On Our Own Strength is a well-written, meticulously researched investigation into Vietnam's famous avant-garde writers collective. The Self-Reliant Literary Group, whose works remain classics in the Vietnamese literary canon, has long been misunderstood, and On Our Own Strength corrects the history. Founded in Hanoi in the early 1930s, the Self-Reliant Literary Group produced famous works of fiction, published newspapers, engaged in charitable activities, promoted fashion and art, and introduced a biting sense of humor to the Vietnamese public sphere. The group rose to prominence as Vietnam was experiencing a profound generation gap. In the early twentieth century, the end of the Confucian exams, changes in the writing system, and the imposition of the French education system meant that young Vietnamese of this generation viewed the world in a way that was dramatically different from their parents. A product of this generation gap, as well as a driver of it, the Self-Reliant Literary Group produced avant-garde literature and projects that challenged—and even mocked—their parents’ worldviews. As the “taste makers” of their generation, members of the group eschewed a purely Western vision of modernity; instead, they promoted a distinctly Vietnamese form of modernity. Martina Thucnhi Nguyen should be commended for both the breadth of the topic and the depth of her research. To study the Self-Reliant Literary Group is to master fiction literature, newspapers, politics, fashion, humor, the book industry, and architecture and city planning—and Nguyen successfully accomplishes this.

Though the group members engaged in charitable works and published widely on a variety of topics, their writings on politics and their social reform activities have been largely written out of the historiography; the group is remembered, for the most part, for fiction literature. On Our Own Strength is a much-needed new look at colonial-era Vietnamese politics. Nguyen finds that the Communist Party was largely responsible for downplaying the group's political role. After independence, many of the group's literary works were banned, and some members were killed in Communist Party reeducation camps. In her analysis of the Self-Reliant Literary Group's political agenda, Nguyen offers an alternative to the two-party binary of Vietnamese nationalism that dominates the historiography. Nguyen argues that the group promoted a form of cosmopolitan nationalism, which she defines as a “variant of French Republicanism born of the colonial experience” (p. 6), and a desire for Vietnam to join the international community. Though never explicitly anticolonial, Nguyen writes, the group worked to transform the masses’ worldview and prepare the people of Vietnam for their vision of a modern postcolonial society. Ideas put out by the group not only challenged those of the Communist Party, but also “primed the populace” to be open to later communist programs.

On Our Own Strength offers a fascinating analysis of late colonial politics and culture. While the most important contribution that this book makes to Vietnamese studies is to correct the history of Vietnamese nationalist politics, it also has important implications for how we understand the growth of materialism that famously beset the late colonial period. Assumed to be an inevitable by-product of the late colonial capitalist economy and the accompanying flood of Western goods and culture into Vietnam, materialism has historically been identified as the source of what were believed to be the major social problems in late colonial Vietnamese society, including moral depravity, loss of tradition, individualism, and shallowness. The rise of materialism was frequently used as an effective rhetorical foil in arguments by influential intellectuals criticizing capitalism and French rule.

This book, however, does not take the rise of materialism for granted as a by-product of capitalism or blind acceptance of Western influence. Instead, On Our Own Strength reveals another dimension of materialism. Nguyen argues that materialism was a deliberate strategy of the Self-Reliant Literary Group. Believing that “material changes can transform society and culture” (p. 28) to a modernist worldview and prepare consumers for future citizenry in a postcolonial state, the group used material objects to promote Vietnamese nationalism. Much like a marketing strategy, the group produced beautiful, well-made objects such as books, clothing, and houses to attract consumers to its modernizing agenda—an agenda that was very much about cosmopolitan Vietnamese nationalism. Even humorous cartoons printed in newspapers were part of an effort to transform readers’ worldview from within.

As products produced or promoted by the group were widely popular during the late colonial period, the group had tremendous influence on the everyday lives of the urban Vietnamese population, as well as much of the rural population. This new approach to understanding materialism has important implications for the cultural history of the colonial period, and it gives new meaning to the material culture and trends that were associated with the Self-Reliant Literary Group.

Nguyen should be commended for this excellent study of the Self-Reliant Literary Group, whose popularity and influence transcend both medium and time. This book is not only a corrective to the political history, but it is the beginning of a new way to approach late colonial Vietnamese cultural history. This book also calls for new interpretations of other aspects of the Self-Reliant Literary Group, specifically group members’ literature on family structure and women's role in society. With its accessible prose, On Our Own Strength will be a hit in graduate and undergraduate classes on Vietnamese history and literature.