Haydon Cherry's Down and Out in Saigon is a social and economic history of the poor in colonial Saigon during the 1904–40 period, examined through the lives of six individuals. It is also much more than a history of the poor. In asking the why and how of the evolution of the six lives toward temporary or long-term destitution, the layers of rich context that Cherry provides offer remarkably keen insights into the conditions of everyday life in Saigon and in the provinces the individuals hailed from (all were born outside Saigon, two abroad). Cherry skillfully analyzes the cases both synchronically—by revealing vividly portrayed slices of daily life, including the workings of colonial institutions—and diachronically—by examining change wrought through historical patterns and events such as rice export, urban development, migration trends, disease outbreaks, and the Great Depression. The social and economic historical approach is particularly valuable given the still-lopsided historiography of modern Vietnam with a concentration in political history. There are no comprehensive monographs on colonial Saigon, migration into Saigon, migration in colonial Vietnam broadly, or social history of colonial Vietnam.

The prologue begins with an anecdote about a vagrant about whom a Frenchman wrote a letter to the police, which sets the tone for the rest of the book. Noting that the archives of the colonial police seem to be lost, Cherry states that he selected his cases from the dossiers of which copies were sent to the colonial government. Here it would have been helpful to have reflections on producing social history of the poor from archives (Cherry cites works that discuss this topic in an endnote), especially sources that were the select ones that traveled away from the original archives. The first chapter treats the urban and economic history of Saigon and Chợ Lớn and ends with a discussion of the regional rice trade (a core theme of the book) that made Saigon prosperous and drew migrants.

The subjects of chapters 2–7 are, respectively, “a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an untreatable invalid, and a poor Frenchman” (p. 3), a group diverse in regard to gender, ethnicity, and nationality. The six lives are also framed as windows for examining specific topics. The degree to which each life story is fleshed out varies, as that depends on sources, yet each story is absorbing in its own right.

The story of the laborer Trần Dưỡng (chapter 3) is particularly riveting. Falsely accused of calumny, when ordered to be expelled back to China, he utilized the judicial system to try to exonerate himself. Félix Colonna d'Istria (chapter 7) left the most traces of his activities and opinions, as he briefly ran a newspaper. In contrast, the lives of the prostitute Lương Thị Lắm (chapter 2) and the invalid Trần Văn Chinh (chapter 6) are the most elusive. Chapter 2 treats the scarcity of work opportunities for women, institutions and laws pertinent to prostitution and venereal diseases. Much of chapter 6 is on diseases, such as smallpox, malaria, and cholera. Chapter 4, on the rickshaw puller Trần Văn Lang, reveals many twists—including an alias used—and much geographical (although not upward) mobility despite authorities’ restrictions on it.

Cherry's prose strikes a rare jarring note when he writes that upon return from France to Saigon, Aimée Lahaye (chapter 5) “promptly vanished.” This sounds as if she disappeared away from those who knew her. The next sentence, however, goes on: “There is no trace of her in the colonial archive for almost four years” (p. 128). So she only vanished from the perspectives of the archive and the author, not necessarily from the perspective of the authorities. The elusiveness of the two female subjects in the book seems to speak to the unevenness of archives when it comes to gender, something—and this is a minor criticism—that Cherry could have addressed directly. Patriarchy was a main cause of such unevenness. Family and friends could be interviewed about an arrested prostitute; for Lương Thị Lắm, her father was summoned, and there is no record of her own voice although she stayed for two hundred days at the dispensary (p. 48). On the other hand, the nuns of Saint Paul de Chartres, who did much charity work, were an active presence. In the nineteenth century, they refused to send back children when requested by their parents, and even abducted them away from parents when the children escaped from their orphanage (p. 112). The book is full of such fascinating details.

The epilogue draws from a lively portrayal of Saigon published in 1940 and concludes that the stories of the urban poor are not about “uniform misery or privation” and that their stories “testify to the ingenuity and individuality of the poor” (p. 178). The book also shows that for all six, all from marginal backgrounds, their lives could have taken turns for the better, and that blows such as the collapse of the rice-export trade, a bank failure, or illness—which they all suffered—could leave them with little recourse. Skills such as knowledge of French or the Romanized Vietnamese alphabet helped to an extent. Down and Out in Saigon is beautifully written and could be used in upper-division undergraduate classes; the refreshing absence of other scholars’ names from the main text also makes it accessible. It is an exemplary work of social and economic history, a remarkably nuanced, in-depth, and assured investigation into a rarely treated topic. It is sure to be the standard for a long time.