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This review is based on a free review EPUB from the publisher via Net Galley UK.
This is a
fictionalised history of several people’s stories, intertwined with
each other, the Vietnam War and its aftermath. It is well-written and
deeply-researched. The themes include sexual exploitation, racism and
bullying, from a realistic rather than a “woke” perspective. Fear
of the impending communist regime turns out to be worse than the
reality, though no-one specifically targetted by the regime is likely
to think so! All of Vietnam’s regimes, so far, have been
authoritarian and one thing which an authoritarian or totalitarian
regime does not normally do is crack down effectively on bullying,
which makes bullying the key problem for most of the protagonists in
this story. (Authoritarian regimes tend to be coalitions of the
culpable which find themselves obliged to let their accomplices get
away with stuff -and, of course, they then have to go on letting the
bastards get away with stuff no matter how bad things get. Marshal
Tito was the sole (and belated) proponent of socialist economic
liberalism to survive the Soviet era largely because he was the only
communist leader to run a tight-enough ship to be ABLE
to change course.)
The author shows us
what’s wrong with sexual exploitation by showing us all the other
things the exploited ones knew how to do and how much happiness and
prosperity was possible when they were able to do those things
instead. And always, education and new skills, acquired throughout
life and not just in childhood, are a better escape mechanism from
poverty and exploitation than the panacea of a US Visa. The moral
arguments against prostitution are essentially the same as Adam
Smith’s economic arguments against slavery: the waste of resources
is always a moral issue when the resources being wasted are human
ones.
American servicemen
are shown as treating Vietnamese women extremely badly and there’s
plenty of historical evidence of that. It’s partly because they
were so much younger on average than the men who’d fought the
Second World War, but also because the only goal they were ever given
was to complete their “tour” and go home. The absence of any
published definition of success emphasised the lack of any extant
strategy for achieving success and led to a lack of much, if any,
sense of responsibility on the part of American soldiers to those
they left behind in Vietnam when they achieved their goal of going
home. Nothing they did was seen as making anything any worse; the
author’s skill is to show us that, actually, it did make things
worse.
Reading this book
left me with a feeling of admiration for the Vietnamese who seem to
have recovered from the Vietnam war rather better than their
neighbours in Cambodia and Laos. And gratitude for the post war
British leaders who saw Vietnam as a hot potato which, like Aden and
Yemen, simply needed to be dropped. Which makes the sell-outs of
their successors, Blair and Cameron, to the mindless White House
incumbents of their day all the more galling.
Dust Child by Nguyễn
Phan Quế Mai is published in the UK by One World Publications on
the 6th of April 2023.
