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Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950

2001; Oxford University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2700496

1945-2314

Andrew J. Rotter, Mark Philip Bradley,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

This book is a rare and wonderful thing: a study of United States–Vietnam relations that says new things in new ways. Mark Philip Bradley focuses on the development of American and Vietnamese perceptions of each other from the end of the Great War to the beginning of U.S. aid for the Frenchbacked Bao Dai government in Vietnam and concludes with a brief look at the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam in 1995. Here is what Americans thoug ht of the Vietnamese: they were backward, lazy (the tropical heat was “too fatiguing for revolutionary feelings,” one scholar wrote in 1927), dishonest, and cowardly. No such people were capable of selfgovernment. Here is what the Vietnamese thought of Americans: they were heroic in their revolutionary past and idealistic in their faith in democracy but also materialistic, at the expense of moral values that ought to reside at the core of any proper society. Such people could be of help in the anticolonial struggle. Or, they might abandon principle in their quest for less exalted goals—and that, of course, is how it turned out.