A History of the Vietnamese (ii)

from K.W. Taylor and Asian Studies

The history of Vietnam prior to the nineteenth century is rarely examined in any detail.

What can I tell you. We hang out on different street corners. I do agree that the name of the country is seldom spelled on the back of university press books in English as Viet Nam does at the United Nations.

In this groundbreaking work, K.W. Taylor takes up this challenge

Groundbreaking is politicians in hardhats stepping on shovels in a photo opportunity. This here is a completed foundation and structure. I have never seen Keith take up any challenge. He is inner-directed. Last time he got manipulated he was under orders.

addressing a wide array of topics from the earliest times to the present day - including language, literature, religion, and warfare - and themes - including Sino-Vietnamese relations, the interactions of the peoples of different regions within the country, and the various forms of government adopted by the Vietnamese through their history.

Atta boy. See, you did you read the book. I knew it. Why didn’t you just say so. There’s your lede.

A History of the Vietnamese is based on primary source materials, combining a comprehensive narrative with an analysis which endeavors to see the Vietnamese past through the eyes of those who lived it.

Rock on. Why we love Keith Taylor.

Taylor questions long-standing stereotypes and clichés about Vietnam, drawing attention to sharp discontinuities in the Vietnamese past.

We have got a witness! Let the church say amen.

Fluently written and accessible to all readers,

It would break one of those programs that specifies a grade level. But yes any who can work a search engine may read through this thing and emerge a better thinker and writer as well as Viet Nam hand.

this highly original contribution to the study of Southeast Asia is a landmark text for all students and scholars of Viet Nam.

I would have said abundantly original. Overflowing with origins. A contribution on the order of the widow’s mite: all that she has to give. East Asia is more important to him than Southeast Asia but yeah. Not a landmark. You would have to choose one of the origins and navigate by that.

K.W. Taylor is a professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University.

Professor of Sino-Vietnamese Cultural Studies, if you please. Note Asian Studies, at Cornell University where the United States of America has supported a Title VI Southeast Asia program since 1958 for our own good reasons. Keith is a historian, always working from documents, but with an area studies readiness to speak of power and security without pomp or shame.

Now the peers review:

“This book is a landmark in scholarship,

Again with the landmark. Are we orienteers? Sailors? Or are you just warming up to say masterpiece?

the product of Keith Taylor’s four decades of intensive and prolonged engagement with Vietnam.

For sure. See how loud facts speak?

There is no other book quite like it:

Yet it inspired you make that trivial observation. I shouldn’t be like this. You sweat bullets overtime to blurb a book then the publisher chooses the one vapid bit you wrote, every time. Then some jackass makes fun of you.

it is the most authoritative work yet written on the full sweep of Vietnamese history.

As their ethnographer I see Keith as the historian of Viet Nam in English, French, and Vietnamese with the skills to work with documents, the training to think, and the liberty to teach and write who has addressed his topic at his scope from his point of view. On any particular point of fact he isn’t any more reliable than his peers I would bother to read. Reliable isn’t a value in opinion. As to authority, that is not a value in scholarship and science. What the Vietnamese call fighting over the cock’s head. What the anti-colonialists said the learned did rather than study and teach. Feh.

In these pages, stories from this past - whether of cannibals or kings, eunuchs or slaves, queen regents or revolutionaries - are woven into a rich historical account of the Vietnamese past.

There we go.

A magisterial achievement.

I’m in love. He transformed masterpiece. That would be Keith’s first book, The Birth of Viet Nam, the piece that established him as a master who could run a shop with journeymen and apprentices. Magisterial instead evokes a judge and a wizard. Right on.

Shawn McHale, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University

Shawn was a year ahead of me at our national high school. Both of our dads were men of the people. His rose through Southeast Asia Studies, mine through fighting government and those born rich. Shawn is one of the people who has stood at a lectern to teach with honesty and rigor the history of Viet Nam. For me it has been our species worldwide since the appearance of our genus. Shawn studied that undergraduate while I have studied such as him at work, amateurs of each other’s profession.

“Elegant, erudite, and stunningly comprehensive,

Yup.

A History of the Vietnamese is, by a wide margin, the finest general survey of Vietnamese history ever produced in any language.”

Peter Zinoman, Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

That is Peter in a nutshell. A sure eye for talent and confidence to defend it. Born the same year as my next younger brother, he introduced me to the work of Nguyen Huy Thiep, one of my junior uncles of the war, and Pham Thi Hoai, my age exactly.

He mined the prison memoirs of the Vietnamese Communists, our grandfathers, to tell their story. He has presented his own colonial Vu Trong Phung in English to the world.

Peter has put these literary accomplishments in the service of assertions of his taste as a general principle. Authority. Legitimacy. What the Vietnamese Communists enjoy and our side lost thank heavens. He has built a journal that has punched the tickets of those rising to teach our country about theirs.

Hats off. Not my kind of anti-colonialism. Pete grew up in the apparat of the United States of America across Southeast Asia. I am glad he is on our side.

Like Shawn, he is one of those who tells this past for a living. They both are students of Keith. I am a student of them all. I am touched by this display of right relations and completely agree with the senior and junior brothers about the junior uncle’s work.

Cover image is from untitled lacquer painting by Bui Mai Hien, photographed by Bui Hong. Cover designed by Hart McLeod Ltd.

This was the second Viet Nam letter of 3 so far concerning A History of the Vietnamese by K.W. Taylor. The first posted on March 30, 2023 then 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.

Note no publisher’s category