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Indochina Now and Then
Indochina
Now and Then
George Fetherling
Dedication
À la mémoire de Dale Singer Fetherling, 1941–2011
— ONE OF THE THIRTY-SIX STREETS —
Every now and then, whenever I have accumulated sufficient airline points, I go to Southeast Asia, for though it is changing so rapidly as to make one dizzy, it is also a place where the past is never hard to find. On two of these trips, I had it in mind to see what remained of French influence and culture in France’s three former colonies in the region: Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The objective seemed most obtainable on one of the journeys when I was travelling with my friend M, who speaks French with complete ease and fluency and no discernible English accent. We had a wonderful long stay there, traipsing about by foot, car, subway, rail, cyclo, longtail boat, and, in one brief instance, elephant. But despite all our persistent and sometimes ingenious field research, we found little evidence of what Vietnamese call “the French Time” or at least none that was extraordinary or even surprising. The nadir of our hopeful expectation came when M discovered that the corporate head office of Peugeot Auto (Asie) Ltée, or whatever it’s called, seemed to shelter no one who has even as little of the French language as I do.
On another trip I will also recall in these pages, one undertaken a few years later when I happened to be travelling alone, I had a strange little low-level epiphany. I was in a building in Hanoi, in the area of Old Quarter called the Thirty-Six Streets (because in earlier times each one was home to a particular type of shop). Some of the buildings are quite old indeed, though dating them precisely is difficult, as until fairly recently architectural styles changed very slowly. What the structure I was in may once have been, I didn’t know. At the moment, it was a bar. As time wore on, I found myself alone in the gents’ loo with another foreigner: an American, I thought at once, and one who was looking a bit grizzled and unshaven. I was about to wash my hands at one of two adjoining basins; he was bending over the other one to splash water on his face. The spigots were ancient. He turned on the one marked C and muttered a foul Midwestern oath. He had expected cold water to come out.
The lesson was that only a few traces of the French imperial mission survived the destruction of a French army in 1954 at the remote town of Dien Bien Phu in the far northwest of Vietnam, near the Lao border: a defeat that opened the way for the U.S. misadventure in Vietnam the following decade. But now the latter war too is much less a fact of living memory than it is a subject for patriotic schoolroom recitation. This change speaks to the high birth rate in Asia and the low one in the West. But of course it also speaks to the very nature of time itself.
— LANDS OF CHARM AND CRUELTY —
In a period that still seems to me not all that long ago, it was possible to find early postcards from Southeast Asia in the booksellers’ stalls along the Seine in Paris. They usually cost only a few francs (there were no euros in those days). The photos on them were interesting, because, without quite meaning to do so, they revealed a great deal about the indigenous cultures in that part of the world and their struggles with European colonialism. In Amsterdam, I suppose, a person as determined as I used to be could have found picture postcards that Dutch businessmen and administrators had sent back home from what’s now Indonesia. Portobello Road and many other places in London must have hidden British ones that their authors had posted from various places in the empire. Having come of age during the Vietnam War — which, to avoid confusion, I will hereafter refer to as the American War, the way the Vietnamese do — I was interested in those that came from Indochina.
Even the term Indochina is not without confusion. Until recent decades, Indochina was also known as Farther India. Both names referred to the peninsular part of southeastern Asia, the territory east of India and south of China: Burma, Thailand (formerly Siam), Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia (formerly Malaya). These were places that for great stretches of history had not only fought one another almost constantly, but were subject to the cultures of both India and China. Religion naturally occasioned much strife in this region, one which Stan Sesson, an American journalist a hundred years later, perfectly named “the lands of charm and cruelty.” Eventually of course, Hinduism waned in these areas while Buddhism ascended and Islam became the religion of Malaysia and a strong presence in certain other regions.
The era of European colonialism brought the British. They wanted to expand their control of India eastward, across Indochina, until they reached China proper, and then find ways of moving northward into that vast market. The French had a similar goal, but a different strategy. They wished to get a toehold in Cochinchina, the southernmost portion of the three kingdoms of what’s now Vietnam, where the Mekong finally empties into the South China Sea after a journey of five thousand kilometres from the Tibetan Plateau. They reasoned that if they controlled its mouth, they could follow the river straight up through Cambodia and Laos into southern China. When France captured Saigon in 1862, it believed it had the makings of great new entrepôt, a new Shanghai, as many said, that would allow them to dominate the Mekong and make it a commercial artery rivalling the Yangzi in importance. In 1863, they signed a treaty that gave Cambodia the status of a French protectorate. Three years later, a major scientific and commercial expedition was dispatched under Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier. Their report, published in 1873 as Voyage d’exploration en Indo-Chine, created a sensation in Paris, as it contained the first detailed study of the great “lost” city of Angkor. But their harrowing journey through territory virtually unknown to the West also resulted in the discovery of the Khong Falls on the Cambodia-Laos border, which made steam navigation all the way to China impossible. French plans then shifted to constructing a railway once they had acquired the middle and northern kingdoms of Vietnam: Annam, whose capital was Hué, and Tonkin, whose capital was Hanoi. The plan was never entirely successful, whereas today, the People’s Republic of China is building a high-speed rail system that will run from Kunming, in Yunnan Province, all the way down to Singapore.
France was demoralized at the time by its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and hoped to find solace, and much-needed revenues, in a new wave of colonial acquisition. The problem was the Thais, who controlled much of Laos. This obstacle wasn’t resolved until 1893 when another treaty gave France the land on the east side of the Mekong, while the Thais retained that on the west. Just as in the British Empire, there are colonies and then there are colonies: a heavily stratified system based on the amount of local political autonomy. A territory, a protectorate, a colony, and other fine distinctions — they all meant different things. French Indochina (Indochine française — the term did not become official until 1897) was never technically a part of France itself, as Algeria was. It was a ragged collection of little states, gathered by dubious means. France pledged to hold them together for commercial and political purposes, but was also forced to keep them separate and on unequal footing so as to prevent them from joining forces in an uprising.
The reason why Vietnam is such an easy place for Westerners to explore is that the French approved and accelerated the process by which the Roman alphabet supplanted Chinese characters there, a transition that also underscored the separateness of Vietnam from neighbouring Cambodia and Laos. The tactic recalls how, in the days of the African slave trade, whites would often bring together slaves of different linguistic groups, hoping in that way to minimize talk of revolt. Cambodia and Laos have their own scripts derived from Sanskrit and Pali. Both are especially difficult for Westerners to master, however beautiful they may be to look at. (The Khmer script of Cambodia enjoyed somewhat of a vogue in the West when Angelina Jolie had a sample of it tattooed on her lower back.)