Vietnam: A New History (iv)

from Christopher Goscha and Vietnamese studies

I have seen Christopher Goscha speak on his own particular work and as well to introduce other specialists of our common interests. I have never heard him lecture on the national history of Viet Nam as a professor, 2 or 3 lectures a week for about 15 weeks, a university semester.

I wonder if he ever heard anyone else do that. I sure haven’t. The Vietnamese past is something we 2 learned in bookstores and cafes, libraries and seminars, on the streets of Ha Noi and Paris, on Tran Hung Dao and Jules Ferry.

I knew Chris at the turn of the century in Paris, an attic of the Indochinese past, where antiquarians and connoisseurs like ourselves have passed books and ideas around over 2 hundred years. Now he has written up his readings such that that you may read them, a first course in Viet Nam. It is as if Richard Feynman demonstrated freshman physics, soup to nuts, to first-year engineers at Cal Tech.

Richard did do that. His fellow laureates came to watch because you don’t often get a first-rate mind indoctrinating the newbies by telling them what we understand clearly and only that, without arm-waving or narrative leaps, without assuming your conclusions so they may write them down and take a test.

I wonder if the author has given such a lecture course up in Montreal. At moments I think I am reading the English of a native speaker of French terminally educated in that language. Since Chris comes from Kansas these odd Gallic stumbles, always literate, betray the author’s qualities as a field man.

He went native among the savants, même les grands même les idiôts, a long time ago. He has acquired the local knowledge, the metis of the Viet Nam hands. For instance who first came up with the place name Cochinchina and what region did they mean by that, and who else has used it to mean where?

Chris lays that out for the world to read. What was Indochine when? Which among Annam, Cochinchine, and Tonkin was a colony and which were protectorates when? Who built Saigon and Hai Phong and who paid for them? Do those seem to you picayune details easily found online?

Then you do really need to read this book about the contest among realms for a nation and its peoples. Altered States, the chapter in the middle photo, concerns the second half of the 19C, as France disrupted and suborned the Nguyen dynasty. Nobody else has written it up as lucidly as may be and no more. Bon voyage.

This was the fourth Viet Nam letter of 6 so far addressing Vietnam: A New History by Christopher Goscha. The first went out April 16, 2022, the second on May 18, 2022, and the third on June 20, 2022.

Then the fifth posted on October 17, 2022 and the sixth on November 27, 2022.

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.