Le communisme vietnamien (i)

From political scientist Céline Marangé of Langues O'

I went to fetch Huynh Kim Khanh who fell dead on the paths at Cornell University years ago. You too may visit his Vietnamese Communism 1925-1945 at hundreds of libraries around the world. The author died the year before I starting using Vietnamese language at his university,

but I have introduced him often. If you want to deal with those people you should know who they are, I have said time and again. So I journeyed to my library to fetch his work to write up here for you all. I pushed in the book on either side

and pulled Khanh out spine first. When I touch a book I touch at least one person. I didn’t feel someone there. I heard rather the chatter of authors I don’t enjoy, say George McTurnan Kahin. Reading George for me feels like chewing glass.

We venerate Kahin with a shrine at Cornell because he was one of the few members of the establishment of the United States of America who could point to Southeast Asia let alone either Viet Nam on a map. He took valuable time from his money work on Indonesia to correct our foreign policy with those two nations.

But he remained apparat, a stuffed shirt, a suit. That was his good side. Huynh Sanh Thong told me that Khanh, his best friend, dropped dead from the strain of getting along with such white men, gazing at Vietnamese as objects of research. Thank god, the brass never have needed me.

Who did I meet standing there next to the dead friend of my dead friend but Céline Marangé. Hard to miss. Black and red and 2 inches thick if you round up from 4 places on my digital micrometer, a solid 5 centimètres by my rule.

See how my camera lens went all Escher representing the back and front covers together in one plane? Not only thick but heavy in the hand. Where have I hefted a book and author like this before?

Dominique Niollet and his L'épopée des douaniers en Indochine: 1874-1954. At one of Christopher Goscha’s seminars in Paris, 1999-2000. Dominique was a healthy specimen and his book is about 100 pages more than Céline. Dominique wrote as a customs man, a douanier,

telling the history of his service as long and detailed as it took. Everyone at Chris’ seminars had book like that in or out of them, as did the friend of my host Michel Fournier at Langues Orientales who presented his thesis to our class. I recall the thump of one volume after another of argument and evidence landing on the table.

The weight of these books of Paris, the city that is a university, a cradle and mass grave of revolution, is intellect and love as well as wood pulp. Céline’s is red and black. Red and gold would be the colors of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Red and black are the rich blood of armed struggle and its stain.

Yup, there is Chris, right above my middle finger in the photo. That whole section of thanks expresses feelings in relationships. There is money in there, and rank, to be sure, as where is there not in the world of politics, of power, of scholarship.

But this book is felt in five languages, and decades of friendship. I can feel it in my hand.

Well that is enough for now. I will be reading from Céline’s work to you again and again for a long time. Oh, right. Rights. See below.

The publisher wants to apply French law which they say means I need permission to reproduce pages from the book. Attention, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques!

We in Vietnamese studies do not ask permission for critique whether in Paris or here in the jurisdiction of the United States of America.

What are you, VC?