Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam - Softcover

Templer, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140285970 ISBN 13: 9780140285970

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1999

Synopsis

In Shadows and Wind, Robert Templer paints a fascinating and fresh picture of a country usually viewed with hazy nostalgia or deep suspicion. Here is Hanoi, an increasingly tense and troubled city approaching its millennium but uncertain of its direction. Here are people emerging from a long wilderness of malnutrition, discovering a new lifestyle of leisure and luxury. And everywhere are the anomalies that burst the bubble of optimism: a vastly expensive luxury hotel sitting empty in an unknown town six hours from an international airport; museums crammed with fake exhibits. And there remains the one-party Communist state, still wrapped in secrecy and corruption, and making for an uneasy bedfellow with the rapacious capitalism it now encourages.Drawing on hundreds of interviews in Vietnam and years of research, Robert Templer has produced the first in-depth examination of the problems facing modern Vietnam. Shadows and Wind is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam that now has emerged from a century of conflict with both foreign powers and with itself.

About this title

About the Author

After graduating from Cambridge University Robert Templer worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Afghanistan. A regular contributor to the Guardian and Sunday Telegraph (London), he is a recipient of the prestigious Soros Fellowship and now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

Reviews

A journalist draws on his reporting for the French news agency Agence France-Presse for an incisive, evenhanded portrait of contemporary Vietnam. Templer begins with a rather testy survey of the literature, taking to task the now-famous group of American reporterswhose careers were made reporting on the Vietnam Warfor falling into the old trap of seeing Vietnamese as inscrutable Orientals. Templer does indeed correct this mistake by describing a complex but unmysterious country reminiscent of the overpopulated, energetic Philippines, all mixed up with a police state something akin to East Germanys before the Berlin Wall fell. In Vietnam the Communist Party rules but is riven with corruption and has lost the peoples respect. Following the American withdrawal, there were costly wars and Vietnams own gulag. Stalinist-style controls on agriculture threw the country into famine, in the end forcing the free market reforms that crested in 1986, and began an economic boom. Yet hardly had Vietnamese grown used to their new freedoms when the dissolution of the Soviet Union frightened xenophobic party bureaucrats, who tightened controls once more. Templer brings to life the harsh struggle and yet the fleeting charm of life in Vietnams big cities, in particular Hanoi. Not least, he salutes the bravery and slyness of novelists such as Bao Ninh and Nguyen Huy Thiep, who write realistically of their fascinating, sad country. Vietnam's problems are many, but Templer ably distills them: 1) overpopulation, 2) widespread corruption, which among other things sours the climate for foreign investment, 3) the lack of a viable judicial system, and 4) a rigidly controlled press. Despite some hopeful signs, real change does not seem imminent. Templer has rendered a valuable and long overdue service both to the Vietnamese and to those who would try to understand them. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"I am too young to have seen the Vietnam War on television or to have read about it at the time," British journalist Templer announces at the beginning of this penetrating and lyrical history, confessing that his own impressions of Vietnam had been formed by American books and movies. But upon arriving there in 1994 for a three-year stint as a reporter for Agence France-Presse, Templer found that more than half of the population had been born after American troops pulled out of Saigon, and that the reality of life in modern Vietnam was much more complex than he had realized. The lingering images of French colonial Indochine and the American experience in 'Nam oversimplify and obscure the struggles of a communist nation in the midst of economic reformADoi Moi, or "renovation"A after half a century of armed conflict. Not to mention the "Rip Van Winkle popular culture" that has awakened with an enormous appetite, but uneasy stomach, for Western stimulus. Dismissing as "drive-by reporting" such celebrated books on his topic as Frances FitzGerald's Fire in the Lake and William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War, Templer has built his own vision of Vietnam through hundreds of interviews and careful analysis of Vietnamese journalism and literature. A picture of a diverse culture emerges in a nation struggling to understand its relationship with China, adjust to feast rather than famine and balance its communist past with an increasingly capitalist present. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Templer, who covered Vietnam for Agence France-Presse in the mid-1990s, begins with the observation that, like the vast majority of Vietnamese, he was too young to have seen the war on TV or have read about it at the time, but the past hangs over all present-day problems. "Imagining Vietnam" is a key topic for a series of chapters showing how Confucian Chinese, French colonizers, American Cold Warriors, and Chinese "Socialist brothers" all misunderstood the nature of the country they tried to change and on which they all left their mark. Through many vivid interviews and brief, crisp essays on economics, politics, culture, and society, Templer reveals the contemporary problems of a government mired in Socialist rhetoric but looking forward to reform and global participation while many common people seek their own ways. His tone is both critical and admiring. Highly recommended for public as well as specialist libraries.ACharles Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It is easy still for Americans to think of Vietnam as a war and not a country. No longer at war with the U.S., France, or China, modern Vietnam seems at war with itself. The re-education camps of the 1970s, where the South Vietnamese learned mainly about hunger and hoarding scarce food, have given way to creeping capitalism, continued cultural repression, and a corrupt Communist state. Vietnam has been only marginally able to share in the wealth of its Asian neighbors. The Communist government's schizophrenic economic policies, combined with a generation gap between the ruling party and the younger Vietnamese, have resulted in a people with little confidence in the government to better their lives. Templer profiles the role of the government in economic and cultural policies that are keeping Vietnam a backward country. Most interestingly, though, he examines the role of the determined Vietnamese people as they make inroads through tiny gaps in public policies to grow food in rural areas, build a life in the cities, and try to maintain their culture and religion. Marlene Chamberlain

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140285970
• ISBN 13: 9780140285970
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384