Seeing Vietnam: Encounters of the Road and Heart by Susan Brownmiller (1994)

I recently visited Vietnam for my third-ever visit, this time mixing up my visit to Ho Chi Minh City with a short flight to the central coast near Danang and the site of the My Lai Massacre. It was an eye-opening experience for me—my best visit yet.

A companion to my trip was this travelogue published 3 decades earlier and covering some of the same ground as I was hoofing. Honestly, this wasn’t the best travelogue I’ve ever read, but it was the only Vietnam-focused book I had with me, and like all “older” books, I found a wealth of time-capsule information inside that helped me better understand the nation and people I was visiting.

Not a Writer I’d Read Very Often

Susan Brownmiller is likely not an author I’d otherwise rush to read. Especially when it comes to non-fiction works like this, I enjoy reading authors with whom I can at least moderately relate. I therefore always have a hard time reading personal non-fiction from female writers (and admittedly some fiction as well)—not because I’m a bigoted misogynist, but because I find it hard enough to get inside a writer’s head, and thus find doubly hard to get into a “female writer’s” head!

Beyond this, I also don’t think Brownmiller and I would agree on many political, social, or spiritual issues. After all, she admits it herself at one point: “There isn’t a grain of spirituality in my bones” (121).

All that being said, I found this book informative for a number of reasons. First and primary is that Brownmiller is one of the first tourists to visit Vietnam following its post-War opening. Because she had been a reporter responsible for editing out some of the grizzliest parts of war footage during the 1960s and ’70s, she’d become well jaded to the nation, its people, and the devastating effect the War had on our own American population. She was done with it—that is until the early ’90s rolled around and she suddenly found the opportunity to visit the nation herself as a tourist to see what might have changed.

This perspective of what’s essentially an Antagonistic reporter taking a tour of a nation she despises is both unique enough and engaging enough to keep a guy reading. Although I didn’t visit Hanoi on this trip (the northern city where she begins her own trip), I’ve been to the rest (like Danang, Hue, Saigon and the Delta), so it was familiar territory for me and enlightening.

A Few Notable Quotations

Brownmiller touches on aspects of culture and nature, history and the effects of war. Below are just a few of my favorite bits from her text:

Culture and Food:

The two basic ways a tourist absorbs a foreign culture are through buying and eating… Pressed for a cultural stereotype, I’d say that the Vietnamese are a nation of serious, sensual, and prideful eaters. (49)

Vietnamese Proverb:

Paradise is living in a French house, having a Japanese wife, and eating Chinese food.(Mr. Duy, 168)

The Effects of War: Prostitution, Infanticide, and Population Growth:

From various bits of evidence collected here and there, I came to my own conclusions. Battlefield deaths numbering perhaps two million had left the devastated reunified nation with what is awkwardly alluded to as a surplus of women. Older than the traditional age for marriage, unable to find partners, single women still in their prime had waged a four-year campaign, unreported in the international press, to force a sexually prudish government to grant them the legal right to bear children without benefit of matrimony. Vietnam’s population soared after the war, as well it should have, but amid the rising birth rates duly recorded by government census takers, a watchful observer could discern a disturbing trend. Live births of males outnumbered live births of females by a ratio of 106 to 100. With no hard evidence of the kind that has been reported in China, one can only speculate with great reluctance that infanticide and/or discriminatory child-rearing practices favoring boy children lie behind the skewed rates. (215)

This final quotation is a striking one and painful to read, yet it’s also a major focus for Brownmiller in this and her other writings, and it’s one worth learning. I had no idea the effect war would have on these areas—that when the male population is decimated and worse, the women need to fight to keep the population growing. We’ll likely see the same in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, yet it’s hard to tell how many women’s groups or ministries are preparing for this eventuality. Probably not enough.

Some Notes on Nature

Brownmiller also named two animals that piqued my interest (as a budding naturalist myself): the Soala and the Sarus Crane. Before reading this, I’d heard of neither, yet after reading it, I became all the more fascinated! The Soala is a species of forest-dwelling bovine first discovered in 1992! Can you believe it that large animal species were still being discovered that late in the game!? And then with Sarus Crane passage, Brownmiller writes of someone I know by proxy:

George Archibald of the highly regarded International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, came to Dong Thap province with German ornithologists from the Brehm Fund for Bird Conservation. Their mission was decidedly unlike that of most other NGOs, which set up prosthesis clinics, nutrition projects, and health programs. The bird people had heard that the sarus crane, an endangered species in Southeast Asia, was returning to the Plain of Reeds. (220)

This was an exciting passage for me to read, not only as a birder, but as a friend of one of Archibald’s most faithful volunteers. That was a pretty special moment for me to read that!

Conclusion

All in all this, was a moderately helpful travelogue, as it did deliver a full taste of Vietnam in the early ’90s. Negatively though, it also tended to get distracted from its purpose—sharing Brownmiller’s own opinions of the nation and the individual Vietnamese people she met more than giving a fine, objective overview of the nation as seen through the eyes of a very early tourist. There are times, for example, that it seems she judges the whole culture by the rudeness of on guide.

I’m glad I read the book, and it was nice to have it along for my ride, but I hope to find better (not necessarily updated) travelogues out there—for my eventual next visit.

©2024 E.T.

Read More about Vietnam:

• Young Man in Vietnam by Charles Coe (1968)
• Seeing Vietnam by Susan Brownmiller (1994)
• Listen Slowly by Thanhha Lai (2015)

Read More Travelogues from Asia:

• After You, Marco Polo by Jean Bowie Shor (1955)
• Mongolia by Silvio Micheli (1964)
• Chinese Journey by Jan Myrdal (1965)
• The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux (1975)
• Rhythms of a Himalayan Village by Hugh R. Downs (1980)
• Across China by Peter Jenkins (1986)
• Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux (1988)
• Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China by Guy Delisle (2006)
• Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle (2008)
• Why China Will Never Rule the World by Troy Parfitt (2011)
• Something Needs to Change by David Platt (2019)
• High by Erika Fatland (2020)