A Broad With A Book: The Mystery of Vietnam

It is low season and Vietnam is packed. My Japanese picture-spoilers from Cambodia made the jump here too, together with a quarter of the population of China and practically all of Australia. Everywhere you go, camera bearing crowds surround you, yet the locals insist that this is nothing. Same goes for the heat. Any water we consume finds an immediate way out through the forehead, down the nose, dripping from the ear lobe, and running from armpit to waist, from breast to belly, from inner thigh to the ground, giving the impression that we are carrying our own rain cloud. But the guide assures us that next month it will get "crazy hot." Really?

Vietnam is a nation of welcoming beautiful people. They are happy that we are here. They want more of us. And apparently we are listening, because we keep coming. One would expect, however, that they might welcome the world, but only tolerate Americans. One would be wrong.

After the many years of war, the heavy casualties, and the enduring effects, the Vietnamese welcome Americans with open arms, a big smile, and with English as their second language. Not French, the language of their prior colonial invaders. Not Russian, of their communist friends. Not Chinese, of their active neighbors in trade of past and present days. Nopes. Every uniformed school kid can't way to say "hello, were are you from?" and if you answer USA, they've hit the jackpot and hellos multiply from all their friends; every young person mumbles a few basic words of English; and everyone immediately translates their crazy currency to dollars so that you (whether you are American or Chinese) can understand how much the several thousand Dong they've quoted you will deplete your budget.

Something important is missing for me, and that's the written word. Yes, there are thousands of American written novels about Vietnam, from our point of view, of course. And yes, we continue to write them even when other wars would seem to take precedence. In Vietnamese bookstores, however, you find only relatively few titles on the war, half of which are dedicated to the cult of Ho Chi Mihn, the two classics of the area (Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Graham Greene's The Quiet American) and miscellaneous contemporary fiction that has nothing to do with Vietnam. When looking in Hanoi bookstores, I only found two authors that may remotely fit the bill, a Vu Trong Phung, author of a colonial era book rediscovered in the last five years, Dumb Luck, and a new author, Thuan, who has published two books, both in French, both not yet translated to English, and both involving Vietnamese in France.

But of the contemporary fictional narrative that brings a country to life way better than any travel guide can, there is nothing. The country is busy getting itself up and rushing towards prosperity. Everyone is out on their motorbikes at all hours of day or night. Perhaps there isn't time to write. Perhaps there is, but it has yet to be translated. This country doesn't have a 'farang' in love with it to make it come alive with (of all things) murder mysteries like John Burdett does to Thailand, Colin Cotterill to Laos, and others to Cambodia. Why not? Perhaps it's time this mystery also gets solved. After all, and as much as it continues to keep an interesting balance between past and future, Vietnam doesn't seem to seriously miss anything else.