Word: saigon
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...almost everyone else. Nineteen years after the fall of Saigon, it is not easy to persuade readers anywhere in the world to revisit the Vietnam War. That was the problem British literary agent Gill Coleridge faced when she tried to sell the rights to Ninh's Sorrow of War to American publishers in & 1992. "They all turned it down," says Coleridge. "I remember one said, 'We don't want to be told how badly we behaved in Vietnam...
...similarities. Both writer and character are decorated soldiers in the NVA's 27th Youth Brigade. Each is among the unit's 500 conscripts who enter the war in the bloody Central Highlands -- and one of only nine survivors by the time the unit becomes the first to march into Saigon in 1975. After he was demobilized in 1976, Ninh tried university for a while and then quit to live as Kien does, "like a wanderer, jobless" for years. Says Ninh: "My war experience always haunted me and asked me to write it down. I can't remember...
...region as a counterweight to China. The profit motive drives America's wish for relations with Vietnam. Anyone susceptible to the sentimental image of the U.S. and Vietnam as lion and lamb lying down together can be cured by a visit to the war museum in Saigon, where the propaganda about American atrocities is ham-handed and offensive, and where G.I. gear is sold at souvenir stands. A great deal of history stands between the U.S. and Vietnam, as between the U.S. and China. Ideology stands between us too. Communism is dead in both China and Vietnam, but authoritarianism thrives...
When we see free-market economics at work in the North and South of Vietnam, we are entitled to feel, instead of futility, a certain sense of vindication. There are reliable people in Saigon who will say (not too loudly, certainly not for attribution) that if a plebiscite were held today, the South would choose independence from the North. This is not because people in the South oppose union; in fact, they favor it. They would choose independence because they despise their oppressive form of government. We fought to help them avoid this predicament. There were many good reasons...
...Palm Sunday, and outside the cathedral in Saigon a girl of nine or 10 was selling postcards. These children with their souvenir postcards are everywhere now in the South, tugging at sleeves, beseeching with practiced but adorable smiles, the authorities having become gradually reconciled to such small-scale enterprise. On this particular Sunday, this particular young capitalist was particularly beguiling, and had an advantage: her customer was at loose ends, having missed Palm Sunday services. The cathedral would not open again for hours. At the end of protracted negotiations, she got her asking price, one U.S. dollar, for a package...