By Karen Turner, professor of history

When Tom and I lived in Hanoi, we found that two books, in cheap pirated editions, always appeared among the wares sold by homeless children licensed by the state to sell goods on the streets. Whoever chose these selections to tempt visiting foreigners had good judgment, for both books seem to us essential reading for understanding Vietnam. One is the British author Graham Greene's classic novel, The Quiet American (1955), a work well known to Americans of a certain age. Rereading Greene in Vietnam heightened our sense of his skills as a writer. His tale of Pyle, an earnest American meddler, and his rival, Fowler, a jaded British journalist playing for high stakes in 1950s Vietnam, reminded us once again that Vietnam is far more complicated than it seems. 

The second Hanoi street-classic, Bao Ninh's semi-autobiographical book, Sorrow of War (1996), is less well-known in the United States.  Yet this no-holds-barred anti-war novel, compared often and with good reason to Eva Maria Remarque's account of a young German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), is more than an infantryman's story.  It is a deeply disturbing obituary for the ordinary people who paid the price for the ambitions of distant leaders and political decisions.  Bao Ninh's protganist, Kien, a platoon leader in the North Vietnamese army, rejects any notion that war can ever be glamorous or that men can muster heroic moments. 

In the past five years, a wealth of literature from the Vietnamese side has been translated into English. I have been particularly moved by Kevin Bowen and Bruce Weigl's anthology of fiction, poetry, reportage and memoirs from both sides: Writing Between the Lines: An Anthology of War and its Social Consequences (1997). The collection includes poems taken from captured Vietnamese soldiers, revealing vividly that the writing of poetry is not a rare or elitist endeavor in Vietnam, but an integral aspect of daily life, even wartime life, for men and women, footsoldiers and officers. The Other Side of Heaven (1995), edited by Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu, brings together famous Vietnamese and American writers to consider the postwar situation for both sides. 

For a readable and comprehensive study of Vietnam's culture, past and present, we both like Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (1993). Jamieson knows Vietnam from long years of study and recent experience in-country as a representative of an American nongovernmental organization. Less satisfying, but one of few relatively up-to-date overviews is a journalistic survey, Chasing the Tigers: A Portrait of the New Vietnam (1996), by veteran correspondent, Murray Hiebert. Hiebert provides a succinct history of postwar social and economic culture and evaluates the effects of doi moi (renovation) policies that, since 1986, have generated experiments with a market economy and an open-door foreign policy. To keep current on Vietnam, we both read recent editions of Far Eastern Economic Review. 

We always recommend to travelers the latest edition of the Lonely Planet series. The Vietnam guides in this series do play up the darker side of travel over the joys of the Vietnamese experience, but the authors include a wealth of cultural, historical and practical information that helped us prepare for the adventure and survive it once in country. A recent book that I wish had been available when we journeyed through Vietnam is John Balaban's Vietnam: A Traveler's Literary Companion (1996). Balaban spent the war years as a conscientious objector south of the DMZ, and has a real feel for the land and the people. He gathers stories from Vietnamese writers that vividly portray the Vietnamese landscape and its inhabitants, from the cities to the mountains and the jungles, in all of their variety and beauty. 

I have enjoyed two recent books by young American women who traveled to Vietnam without the baggage that clutters the perspective of many middle-aged Americans. Karen Muller's Hitchhiking Vietnam (1998) is a professional travel writer's attempt to capture the essence of contemporary Vietnamese life from the back of a motorcycle. Edith Shillue's Earth and Water: Encounters in Vietnam (1997) is a deeper, more sensitive portrait. Shillue spent 1993 teaching American studies and English in Saigon and then in a northern village. Every bit as adventurous as Muller - she trekked by motorcycle to Cambodia - Shillue's linguistic expertise and long-term commitment to Vietnam make for a far more informative book.  She encounters Vietnam with a zest and an ear for language that is refreshing and unusual, and recounts her adventures with her Vietnamese host family and young people like herself with candor and good humor. Her writing and that of her young Vietnamese counterparts inspire hope that someday both sides will move beyond war stories.