THE DEFENSE OF THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE MIDDLE-CLASS PERSPECTIVE ON AMAZON.COM

LITERARY CRITIQUES Phê bình và phân tích văn chương:

THE VIETNAM WAR REFOUGHT ON AMAZON.COM

NOTE FROM THE BLOG:   On Amazon.com, where the novel DAUGHTERS OF THE RIVER HUONG is sold, a number of consumer-reviewers revisited the Vietnam War. One Mr. Jones downgraded the novel, using the North Vietnamese perspective.  Another reader, An H. Tran, immediately wrote in response, and exposed 12 points of bias and inaccuracies in Mr. Jones' five-paragraph review. Reviewer An H. Tran presented the South Vietnamese perspective in his praise of the novel. He concluded by raising the rhetorical question:  "Who is Mr. Jones?", suggesting that "anonymous faces" attacked the novel's literary value in order to belittle the South Vietnamese perspective about the war:
   

"[Mr. Jones is a] pseudonym mouthpiece for those anonymous faces who want to downgrade this novel and its South Vietnamese perspective[.] After all, it is Mr. Jones' "Vietkieus" who have poured billions of their hard-earned U.S. dollars into the economy of Vietnam before, during, and after "Renovation." The unbiased and truly curious readers of Amazon will determine the literary value of this novel. Such literary value is not assessed based on esoteric likes or dislikes, let alone hostile distortions and political bias!"  An H. Tran. 

About propaganda and disinformation: A response to John P Jones III’s review of Daughters of the River Huong

 April 25, 2011

By an h. tran "antran" (paris france) –

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This review is from: Daughters of the River Huong (Paperback)

On Amazon.com,  one “Mr. Jones” wants to give the trophy to North Vietnam and to downgrade Vietnamese American literature.  My review posted separately points out his inaccuracies and distortions.

Three obvious signs of Mr. Jones’ bias: 1) he calls the "Vietnam War" the "American War,"  like North Vietnamese communist propaganda.  2) He uses the derogatory term "Viet-Kieu" to refer to Vietnamese Americans. 3) He typecasts the novel as portraying “a war between two sovereign states," which is the South Vietnamese perspective.

He is no expert on Vietnam, and his inaccurate and biased comment should not stand uncontradicted. See my review! An H. Tran

FULL REVIEW BY AN H. TRAN:

During the Vietnam War, propaganda, disinformation, and ignorance tore America more than any other war in American history. Mr. Jones' review of the novel "Daughters of the River Huong" offers a concentrated example of this prejudice. Readers may be misled by Mr. Jones' review. Clarification is needed especially in the month of the anniversary date of the fall of Saigon - an important date for Vietnamese Americans and for America. 

Let's start with Mr. Jones obvious bias. Mr. Jone uses Vietnamese communist rhetoric to criticize the creative literary work of an accomplished South Vietnamese American author. He calls the Vietnam War the "American War," the terminology of Communist Vietnam. (Perhaps he should also call the Korean War the "American War" and the Cuba Revolution the "Anti-American Revolution.") He also calls the author a "revisionist" of history. He forgets that only those in power can do the kind of revision he attributes to her. Here is one concrete example:

In typecasting Vietnamese Americans as "Vietkieu," Mr. Jones also suggests that the millions of Vietnamese boat people just "emigrated" (his choice of word). No, they risked their lives at sea to seek freedom and a better society. Boat people were once called criminals fleeing the country; then, once the Berlin Wall and the Soviet have disintegrated, and the U.S. dollars are desired, they immediately become "Viet-Kieu," beloved expatriates welcomed by the very government from which they escaped. The author explained the undesirable meaning of this term in her novel, but Mr. Jones just ignores that. The term has its semantic origin: Vietnamese call Chinese expatriates living in Vietnam "Hoa-Kieu," American expatriates "My-Kieu", Indian expatriates "An-Kieu," and French expatriates "Phap-Kieu." All these expatriates live in their host country (Vietnam) away from their homeland, and that's why they are called "Kieu" by native Vietnamese. Thus, in Vietnam, calling Vietnamese who live in America "Viet-Kieu" is linguistically incorrect. Yet, this inaccuracy has been accepted in Vietnam as part of the post-1975 large-scaled "revision" by the Communist government. The "revisionary" term Viet-Kieu is accepted by Mr. Jones, who apparently does not know Vietnamese linguistics. Who is the "revisionist," then, Mr. Jones or Ms Duong?

I am also disappointed that Mr. Jones claims authority over matters that he does not know. There are more major inaccuracies in his 5-paragraph review than in the 400+page novel.

Here are some of his rudest:

1) JONES:  "There is the "Cinderella" aspect of the story, as told by Jackie Collins. The great grandmother was a humble boat rower on the Perfume (Huong) river in Hue, who was "discovered" by the Emperor..."

REPLY:  Mr. Jones does not know that this "Cinderella" story is part of Vietnam's anecdotal history concerning Emperor Thanh Thai and his "Paddle Girl" bride, not "Jackie Collins" in America or Cinderella! This anecdote is so popular in Hue that there are the famous folk verses expressing the Emperor's sentiments: "Kim Long co^ gái my' mie'u, Tra'~m yêu tra^~'m nho', tra^~'m lie^'u tra^'m di."  Even the Communist government has documented this tale (see published works of Ton That Binh and Nguyen Dac Xuan in Vietnam). Emperor Thanh Thai was a real historical figure.

2) JONES:  "Each generation is told in the first person, so there are sentences like: "My skin was burning when he kissed me one, twice, and then too many times to count," and "...even though the cells of my skin danced under his fingertips." (narrative by the Mystique Concubine of the early 1900s). 

REPLY:  Apparently, Mr. Jones does not know Vietnamese creative literature well enough to realize that this is the way Vietnamese women and literary protagonists talked in the first part the 20th century. When flying over "Dien Bien Phu" or admiring the work of photojournalist Tim Page (who donated publicity material to the Communist government), Mr. Jones should ask the Vietnamese cadres about "Nu?a Chu`ng Xuân," the famous novel written by the famous Vietnamese writer Khai Hung during the first half of the 20th Century. There, Khai Hung's female protagonist said, "tôi chi? yêu có mo^.t nguo`i và ''to^i cho  ra`ng do`i to^i nhu the^' la` he^'t dù ra`ng tôi chi? mo'i nu?a chu`ng xuân." ("I only love one man, and my life is considered over, even though I have gone through half of my spring time"). Yes, that was the archaic, stylized speech of Vietnamese women back then! (In fact, if Mr. Jones asks about Khai Hung, most likely he will not be able to get an answer or translation of text from any government cadres, because Vietnamese communists assassinated Khai Hung, and his idealistic novels were only read and studied in the South by young Vietnamese women like Ms. Duong (who, based on her bio, attended high school in Vietnam)!

3) JONES:  "Three generations later, you have a "Lolita," starting at six, and within a few more years, taking a Frenchman, the grandson of the Resident Superieur who exiled her great grandfather, away from his wife. (Marguerite Duras [sic] novel The Lover plays the Indochina Lolita gamut infinitely better)."

REPLY:  What a sexist distortion of the plot: 10-year-old Simone took Andre away from his wife? Where in the novel? I recall just the opposite: that Andre left Vietnam to marry someone of his own age and race! Further, didn't the Frenchman have to take any responsibility over his own action? Why does Mr. Jones blame the child on behalf of the Frenchman? (In his review, Mr. Jones also states that the child was...Ms. Duong, who tore pages from her grandmother's book and revised it! Incredible accusation!). Mr. Jones' stacking of Duras next to Simone is even more offensive -- the worst stereotype: Duras - the white girl in French Indochina -- was financially dependent on, and had a steamy sexual relationship with a Chinese man - the "yellow" lover. A quid pro quo? None of those elements existed in Ms. Duong's novel. Every seemingly "taboo" love story that took place in Vietnam is immediately placed next to Duras' steamy sex scenes although Duras is not even Vietnamese!

4) JONES:  "There is also: "He even wanted to go to Japan to study the Japanese experience of industrialization and decolonization. Was Japan ever colonized?" 

REPLY:  By picking on this detail (from the narrative of Dew, a young girl, not even 10 years of age), Mr. Jones reveals his ignorance about Vietnamese history. After the "Support-the-Emperor" movement (Ca'n Vuo'ng), the Dong Du and Duy Tan movements were initiated by Vietnamese mandarins who believed that going to Japan would help them learn how to decolonize Vietnam. Only an uninformed Westerner like Mr. Jones does not know this. Among those mandarins was the famous Phan Chau Trinh, who might have taken the young Ho Chi Minh under his tutorage during their time in Paris in 1917). Mr. Jones assumes that these Confucians (nhà nho) would rather learn the lesson of decolonization from another....colonized country! Why would they want to send young Vietnamese to neighboring Laos or Cambodia, where everybody would be oppressed by the same French colonists? These mandarins believed, as youngsters like Ms. Duong in pre-1975 Vietnam must have been taught, that the lesson had to be learned from Japan, which developed itself into a superpower and escaped colonization from the West. These are the ABCs of Vietnamese history of the 19th and early 20th century.

5) JONES:  "...[T]he novel would have the reader assume that the author's principal source of knowledge about the war was Hollywood movies, and not one who had lived through it." 

REPLY:  Another condescending stereotype! Mr. Jones, who was not born and raised in Hue, nor evacuated from Saigon like Ms. Duong, feels the need to use the stereotypical "Hollywood movies" jargon to typecast Vietnamese American authenticity. Mr. Jones should have researched the history of Vietnamese Americans' settlement in the U.S, or simply read the author's bio. Many Vietnamese, including those in Vietnam today, consider the novelist (formerly Judge Duong) a role model for our younger generations. She also writes abundantly on technical matters related to Vietnam that only an expert can produce. Many of us - now in our 60s and 70s - may still remember her as the teenager who received South Vietnam's National Honor Prize in Literature awarded on the Trung Sisters' Day. In March 1975, one month before the fall of Saigon, the skinny young girl walked in the national park Tao Dan downtown Saigon, together with her fellow honorees: widows of South Vietnamese soldiers and female officers of the South Vietnamese armed forces. The young woman was then interviewed on South Vietnam's national TV, Bang Tan So 9. When somebody like her decides to write a novel in America, it is not to "to make the story palatable to an American readership, as well as exciting, and "marketable" of the Jackie Collins style as Mr. Jones prejudicially asserts.

6)  JONES:  "The Paris Peace treaty occurred in 1973, not '72." 

REPLY:  Mr. Jones is wrong. The Paris treaty negotiation occurred in 1972 and the treaty itself was signed on January 27, 1973, in the Centre de Conférences Internationales, Avenue Kléber, Paris. As South Vietnamese, many of us knew that the death of our country predated the signing of the treaty, the final touch to a farce. 1972 was the year of the Eastertide Offensive and the battle of An Loc. In July, 1972, the Paris peace talk resumed, carried out to the desired result: the exclusion of the South Vietnamese interest. I need say no more, since I don't think a novelist like Ms. Duong has the duty to give Mr. Jones a whole chapter on what happened in 1972 in Paris, in Washington, D.C., Hanoi, and Saigon!

7) JONES:  "The "Renovation" policy was announced in '86, not '85, and the US Trade embargo was lifted in Feb., not April '94." 

REPLY:  Many of us, Vietnamese Americans, know that "Renovation" was not just announced overnight in 1986. We know that in 1985, party-member Nguyen Van Linh was reinstalled in Vietnam's Politburo, after he had been removed from there in 1982. As soon as he became General Secretary, Renovation was officially announced. That does not mean Renovation was not formulated earlier, or that Linh spoke for the first time about "free enterprise" in 1986! Linh responded to Vietnam's economic crisis in the mid-1980s, after hints of reforms had emerged in the former Soviet as early as 1983. (Prior to Renovation, at the beginning of 1985, Vietnam also broadcast its bloody oppression against "resistance" while "Renovation" was being orchestrated. During the same year, the Foreign Investment Law - the frame for Renovation modeled after China's -- was being formulated.

February 1994 might be the date for Washington's embargo lift, but those of us Vietnamese Americans who shared in that historical event "on the ground" knew that the real implementation - the signing of some huge foreign investment contracts between Vietnam and major U.S. companies - actually occurred in April and May, 1994, when roadmaps for diplomacy and the Consular Agreement also came about. I examined the author's publicly posted CV, and found that the author was a lawyer for Mobil Corporation in Southeast Asia during this period of time. No doubt in my mind the author wrote about Vietnam's early days of globalization from her own experience.

8) But Mr. Jones' most offensive act was his accusation that the author described the Vietnam War as between two sovereign states. What if she did? I see the novel not as political fight, but a humanistic painting of a generation during a tragic period for both Vietnam and America. While the United Nations might not have recognized two states of Vietnam before 1975, that does not mean in our hearts and minds, South Vietnam isn't/wasn't a sovereign state. Is South Korea a sovereign state? Is Taiwan a sovereign state? Ms. Duong is an international lawyer. Why not ask her what a sovereign state is, or should we ask Mr. Jones?

9) JONES:  "The circumstances of the family's final departure from Vietnam in 1975 are highly improbable, as told, and certainly the biological timeline is impossible." 

REPLY:  Which circumstances? Which "biological timeline"? I suggest that Mr. Jones reread Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" to find some of the "circumstances" described by his CIA compatriots about the months and days leading to the fall of Saigon. Mr. Jones should also find some Vietnamese elderly who can tell him more about the Vietnamese extended family structure and "biological timeline" concerning Vietnamese women, in their time and place. For example, ask about "tu'c ta'o hôn" and the marrying age of Vietnamese women at the turn of the 20th century.

10) JONES:  "In the novel itself, the second largest city in southern Vietnam, DaNang, is described as: "...the military base of the American..." In speaking of O-Lan, the author says: "I was born in the foothills of the Truong Son range, which later became the Ho Chi Minh trail." 

REPLY:  Is the child character supposed to give Mr. Jones a better geographical and socio-political description of DaNang? And, should the character O-Lan -- an illiterate noodle peddler who does not know (and does not care) who her father is - give Mr. Jones some...200-page explanation of her origin and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in a scene that occupied approximately 10 pages out of a 400 plus-page novel?

11) JONES:  "...[O]ne of the major hardships that the family faced during the American war was the inflation in Saigon, and having to give up their domestic help ...The impact of the war on the author's three million compatriots who lost their lives is virtually unmentioned. Yet shortly after giving up their domestic help, they can send their daughter to Paris for schooling!”  

REPLY:  Mr. Jones likes terminologies popularized by the current Communist government: from the "American War" to "Vietkieus" (he Americanized the term into one word). Yet he seems to understand "domestic help" the American way, not the Vietnamese way. Middle-class or petit-bourgeois Vietnamese households are what "free enterprise" hopes to create and communism wants to wipe out! Mr. Jones must not have heard of "u già,`" "bà vú," or "chi' gái," those young ladies or old women who became part of the household, although not related by blood, just like the special relationship between the enigmatic Nanny Mai and the suffering Madame Cinnamon. Frequently distant relatives also became domestic help. In the novel, the aristocratic grandmother, Madame Cinnamon, took the place of domestic help. But Mr. Jones doesn't just stop there. His mischaracterization of Simone's "French schooling" is another huge distortion of the plot.

More importantly, Mr. Jones refuses to see that in pre-1975 South Vietnam, there was a societal structure "normal" in all aspects. Yet, overnight, that structure collapsed after some 20 years of building of a defense wall around the normalcy of South Vietnamese lives. True, many people died, but Vietnam was not just about black-pajama bodies and Agent Orange. In Mr. Jones' stereotypic, jaded view, every book about Vietnam's got to portray the deaths of millions of people, as though a literary fiction writer were supposed to be a war correspondent. This novel describes the normalcy that constituted the hopes of the Vietnamese middle-class, and how it came to an end in April, 1975. Millions of lives were lost so that Saigon and South Vietnam (and Ms. Duong's characters) could hold on to the structure of normalcy, the impetus that could have pushed a free (or freer) Vietnam to the economic development that today characterizes Vietnam's neighbors: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and even Japan!

12) JONES:  “The Tet offensive of 1968 had a major and devastating impact on Hue, and that is the subject of the novel, but the impact of Tet on Saigon is essentially omitted.” 

REPLY:  Another distortion! Is this novel only about "the Tet Offensive impact" on Hue, or does it present the odyssey of a family originated from Hue? Should we condemn Ms. Duong for not making her novel into a 1,000-page treatise or encyclopedia on the war?

So, Mr. Jones' repertoire of the Vietnam literary genre allows him to mix autobiographies with creative fiction. (He cites three books; two out of three were not written by Vietnamese Americans; two out of three are not even literary fiction.) And then he acts surprised that Ms. Duong's novel is...a novel.: "...[F]or some, that means anything goes. For me, great or even good novels have to be authentic to time and place as well as ring truthful concerning the human condition." In a novel, a standard of aesthetics is used, not "everything goes." That "everything goes" occurs when Mr. Jones changes the novel into an autobiography: "So, it does appear that the granddaughter, the author, pulled a page from her grandmother's book, and revised so many aspects of what could have been a good story..." Why the writer chose the fiction form in a time of "reality shows" is something readers must respect. For one thing, if facts in the novel are true, there is no privacy concern because the participants have been made into novel characters. This novel should help Mr. Jones learn the "time and place" and the "human condition" of middle-class South Vietnamese, but he refuses to see that because of his own political bias. Yes, in Vietnam, pre-1975, there was a middle class, and their voice, too, should be heard!

Who is Mr. Jones? A pseudonym mouthpiece for those anonymous faces who want to downgrade this novel and its South Vietnamese perspective? After all, it is Mr. Jones' "Vietkieus" who have poured billions of their hard-earned U.S. dollars into the economy of Vietnam before, during, and after "Renovation." The unbiased and truly curious readers of Amazon will determine the literary value of this novel. Such literary value is not assessed based on esoteric likes or dislikes, let alone hostile distortions and political bias!

ANTRAN copyright April 2011