BOOKS-VIETNAM: U.S. Bigot Goes ‘Sparring with Charlie’ in Hanoi

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 7 1996 (IPS) - Send an idealistic, thirtyish U.S. journalist and former comedian to Vietnam to explore how that nation has changed since U.S. troops left, and you might expect a whimsical, perhaps even wise, work.

Think again. ‘Sparring with Charlie’, a book of travels through Vietnam and Laos by former ‘Economist’ reporter Christopher Hunt (published by Anchor Books for 12.95 U.S. dollars) shows one U.S. observer as bigoted toward the Vietnamese as the previous generation of soldiers and politicians.

The author originally intended to write a novel about Vietnam that would include adventures down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the hidden, tortuous route by which the North Vietnamese Army sent supplies and soldiers to battle the South. Over time, though, Hunt’s travels down the trail on his rickety Minsk motorcycle sparked its own story and its own adventures.

Hunt is more sympathetic toward the Vietnamese that his countrymen were during the 1965-75 war that ended with the communist takeover of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and a humiliating U.S. defeat. He even genuinely shows concern at how the Vietnamese suffered during the war, as well as at their economic woes in the years that followed.

But the tone of the concerned observer is constantly at odds with that of a more familiar caricature, the nasty U.S. tourist. Revealingly, Hunt begins his tale with an anecdote of how, at one point, he went to shake hands with a Vietnamese who instead clutched out to feel his penis.

“Word had spread that Yankee proportions were unlike those of the average local,” Hunt says in the flat deadpan style of the U.S. adventurer. “We were alleged to be…different.”

Time and again, Hunt notices the difference of Americans abroad: He longs for one mixed-race Vietnamese, the child of a U.S. soldier, saying, “Born to advertise something wholesome, like Corn Flakes, she looked vaguely familiar.”

For the most part, the list of what Hunt finds unusual or upsetting about Vietnam and Laos is the standard litany of tourist complaints: the meat looks funny, the bureaucrats are officious and annoying, and, wouldn’t you know it, the locals speak English poorly. Given that Vietnam is a country where proud nationalists threw back successive Japanese, French and U.S. hegemons, those complaints sound even more ignorant than they usually do.

Some of Hunt’s exploits, moreover, have a nasty taste to them, made worse by his efforts to pass them off as comedy. When the author, despite his lack of a return visa, tries to re-enter Vietnam from Laos, he stands by idly at a border crossing while a Vietnamese guard mauls, and then apparently rapes, a Laotian woman.

As Hunt describes the aftermath, the soldier returns to say, “Lao girls number one”. And Hunt agrees, “unwilling to play the human rights watchdog with my exit to Vietnam on the line.”

Despite his horrific attitude, the author nevertheless scores some points simply through the range of his travels. The port city of Vinh, rebuilt by East Germans in the 1970s, is “a box without features, nuance, or paint. It was a stunning achievement for an architect who must have been trying to perfect the eyesore.”

Hunt also vividly describes the capital, Hanoi, with its burst of new capitalist enthusiasm, advertising and (typically) its hordes of cabdrivers and salespeople eager for U.S. dollars; and the glamourous city of Hue, where women dressed like “fluttering butterflies” are juxtaposed against the billboards of the government’s anti-AIDS campaign.

At such moments, the book has the courage of its own racism, seeming as colourful, if as dated, as the colonial-era travelogues of the previous century.

And, despite his lack of knowledge of Vietnamese or French, Hunt manages to portray a wide variety of interesting characters. Daisy, a cynical girl whose family returned from Hong Kong, asks of the government’s promises of riches: “If we have so much silver and gold, then why are we so poor?”

By contrast, Sung, a true believer in communism, says mournfully that, after Ho Chi Minh’s death, the communist leadership became “a privileged class…After the war they got Japanese cars and we got nothing.”

At times like that, ‘Sparring with Charlie’ — whose very title uses the term by which U.S. soldiers scornfully addressed their Viet Cong enemy — becomes more an interesting travelling journal, rather than the whinings of an Ugly American. Overall, it’s a shame that Christopher Hunt’s first book has too much of the latter and not enough of the former.