In The Quiet American,
Graham Greene’s classic, set in Saigon in the 50’s, an English older journalist
and a young American CIA operative fight for the love of a barely legal
Vietnamese girl, who happens to be extraordinarily beautify and practically
devoid of language. The young American wants to marry her before she speaks.
The old Brit, battling wife for a divorce, wonders if she has something to say,
or perhaps the problem is that they don’t really speak each other’s language… There is
also a manipulative older sister who wants our girl to go with the better
provider. Fast forward to today. You’ve heard it: white males on the prowl,
pimps and beautiful local girls (barely legal) who’d love you long time. Not
much has changed. This is reality.
In The Lover, the
Marguerite Duras’s classic, with clipped sentences and odd non-sequiturs, she
describes her real-life affair at fifteen with an older Chinese man in Saigon.
This was French Indochine, the 1930’s. The precocious young girl, born to a
colonial family (poor but white), discovers love, sex and her own allure with
an older man who also doesn’t belong (rich but Chinese). Fast forward to today,
browse through Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat,
Pray, Love and you have, more or less, the same theme. Foreign white girl
finds love somewhere in former colony, preferably with expat. Goals remain:
travel far, revel in the exotic, run into your neighbor (or someone who could
be), and marry him. This, by the way, is the fairytale. And in direct
contradiction with above male pursuits (good luck Elizabeth Gilbert’s
wannabes).
Obviously, people travel in all kinds of groupings. Couples
on honeymoons, mass adventure or retired excursion tours, not to mention the
backpackers (a class onto themselves). But as long as the reality and fairytale
of the two classics remain relevant to someone, these novels will endure. It
helps that they are very good reads.
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