A History of the Vietnamese (i)

from K.W. Taylor and Cambridge University Press

That’s a lacquer painting. Another Taylor (Nora Annesley, 2009) has told the story of how art students in Ha Noi in the 1920s started painting with the medium used to decorate and preserve sculptures.

Well, a photograph of a lacquer painting. That is, not a lacquer painting. Indeed, not the first photograph of that lacquer painting but your screen’s representation of my photograph of the print on the book-cover of a photograph in the possession of the book publisher, of a lacquer painting.

Spend time with Keith Weller Taylor, as I did at great effort and expense on a dozen occasions over 10 years, 50 minutes at a time, and you too may find yourself speaking like this. The man is awfully good at seeing what he looks at.

Now anyone with a library card may listen to him over 10 hours if you read history like a novel, 1 page a second. Read him like he reads his sources and you may be at it for another 40 years.

We here at Viet Nam Literature Project plan to spend only 20, in letter after letter. I met the author more than 20 years ago already after I decided to follow him and David Marr into Vietnamese studies.

David had served there early in the decade as an officer of the United States Marine Corps. Keith started on the Viet Nam payroll as United States Army.

Some duty with another government agency as a secret squirrel. I have heard details of his service from 2 mutual friends, both dead now. I await Keith’s own deliberate recital of his facts, or not.

Keith writes like a real enlisted man, with a grasp of reality and its significance rather than the other way around. When David had left to start work as a graduate student to get our whole country out of that one,

Keith rallied as one of the true believers in the last days of our occupation of the Republic of Viet Nam. Good guys.

I think they should have got every bit as much support from the United States of America as we gave the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Republic of Spain. They got instead hundreds of millions to arrive at the same result, the bad guys winning a civil war.

You see, no one had bothered to tell the American people what in world was important about Viet Nam, let alone our ally in Saigon. When I was 13 years old there was no better explanation available to me than my childish sense

that we had made promises. For that matter I had no reason at all why my father’s high school class had died in Korea. So my guys have not shut up about it ever since.

Such as David and Keith are my people as an anthropologist. Once when I presented my work here in North Carolina, Hodding Carter, Jimmy’s public relations man from State, responded that this exactly is the value of my men.

They have run their mouths as their fathers and brothers never did about their engagements. I listen to those who have caught the disease of nobody in the United States knowing why Viet Nam is important, from the war, when Keith started looking at the Vietnamese.

Note that turn of phrase. This is not my friend Ben Kiernan’s Viet Nam: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present. It’s not my friend Chris Goscha’s Vietnam: A New History.

There Chris gives my Viet Nam, the new polity the same age as our United States with roots another 2 hundred years deep. Old K.W. here instead presents people doing stuff including but not limited to states over an epoch.

The front cover of my copy of his book is a mystery. Green background, scribbled over with no known script;

a line figure maybe tributaries and their river if it flows one way or a river and its delta if it flows the other;

and finished pictures with areas in solid brown, black, and yellow, oh look there is a net on one as they float about.

What could it possibly mean? You have to stop looking at the cover. It is not a lacquer painting. You have look instead at what Keith wrote and learn how he sees things.

This was the first Viet Nam letter of 3 so far concerning A History of the Vietnamese by K.W. Taylor. The second posted on April 2, 2023 and the third on April 26, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.