Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam (iii)

from sociologist Jonathan D. London and Vietnamese studies

Over the holidays in 1986 a friend who had been small in the same Quonset huts with me, 1959-60, brought a videocassette to my parents’ house of the seasonal favorite about a man who wants to kill himself. Our friend was broken up over my father’s death early that December resisting a disease swiftly fatal until this century.

It’s a heartwarming tale if you make it through. But first you must accompany the man to a bridge to jump off where instead an angel accompanies him to the grey world where he never lived at all, drained of all the small good he effected.

The banker George Bailey had mediated the erosion of human values by market forces and the hoovering up all relations by capital formation. It’s a Wonderful Life is a hymn like A Christmas Carol to liberalism, the force of imaginary relations against implacable realities.

George then decides not to kill himself. I too decided not to kill myself, daily, for years until one day this century I decided this was not in fact a sign of robust mental health. I should have known this. Sociology begins with Emile Durkheim on anomie,

about the modern individual who journeys away from the meaning of shared life and dies at his own hand in a lonely room. The doctoral thesis in anthropology I wrote alone with my coon hounds in a hayloft begins with Nhat Linh, a founder of modern Vietnamese literature who killed himself in a messy divorce from his nation.

What can I tell you. Blindness and insight. Tragedy followed in my case by comedy. I joined a new family, got some help, and it has been ages since I felt even the ghost pain of my amputated self. My psychiatrist is trying to fire me.

Now I get to see, in the final act rather than the second, what the world would be like without me. I failed again and again and again to bring what we call Viet Nam into view in English. That was itself the self-destruction,

trying to find my place when I do not belong in an institution. I gave up the world of Vietnamese studies and at last stopped deciding not to kill myself. That world is so much better off without me. Just look at it. After sorrow comes joy. What could be more natural?

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 4 so far addressed to The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam, edited by Jonathan D. London. The first went out on January 5, 2023 and the second on January 14, 2023.

The fourth, on April 14, 2023, was also the first of 1 so far on The Communist Party of Vietnam, also by Jonathan D. London.

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.