Book Review

The Mekong:

Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future

by Milton Osborne

The first time I ever saw the Mekong River was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. After visiting the National Palace, I stood on its banks, looking across to the other side. A couple days later, while taking a bus to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I went across the Mekong by ferry. After traveling up the east coast of Vietnam to Hue, I crossed over into Laos and again stood on the bank of the Mekong in Savannakhet. My travels took me up to Vientiane where I ate river fish and som tam on the north shore and then took another bus north to Luang Prabang. One evening, I climbed down into the river valley after dinner. As the sun set on the Mekong there, the whole valley filled with an intensely golden light which was like no sunset I had ever seen before. It was the golden color of those stupas all over Southeast Asia, but brighter and more vibrant. I later went back down south and crossed the Friendship Bridge spanning the Mekong, arriving in Nong Khai, Thailand. Over the years, I would have more encounters with this legendary river.

Milton Osborne’s The Mekong: Turbulent Past Uncertain Future is significantly less exciting than any travel adventures I have had in that region. The history presented here is interesting enough, but it gets a light treatment without too many details.

The Mekong begins in the mountains of Tibet, flows south through Yunnan Province in China, cuts through a corner of Myanmar, drops further south through Laos, forming the border along the northern and eastern edges of Thailand. From there it turns inland again into Laos, enters Cambodia, and flows towards the delta in Vietnam where it merges into the South China Sea. Osborne’s historical narrative begins with the Khmer Angkor Kingdom, mostly known now for its iconic Angkor Wat. Portuguese explorers arrived and the Spanish followed. Those colonial powers did not conquer the Khmers or the Annamese, but they did have a significant impact on their affairs. The colonialists left for a long time and the Siamese conquered the Khmers and Laos while the Chinese invaded Vietnam. When the French colonialists showed up, they were welcomes as liberators since they freed those people from the tyranny of the Siamese and the Chinese. The honeymoon period didn’t last though and the French colonialists turned out to be just as severe. Even worse, they exploited the land for raw materials in far more damaging ways than the other Asian conquerors had.

In the heart of this colonial atrocity, there is an interesting adventure story. A group of explorers had a vision of using the Mekong for transport with the intention of moving commercial goods between China and the Mekong Delta where ships could transport them over to Europe. Their intentions may have been less than noble, but they were the first people to map the Mekong River and the story of their explorations is an adventure that rivals the best travel narratives. This really is the best part of the book.

From there, Osborne writes about the French – Indochina War and the end of colonial rule, the American invasion of Vietnam, and the future of the river. This last section deals mostly with environmental concerns largely in relation to China’s ambition to build dams on the Mekong. This has caused controversy with the countries further downstream.

The writing in this book is simple and clear. The first half covering the pre-modern and colonial periods are the best. Osborne does not give highly detailed accounts of events and it is all too obvious that a lot more could have been written. Osborne acknowledges that colonialism was a gross injustice, but he doesn’t dwell on the atrocities to any great extent. He isn’t dismissing this ugly side of Southeast Asian history so much as minimizing it for the sake of brevity and accessibility. This might bother some readers. Another major omission from this book is that almost nothing is said about the kingdom of Siam or the modern nation of Thailand, a significant portion of which is on the southern and western shores of the Mekong. A lot of what is included also happens in the Cambodian areas adjacent to the Mekong, mostly the plain of Angkor and the Tonle Sap tributary river which not directly on the titular body of water.

The Mekong is an interesting read, but it has its limitations. It is, so far, the only book that I know of that treats the entire river as a subject of history. It’s the kind of book that makes good casual reading if you stumble across a copy somewhere, but it isn’t something I would recommend hunting down. Most of what Milton Osborne writes about can be found in other sources that go further in depth. The target audience for this book is probably the handful of intelligent travelers and expats who are interested in more than beach parties and prostitutes. But if you’ve been to the Mekong, it might be a good book to enhance the memories you have. Personally, I have no desire to remember the persistently annoying mosquitoes, but I am more than happy to remember eating those fish that can be bought in the restaurants along the shore. The Laos and Isan Thai people stuff those freshwater fish full of lemongrass and garlic, pack them in salt for a week, then grill them. You eat it with green chili seafood sauce, sticky rice, and papaya salad. Wash it down with a Beer Chang and have a great night with the Asian friends you will inevitably make while in this most gregarious part of the world.

 

Book Reviews

An Eye For the Dragon:

Southeast Asia Observed 1954-1970

by Dennis Bloodworth

A book like Dennis Bloodworth’s An Eye For the Dragon would never come to print by a big name publishing house in today’s cultural climate. I’m no supporter of censorship, but I do believe there is such a thing as common courtesy. That is something Bloodworth lacks in writing about Southeast Asia from the end of World War II to 1970.

The book immediately gets off to a bad start in the introduction. The author’s stated intention is to explain what Southeast Asia is really like for people who have never been there. Maybe I am not the best audience for his writing since I have lived in both Indonesia and Thailand and also taught at the University of Wuhan in China. (Yes, it is THAT Wuhan, the one that brought coronavirus into the world in 2020.) I do have some knowledge of the region. But Bloodworth starts out by launching into an explanation of what durian is as if no other writer has ever done so before. OK, I get that not everyone has been to Asia so despite the patronizing tone, I move on to the first chapter. It all goes downhill from there to the middle of the book.

The first half is a long list of everything the author doesn’t like about Southeast Asia. He starts off by complaining about the corruption, the politics, the low education levels, the lack of intellect, the dishonesty, and a whole bunch of other things that are inherently negative. The most insulting thing he says is, and I paraphrase, that America wasn’t being sensible for trying to promote democracy in Vietnam because there aren’t any adequate materials to work with. In other words, he thinks Vietnamese people aren’t intelligent enough. Judging by the current state of American politics, I’m not so sure American or Brits are intelligent enough for democracy either, but that’s another matter. This comes from a chapter in which he visits a small village in the north of Malaysia on the island of Borneo where the Dyaks are being instructed to stuff ballot boxes in an election. He comments that they don’t even know what country they live in. Alright, I know that it sometimes isn’t fair to judge people in times past by today’s standards, but this kind of comment is racist and insensitive even by the lower standards of the 1970s. And the fact that these problems certainly do exist in Southeast Asia is undercut by his haughty attitude and inability or unwillingness to address any of these issues in depth.

The writing style is not too impressive either. Bloodworth addresses the reader the way an adult might speak to a five year old. Each of the earlier chapters addresses some issue like crime or education that Bloodworth doesn’t approve of. He starts off writing about one country, say the Philippines and then transitions into sentences about other countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and so on. Sometimes he brings cities or regions into the writing without even saying what country they are in. Even paragraphs can begin in one place and end in another for no good literary reason. If you’re going to author a book that is full of insults to people of other countries, the least you can do is learn how to write properly first. If you want to put people down for being stupid and you can’t even write effectively than you only make yourself look like the idiot. Besides, there is a difference between listing and writing and Dennis Bloodworth doesn’t write.

The tone starts to change about halfway through in the chapter about Southeast Asian women. At first he complements them for being smart, practical, shrewd, and even the intellectual equals of Asian men. Given that the author spent the first half of the book making derogatory comments about Asian men, I’m not sure how seriously to take his claims. But then he really blows it when writing about going to do some interviews and being given the services of prostitutes as gifts by the people who take escort him. At that point I almost gave up reading this piece of crap.

But the second half of the book is a big improvement. Bloodworth takes a less insulting approach to writing about politics and the writing is actually a lot better too. In one chapter he writes about King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. He doesn’t say much about Sihanouk, but at least it reads like a slightly more serious attempt at actually writing about something rather than complaining. Some of the more interesting parts give details of the awkward visits made by Khrushchev and other Soviets to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This is of interest because I have never found an account like this in any other history book. He also makes the valid point, one that other authors have made as well, that the North Vietnamese were more concerned with nationalism than with communism and that many nationalists joined the North Vietnamese Communist Party because they wanted self-determination more than anything else. The communists were just a convenient tool for them. He also makes a good point by saying that America was pushing the Vietnamese people into the arms of the communists by supporting the unpopular South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem and the other thugs and tyrants who took over after his assassination.

By far the best part of this book comes at the end when Bloodworth does a fair analysis of the politics of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. He gives some good character sketches of Tengku Abdel Rahman, Sukarno, and Lee Kwan Yew. Tengku Abdel Rahman seies the provinces of Sarawak and Sabah on Borneo then expells Singapore from Malaysia to prevent a Chinese majority in his racist, Islamic-centric nation. Meanwhile, Sukarno tries to launch an invasion of Sarawak and Sabah, claiming them to be Indonesian territories and Lee Kwan Yew becomes the autocratic leader of Singapore.

By the end of the book, Bloodworth presents himself in a slightly more respectable manner. And then he has to go and blow it again. It all ends on a rotten note as he writes about how terrible Southeast Asian people sound when they speak English. He even sinks low enough to make fun of his Chinese wife’s pronunciation.

I hesitate to say that An Eye For the Dragon might be worth reading. The second half is an accessible account of the politics of the 1960s. Other than that, this is a crude and condescending work of yellow journalism written by a pompous asshole who thinks he shits ice cream. By “yellow journalism” I don’t mean the now pejorative label of “yellow” as a descriptor for Asian people; I mean “yellow” in the sense of the kind of journalism popularized by the Hearst corporation that is sensational and written with the intent of insulting the subjects of the writing without any attempt at neutrality. Southeast Asia has its share of problems. A lot of them are the direct results of colonialism. In the time I spent in Asia I encountered a lot of people who live the best lives they can given their circumstances and many of them are making an effort to improve their societies along the way. They don’t deserve to be beaten down by snooty British writers like Dennis Bloodworth who still see the world through the eyes of British colonialists. The sun set on the British Empire a long time ago so get over it and grow up. Bloodworth also never lives up to his stated intention of explaining what life is like in Southeast Asia. Most of what he writes about is related to politicians and what he does say about ordinary Asian people is mostly offensive. He fails to realize his intention of writing this book. Unless you want to study how post-colonial British journalists write about people they see as inferior to them, this book isn’t good for much. There are far better ways to learn about this part of the world.

 

Rare Vintage Anthropology & Ethnography

The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand

(A Socio-Ethnographical Report)

by Oliver Gordon Young

Communications Media Division/Thai-American Audiovisual Services

oversize paperback

1961

Available for Purchase on Ebay here