Familial Properties: Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463-1778 (ii)
from historian Nhung Tuyet Tran and Vietnamese studies
Look to the left. Verso.
"Southeast Asia"
Where?
Mainland: Burma, Thailand, Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia. Peninsular: Malaysia. Island: Indonesia, Philippines. Entrepot: Singapore. The petro-monarchy Brunei and irredentist East Timor.
Is Southeast Asia a strategic area of the United States or a region of its own? Oh, good. You are in the right place. All we talk about.
Not so much out in the nations that announced themselves with all deliberate speed after our victory over Japan. On the one hand peoples in those places have traded and travelled among each other as far back as we have seen,
centuries and millennia before anyone imagined even that we all were in the Pacific. On the other hand everyone joined the United Nations as a nation, not a region,
while here in what no one calls the North Western Hemisphere every one of us writing about any of those nations has taken money from our United States of America for Southeast Asia studies.
"Politics, Meaning, and Memory"
As I said, what we talk about. I have found three different lists of the series. All give more than 30 titles.
In no list do more than 1 or 2 titles name the region or more than 1 nation. We may all work in Southeast Asia studies but nearly all of us are specialists of 1 country.
So we read each other. That is how we become Southeast Asianists. We think everyone should do this. Someone, perhaps the acquisitions editor Pamela Kelley,
has written elsewhere that "Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory seeks to raise the visibility of Southeast Asa in scholarly circles and among general readers."
"David Chandler and Rita Smith Kipp
Series Editors"
David was a Foreign Service Officer in Phnom Penh before he wrote his Tragedy of Cambodian History, about a small nation contested between two regional powers, Thailand and Viet Nam, and their great power patrons.
I don't know Rita. She wrote a book on Indonesia, by leaps and bounds the nation we have spent the most money for the longest time studying. Now she serves as a provost, the official who carries a mace in a university procession.
Power. Southeast Asianists are familiar with power because we do not take breathing and swimming in it for granted. We struggle up a crowded stream as our subjects do.
Look right. Recto.
"Familial Properties"
Sounds great. We won't know at all what it means until we read the book.
"Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463-1778"
But here we see what author Nhung Tuyet Tran plans to tell us about. She notices "gender," that is, women, and men as men rather than the set of all human beings.
She notices "state," that is, an organization with functions and personnel, ambitions and limits. Not a necessary aspect of life you breathe without noticing.
"Society" too.
"Early modern." When? You mean like an Eames chair? No, modern has been new for a long time now. That is what an historian can do for you,
tell you how old things are then conjure how the moderns once were new. When? "1463-1778."
The contact period over on this side of what became over those years the Pacific. The years the United States became possible as did Viet Nam.
Can't wait.
This was the second Viet Nam letter of 7 so far addressed to Familial Properties: Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463-1778 by Nhung Tuyet Tran. The letter reads the title page.
The first letter judges the book by its cover, on March 30, 2022.
The third discusses Vietnamese women and Southeast Asia in light of the book’s introduction, on June 1, 2022.
The fourth is the first letter with the poem, “Like a female stork drudging by the banks of the river,” on July 18, 2022.
The fifth is the second letter to discuss epigraphy from steles women raised in the markets they built, on December 12, 2022.
The sixth is the third letter to show and the second to discuss “Like a female stork drudging by the banks of the river,” on December 15, 2022.
The seventh letter, on March 27, 2023, presents 2 more poems to make the point that the work of history is also an anthology.
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.
Promotional copy:
If you have enjoyed the peace of the United States with no civil war between democratic, industrial armies since 30 years before my grandparents were born
and no menace of invasion since 15 years before I was born, you also have supported under taxation Southeast Asia area studies. All my life we have paid for language teaching, research,
and the publication and teaching of that research, usually in the red and never at any profit. No other country has done anything like it ever. You may educate yourself without charge
about any of the nations of Southeast Asia at any public library of the United States better than you may in any of those countries or at any of their old imperial capitals.
My Viet Nam letters share that wealth. Here is the second of three written so far out of maybe a dozen total to come on 1 book by an American, Canadian, and Vietnamese colleague.
Read all about it. It's all we really want. When you teach one person to read, my mother's professor instructed her, that's it, you have paid off our investment and yours.
Just 1 of you reading just once about 1 of my books and authors of Viet Nam is worth my writing 1 of these things 3 times a week. If you sign up for free we will know you are out there.
We love that. If you would patronize all the readers at $50/year or subsidize the operation at $250/year we can keep the lights on and may one day ourselves publish our colleagues effectively.
We plan on individual contributions at that level because we want readers, who may or may not like anything I say. For instance, lately I am in the awkward position of writing about a good friend, an American and Vietnamese poet who has become a vocal anti-Semite.
The topic of Viet Nam is like that. Mad as hatters, some say of us. Crazier than a shithouse rat. I say that we are people and that is what people are like.
You take the good with the bad or you might start telling dreadful lies such as first involved me with the nation of Viet Nam, and drove so many of them over here.
My view is not the university one. So we don't get any of that good government money for Southeast Asia Studies. Never have. Never will. We couldn't afford it even if I did belong in an institution.
Grants costs $60 thousand/year just to break even on the paperwork. However, the war machine of the United States does allow you to deduct any gift to us from your income before tax to them, because we give you nothing in return are not already giving the whole world.