first and most important lesson of Vietnam. And it is one we Americans have been exasperatingly slow to learn. We remain far too ready to assume that other people are, or want to be, or should be, like us.
448 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1993
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August 27, 2016I don't like musicals.
Despite this and against my better judgement I once found myself jammed into a seat high up in a London theatre watching Miss Saigon, which if you're lucky enough not to know is a reinterpretation in two acts with an interval of Madame Butterfly set during and after the Vietnam war. The chief feature of this musical is that towards the end of the first act a wooden helicopter is lowered down on a pole, half a dozen actors clamber on aboard, then the pole is retracted carrying the helicopter up into the roof space which given the age of many of these London theatres was, I felt, an impressive bit of engineering and secondly required a great deal of bravery and faith on the part of the performers.
Anyhow after a couple of minutes of the male lead singing about how he loved this Vietnamese woman, and she loved him and how impossibly difficult it all despite all evidence to the contrary I was thoroughly sick of the US presence in Vietnam irrespective of any wider political issues. After five minutes I was yearning for the North Vietnamese to take over by any means possible and barely ten minutes into the show I had developed an absolute blind faith in the moral necessity for the re-education of the bourgeoisie and imperialist forces.
My powers of telepathy, however, are weak and so the musical persisted until the end of the second act when the female lead commits suicide because Oriental (if you will forgive a nod to the American Dialect Society's word of the year 2013). And yes, in case you doubt, the story really does make that much sense.
Jamieson's book is the opposite of Miss Saigon. His focus is not on understanding the war as such, but understanding the country. His study reaches back into the nineteenth century and uses the opposites of Yin and Yang to explain the cultural shifts within Vietnamese society. Yin representing a feminine, socially liberal, artistically inventive pole and Yang a socially conservative and morally rigid ideal. One of the points that Jamieson makes is that the US presence itself worked to undermine the cohesion of South-Vietnamese society. US personal were paid in US dollars, which they spent in bars, the young ladies who earnt hard currency through the provision of interpersonal services to said personal could in Jamieson's account ended up earning more, when you took the exchange rate into account, more than Government ministers. This turned society upside down and created as I found in the theatre a wide spread popular support for a more Yang society which North Vietnam was on hand to provide. Naturally the more manpower resource the USA poured into the South, the more pronounced the social pressures became and the greater the popular support for a different, much less permissive, conservative social order. In short the manner of the US intervention undermined the society that it wished to preserve as a bulwark against communism.
Jamieson is not just interested in broad brush cultural movements. He also points out how even small scale everyday differences in body language could be a source of tension and misunderstanding between US personnel and South Vietnamese.
The other irony of Jamieson's account is that US military defeat in Vietnam wasn't a victory for China or the Soviet Union. Communism in Vietnam has to be understood not in terms of a pure ideology that floated in from outside and had the potential to mysteriously align Vietnam with those other states but has to be considered in its local context, as de Tocqueville writes in the forward to The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution "they used the debris of the old order for building up the new". Communism was part of a reaction to what Jamieson describes as the Yin cultural tendencies within Vietnamese society under French rule. It's value to people in Vietnam was as a modern intellectual framework to express well established cultural norms towards a disciplined and organised moral and social order. In short for practitioners and supporters it was a means of being authentically Vietnamese and making society authentically Vietnamese. Unfortunately the administration of the USA did not or would not consider the local context because of their geopolitical concerns when ideally they should have gone with the Dao (or Tao depending on your Romanisation). As we face the end of other foreign entanglements I wonder how far the manner and nature of our interventions has distorted and weakened the social forces we sought to build up, but anyhow, this is a cunning book and well worth reading for the long view it takes of another culture.
Despite this and against my better judgement I once found myself jammed into a seat high up in a London theatre watching Miss Saigon, which if you're lucky enough not to know is a reinterpretation in two acts with an interval of Madame Butterfly set during and after the Vietnam war. The chief feature of this musical is that towards the end of the first act a wooden helicopter is lowered down on a pole, half a dozen actors clamber on aboard, then the pole is retracted carrying the helicopter up into the roof space which given the age of many of these London theatres was, I felt, an impressive bit of engineering and secondly required a great deal of bravery and faith on the part of the performers.
Anyhow after a couple of minutes of the male lead singing about how he loved this Vietnamese woman, and she loved him and how impossibly difficult it all despite all evidence to the contrary I was thoroughly sick of the US presence in Vietnam irrespective of any wider political issues. After five minutes I was yearning for the North Vietnamese to take over by any means possible and barely ten minutes into the show I had developed an absolute blind faith in the moral necessity for the re-education of the bourgeoisie and imperialist forces.
My powers of telepathy, however, are weak and so the musical persisted until the end of the second act when the female lead commits suicide because Oriental (if you will forgive a nod to the American Dialect Society's word of the year 2013). And yes, in case you doubt, the story really does make that much sense.
Jamieson's book is the opposite of Miss Saigon. His focus is not on understanding the war as such, but understanding the country. His study reaches back into the nineteenth century and uses the opposites of Yin and Yang to explain the cultural shifts within Vietnamese society. Yin representing a feminine, socially liberal, artistically inventive pole and Yang a socially conservative and morally rigid ideal. One of the points that Jamieson makes is that the US presence itself worked to undermine the cohesion of South-Vietnamese society. US personal were paid in US dollars, which they spent in bars, the young ladies who earnt hard currency through the provision of interpersonal services to said personal could in Jamieson's account ended up earning more, when you took the exchange rate into account, more than Government ministers. This turned society upside down and created as I found in the theatre a wide spread popular support for a more Yang society which North Vietnam was on hand to provide. Naturally the more manpower resource the USA poured into the South, the more pronounced the social pressures became and the greater the popular support for a different, much less permissive, conservative social order. In short the manner of the US intervention undermined the society that it wished to preserve as a bulwark against communism.
Jamieson is not just interested in broad brush cultural movements. He also points out how even small scale everyday differences in body language could be a source of tension and misunderstanding between US personnel and South Vietnamese.
The other irony of Jamieson's account is that US military defeat in Vietnam wasn't a victory for China or the Soviet Union. Communism in Vietnam has to be understood not in terms of a pure ideology that floated in from outside and had the potential to mysteriously align Vietnam with those other states but has to be considered in its local context, as de Tocqueville writes in the forward to The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution "they used the debris of the old order for building up the new". Communism was part of a reaction to what Jamieson describes as the Yin cultural tendencies within Vietnamese society under French rule. It's value to people in Vietnam was as a modern intellectual framework to express well established cultural norms towards a disciplined and organised moral and social order. In short for practitioners and supporters it was a means of being authentically Vietnamese and making society authentically Vietnamese. Unfortunately the administration of the USA did not or would not consider the local context because of their geopolitical concerns when ideally they should have gone with the Dao (or Tao depending on your Romanisation). As we face the end of other foreign entanglements I wonder how far the manner and nature of our interventions has distorted and weakened the social forces we sought to build up, but anyhow, this is a cunning book and well worth reading for the long view it takes of another culture.
March 20, 2016
Through background to Vietnamese history
I am an English teacher in Vietnam and this has given me a broad understanding of the history of vietnam. Not just about the American war it covers pre Nguyen dynasty of the 19th century. It is easy to read and draws on poetry and literature of the time which illustrate the social concerns of the people.
I already understood the differences in values between a collective and individualistic society or so I thought. Reading this gave me a real insight into what being part of a collective family based society would b e like. The depth of feeling the depth of oneness and also the ambivalence of shifting from this to more western concepts of individualism through westernized education.
It stops in the 1980s at a stage when the social reform I n initiated after a reunited Vietnam did not bring about the expected results. Obviously there have been significant changes in policies since that time and I would be interested in a follow up to restoring th oily s author.
I recommend this book to people who want to understand more about the mindset and ways of thinking of Vietnamese people and to understand the heritage and struggles they have experienced.
Before coming to Vietnam I had no clue about its history and people and my tourist trips to museums in ho chi Minh, doing ha and Hanoi gave me some confusing bones to chew on but this book put flesh on the bones!
I am an English teacher in Vietnam and this has given me a broad understanding of the history of vietnam. Not just about the American war it covers pre Nguyen dynasty of the 19th century. It is easy to read and draws on poetry and literature of the time which illustrate the social concerns of the people.
I already understood the differences in values between a collective and individualistic society or so I thought. Reading this gave me a real insight into what being part of a collective family based society would b e like. The depth of feeling the depth of oneness and also the ambivalence of shifting from this to more western concepts of individualism through westernized education.
It stops in the 1980s at a stage when the social reform I n initiated after a reunited Vietnam did not bring about the expected results. Obviously there have been significant changes in policies since that time and I would be interested in a follow up to restoring th oily s author.
I recommend this book to people who want to understand more about the mindset and ways of thinking of Vietnamese people and to understand the heritage and struggles they have experienced.
Before coming to Vietnam I had no clue about its history and people and my tourist trips to museums in ho chi Minh, doing ha and Hanoi gave me some confusing bones to chew on but this book put flesh on the bones!
August 18, 2016
Written by one of the very few Americans who bothered to try understanding Vietnam on its own terms when it really counted, this work deserves its reputation as a superior guide to what happened and why.
A more accurate title might be "Understanding 20th-Century Vietnam Through the Debates of its Leading Writers and Intellectuals." For those seeking political or historical insight, the amount of focus on novels and poetry can come as a surprise. As the author argues, though, the literary arts play a far greater role in both traditional and modern Vietnamese life than Western readers are accustomed to, and the worries of poets are a useful mirror for otherwise vast, unwieldy social transformations.
The spirited, engaging runthrough of Vietnamese intellectual life from late imperial decline to uncertain 1990s transition is always helpfully placed in a broader sociopolitical context, and for the period of the American War supplemented with the author's firsthand experiences, which are fascinating and tragic in equal measure. The many faults of all rulers and systems involved - old and new, North and South, foreign and local - are unsparingly analyzed, just as their contributions are acknowledged. Though Jamieson can occasionally become overly enamoured of his pet yin/yang metaphor and systems-theory jargon, this does little to detract from an extremely worthwhile introduction for foreign readers who, all too often, have viewed this great country through every prism but that of its own long-suffering people.
A more accurate title might be "Understanding 20th-Century Vietnam Through the Debates of its Leading Writers and Intellectuals." For those seeking political or historical insight, the amount of focus on novels and poetry can come as a surprise. As the author argues, though, the literary arts play a far greater role in both traditional and modern Vietnamese life than Western readers are accustomed to, and the worries of poets are a useful mirror for otherwise vast, unwieldy social transformations.
The spirited, engaging runthrough of Vietnamese intellectual life from late imperial decline to uncertain 1990s transition is always helpfully placed in a broader sociopolitical context, and for the period of the American War supplemented with the author's firsthand experiences, which are fascinating and tragic in equal measure. The many faults of all rulers and systems involved - old and new, North and South, foreign and local - are unsparingly analyzed, just as their contributions are acknowledged. Though Jamieson can occasionally become overly enamoured of his pet yin/yang metaphor and systems-theory jargon, this does little to detract from an extremely worthwhile introduction for foreign readers who, all too often, have viewed this great country through every prism but that of its own long-suffering people.
September 13, 2012
This book is comprehensive and highly readable; it provides the reader with a history of Vietnam reaching back thousands of years but focusing on the most recent 150, largely contextualized by Vietnamese literature, and especially poetry. It's light on the details of specific military actions, such as the Tet offensive or the My Lai massacre; not that it ignores such events, but rather they are a smaller part of the larger story of Vietnam's century of sustained warfare, which itself is contextualized in terms of multiple centuries of Vietnamese cultural development. Throughout, Jamieson employs the metaphor of yin and yang and the concept of "setting the social thermostat" to keep the reader aware of the scope of the book and the way that individual events relate to the larger context.
August 11, 2007
this is a great book for anyone who wants to learn about vietnam. the author was in the military, became fluent in vietnamese, then went and read all the vietnamese literature he could find. it is a very interesting angle, basically giving a historical, cultural, and political analysis through the lens of novels, poetry, and intellectual writing.
the only disappointment is that it basically stops at the early 80s. it was published in 1993 but is essentially the author's 1981 PhD dissertation from 12 years earlier. so much has happened since then.
the only disappointment is that it basically stops at the early 80s. it was published in 1993 but is essentially the author's 1981 PhD dissertation from 12 years earlier. so much has happened since then.
January 10, 2015
This is the best book which combines history with anthropology and literature study, and in the same time systematically summarized the vietnamese culture(in a sense the tradition of Confucius society), how it is evolved, and how it compared with the western culture.
The author wears a rare humanistic lens to dig deep into the culture to find out the whys and hows of the history. There are a big portion of this book concentrated on the literatures of different historic periods, which helps a lot for the reader to understand the country, the culture.
The author wears a rare humanistic lens to dig deep into the culture to find out the whys and hows of the history. There are a big portion of this book concentrated on the literatures of different historic periods, which helps a lot for the reader to understand the country, the culture.
February 23, 2008
This is a great book for understanding Vietnam the country, as opposed to Vietnam the war. It is scholarly but readable (it does require some effort to focus at points, but the effort is worthwhile). Part anthropology, part history, it is a great introduction to any serious study of Vietnam and its culture.
March 7, 2016
Essential reading for anyone attempting to disassemble the myriad cultural hangups of the Vietnamese populace, especially foreigners currently residing here. Also, a superb primer on Vietnamese lit, poetry, and folk music.
October 4, 2007
A very detailed academic book about Vietnamese culture throughout the ages up to the present day.
May 1, 2011
An excellent and insightful examination of the history and culture of Vietnam, with wonderful primary materials included.
January 30, 2023
A lot of Vietnamese cultural aspects have been covered and analyzed very well. An academic book but very easy for readers to follow through. All the points are successfully stated and well explained. This book is a perfect start for anyone who would like to know more about the Vietnamese, diving into our core values like family focus, the conflict between the old and the new, etc.
February 8, 2023
Good overview of Vietnamese history as seen through a cultural/anthropological lens.
May 17, 2007
Doctoral dissertation adopted into consumer text... Quite thorough in using value and cultural systems of Vietnamese prior to and during Vietnam war during 60s and 70s as rationale for why the war was a blunder.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews