Developed from a 2016 conference at the University of California, this book is the product of a unique, creative academic venture to fill in one long-standing hole in the Anglophone historiography of modern Vietnam, and that is the relative absence of studies detailing civil society in the south, especially in Saigon. While bookshops in ‘Little Saigons’ from Westminster to Melbourne and Paris from the 1980s onwards have featured all manner of memoirs, stories and video documentaries recalling the ancien régime, only a trickle of this material reached university libraries, graduate courses or the study carrels of graduate students. Academic researchers in modern Vietnamese Studies were, until the last decade, mostly preoccupied with colonialism and postcolonialism, the revolutionary (communist) experience or some facet of the (American) war. Diplomatic historians since 2010 have published various new histories of the Republic of Vietnam, focusing most attention on political and military leaders; but only in the last four or five years have new studies come out exploring other aspects of life in Saigon. This interest in southern Vietnamese life is stoked in part by a new generation of academics, especially descendants of the Vietnamese exodus; but it is also in part a response to Vietnamese interests in Vietnam. Vietnam's economy has grown rapidly since 2010, and a quickly expanding middle class has fairly easy access to diasporic literature, film, television and even histories. Overseas Vietnamese artists and other public figures routinely travel to Vietnam and, within fairly narrow public limits dictated by the Communist Party, can engage local audiences in performances and talks.
This volume is a timely response to this trend, as the editors have worked with a wide range of individuals with unique perspectives on life in the south before 1975. The result is a highly varied collection of personal memoirs and recollections that is invaluable as a sourcebook for students interested in a broader understanding of an ‘alternative Vietnam’ that briefly was before the war ended and Saigon collapsed. There is a thin but very useful historical veneer of interpretation of these stories and of the history of the RVN. The editors lead with a concise historical timeline of the RVN, and they highlight the central argument undergirding the collection, that the RVN was far more than a puppet regime of the United States and that South Vietnamese people were engaged in realising their own ideas of postcolonial nationalism that were cosmopolitan, modern and original. From there, the successive chapters feature short, and highly varied responses from individuals who played prominent roles in pre-1975 but who are not, for the most part, historians or writers. The volume that results lacks any continuous, narrative thread, but is a gold mine for students and researchers looking to better understand everyday life in the Saigon of, say, 1958 or 1973.
Most chapters present fascinating highlights of public life from all manner of perspectives. Nguyễn Dức Cường, a former Minister of Finance and Trade, notes the incredibly fragile situation of the country in 1973 when a communist attack on the oil fields at Nhà Bè coincided with the OPEC Oil Crisis, forcing a 50 per cent cut in South Vietnam's oil reserves while prices quadrupled. Dức points readers to a fascinating, completely understudied subject, the history of energy and fossil fuel use in Vietnam (p. 21). Two chapters by former finance ministers highlight the central role that currency exchanges, inflation and credit played in the relative strength of South Vietnam's rural economy and, with runs on the banks in 1974, its collapse. A former agriculture minister, Cao Văn Thân, reflects on the creative and active roles that Vietnamese scientists, farmers and politicians made in bringing ‘miracle rice’ to the Mekong Delta; while a private secretary to President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu provides a highly detailed account of a rarely discussed yet pivotal meeting on Midway Island in 1969 between South Vietnamese and American negotiators including Henry Kissinger (p. 61). South Vietnamese perspectives on these negotiations are rare, almost nonexistent in English works.
While several chapters offer similarly nuanced perspectives on well-covered topics such as policing and ARVN soldiering, I was most taken with the accounts of educators, journalists, an actress and the writer Nhã Ca. Not only do these chapters capture fascinating perspectives of artists but also they prominently feature women who played leading roles in these fields. Much of the English-language scholarship on Vietnam examines women's experiences either in connection to the war, as victims or combatants, or else either in relationship to colonialism or as either victims or participants in the sex trade or human trafficking. Recent studies on women's roles in local markets or as leaders in rural communities offer fascinating, new approaches. Võ Kim Sơn describes her struggles with her male colleagues to gain support for recruiting more women in science education, and she identifies key advances in public education as a leader in establishing a community college system. Then there are the writers Trùng Dương and Nhã Ca. Both were among the most widely read authors of short stories and novels before 1975; and their works have attracted a wide following not only in the diaspora but also among a new generation in Vietnam. Trùng Dương relates the trials of running a newspaper, Tsunami, in the last years of the Republic (1970–74). Here we see a female writer and editor navigating conflicts between writers and editors who sought to advance freedom of the press and government offices and leaders who used the courts and martial law to curtail it. Both Trùng Dương and fellow writer Nhã Ca experienced the trauma of war—Nhã Ca was trapped in Huế during the 1968 Tết Offensive—and also on the trials of postwar imprisonment and ‘reeducation’ (cải tạo). Finally, actress Kiều Chinh's recollections of the birth of Vietnamese cinema from 1954 highlights a flourishing industry and ends with a poignant image, of full cinemas in Saigon in the spring of 1975, even in the final months before the city's fall. More importantly, the movies people went to see were Vietnamese (not Western) movies.
The Republic of Vietnam delivers on its promise to render a more nuanced, variegated picture of life in Saigon before 1975. The contributors are for the most part not historians, and many are quite candid in expressing their opinions rather than forming academic arguments. There are few claims to general views about the inherent weaknesses or strengths of nation building in South Vietnam, except to validate its public life and push back against decades of communist historiography and erasure. It is an invaluable sourcebook for courses on modern Vietnam and the Vietnam War; the relatively short, individual memoirs are highly accessible for students. Rather than closing up long-deficient arguments, The Republic of Vietnam demonstrates just how many openings and alternative realities of ‘being Vietnamese’ coexisted within this history of nation building.
