Viet Thanh Nguyen, "The Sympathizer"

The Sympathizer (2015) is the first of the half dozen novels I selected to read from the NY Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far. The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and I remember being intrigued by it at the time. So when the list reminded me, I got an audio copy, very well read by François Chau.

I liked it. There were parts that irritated me, as I will explain, but on the whole it is a high-quality book about a fascinating topic: how a Vietnamese or Vietnamese American person in our day might think about the Vietnam war.

Our anonymous narrator seems to stand in for Vietnam. He is the bastard son of a French priest and and Vietnamese peasant woman; he worked in the South's military intelligence, but was a North Vietnamese spy. He is, he keeps saying, a "man of two minds," and he sees everything from both sides. He grew up poor, giving us flashbacks of rural poverty, but later served as the personal assistant to an important general, which shows us a bit of life among the southern elite. When Saigon falls in 1975, the narrator's controllers order him to join the exodus from the South so that he can spy on the Vietnamese community in the US.

It was the US part that I found rather irritating. Part of it was yet another immigrant saga that I felt like I had read ten times before, and rather less interesting than some. There is also some grousing about white people being racist against Asians, a phenomenon that may exist at some level but has had absolutely zero impact on the prospects of Asian Americans, who are thriving by every measure.  Nguyen's immigrants seemed to me to be doing really well, especially considering that they were just airlifted from a collapsing nation to a new continent. What is good about this section is the depiction of the listlessness that overtook many new arrivals; they were able to find jobs and apartments, but not purpose, so they spent a lot of time just hanging  around, drinking heavily and talking about the old country. Also interesting on the role of music in memory and nostalgia.

In the final section the narrator returns to Vietnam and ends up in a re-education camp. This was, to me, where the book really soars, and I forgave all its stumbles because of the powerful climax. The narrator is forced to meditate over and over on the famous saying of Ho Chi Minh, "Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence." But what does "nothing" mean? Is this perhaps a profoundly ambiguous statement, depending on how one reads it? And it is, after all, ultimately a slogan, and after being "civilized" by the French and "defended" by the Americans, Vietnamese people know better than anyone that slogans are merely "empty suits draped over the corpse of an idea." Why had so many died over these empty suits? What was it all for?

Highly recommended.

Chinese Fertility Collapse

Chart from Kevin Drum. Remarkably rapid collapse in the past seven years, to a rate lower than anywhere but South Korea.

Comparable rates for other nations: 

South Korea:  0.8
Japan 1.3
Vietnam  2.0
North Korea  1.9
India  2.0
US 1.7

Japanese Militarism in the Meiji Period

Japan rose to great power status thanks to a massive program of industrialization and victory in two wars, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Japan had a great tradition of woodblock printing, with dozens of active presses. So, of course, the propaganda of these wars and the creation of the Japanese Empire was accompanied by thousands of woodblock prints. In this print by Yôsai Nobukazu, Crossing the Yalu River, 1894, you can see a glimpse of the more usual subject matter of Japanese art in the background, with the stern soldiers in the center.

Many Americans were closely tracking those Asian events. Some were supportive of Japan and were happy to welcome Japan into the league of great powers, while others were suspicious of Japanese motives from the beginning, but either way they were keeping an eye on Japan's rise. Americans therefore collected many of these propagandistic prints. Hundreds of them eventually made it into museums; both the MFA in Boston and the Saint Louis Art Museum have major collections of this material. After I stumbled on these I did some searching and discovered that the MIT Visualizing Culture site has a long essay on them. (Our Army's Great Victory in the Night Battle at Pyongyang by Kobayashi Toshimitsu, 1894)

One of the themes of this propaganda is how modern and western the Japanese army and navy are, compared to the more traditional, more oriental portrayal of the Chinese and Koreans. (Top, The Hard Fight of the Scout Cavalry-Captain Asakawa by Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1894, and a detail from a work by Yôsai Nobukazu.)

The contrast is especially clear in this print, Chinese Officers Captured Alive at Pyongyang by Migita Toshihide, 1894. Whereas the Japanese are in white or black, the Chinese and Koreans are always dressed in colors, with a sort of feminine softness.

Japan had of course been culturally dominated by China for a thousand years, and the decisive Japanese victory of 1894-1895 inspired a burst of confidence in the militaristic, modernizing leadership. They adopted the slogan "Out from Under Asia," meaning that they had escaped from Oriental backwardness and joined the modern, western elite of nations.

Some of the design here is of a very high level; I especially like this image by Ōkura Kōtō, in which a Russian soldier flees from a Japanese army that appears as a sort of storm cloud. (Braving the Bitter Cold of a Snowy Night, Our Troops Advanced Rapidly in a Certain Direction, and the Russian Troops That Were Already There Were Shocked at Our Might and Withdrew Again)

Many of the naval images play up the new technology of the era, as well as the bravery of Japanese sailors and officers amidst the chaos. These were among the first battles between iron-clad battleships, and by 1905 the Japanese navy was the most experienced in the world at this type of fighting. The course of the naval fighting in the Russo-Japanese War was that the Japanese bottled up the Russian Far Eastern Fleet in its two bases, Port Arthur and Vladivostok. Both Russian fleets tried to break out, but after confused, indecisive engagements in which both sides fought badly, they retreated to their ports. Then the Russian Baltic fleet arrived after a seven month voyage around the southern end of Africa, an astonishing logistical feat, only to be shattered by the Japanese in the battle of Tsushima. Six of the eight Russian battleships were sunk, and the rest of the fleet had to surrender. Many historians think it was the experience gained in their two previous battles that gave the Japanese such a decisive advantage. When something is so new that nobody has ever done it before, even a small amount of experience can make a huge difference.

And yet while military action was always portrayed in the most modern terms, the home front seems almost medieval, the women frozen in time. Here we have the cover illustration from a sentimental novel of 1905 and A Soldier's Dream by Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1894. I have a sense that this heavily gendered model of development, in which the men were supposed to charge forth and become westernized soldiers and businessmen, while the women stayed home and preserved tradition, still haunts Japan.

One reason these images fascinate me is because of a major "what if" of history. I think it's easy to understand how Japan acted in the 1870-1910 period. Humiliated by the technical prowess of the west, they resolved not to be left behind, and progress they made in two generations is astonishing. Their victory over the Russians was cheered by thousands of other non-westerners, for example in India, as proof that the non-western nations could challenge the European powers. Yes, they established an empire in Korea and China, but Britain, France, Germany and Russia also had empires, and the Japanese desperately wanted to join that club. The Japanese were not in this period particularly brutal conquerors; on the contrary they prided themselves in meeting the best western standards for the treatment of prisoners. They made major investments in the economic development of Korea and Taiwan, just as the British and French did in their empires. They might have continued on that path, becoming more like Britain or France over time.

 

Yet somehow they did not. Somehow the militarists continued to grow in power while the civilian parliamentarians shrank away.  Somehow the professional treatment of prisoners gave way to using them for bayonet practice, and the building of schools in Korea to the Rape of Nanking. Did it have to happen? Were the seeds of the Banzai state already sown in this earlier era of nationalism and empire? Or was there a chance for a different path, toward co-existence with the west and gradual liberation of Korea and Taiwan? Did it take the cataclysm of World War II to break the old imperial world that the Japanese fought desperately to join, or might it have faded on its own? Was their a more peaceful path toward the contemporary world? Or did the brutality of empire have to grow until it burst across the world as Fascism and ruin?  These images make me wonder.

On the Apparent Failure of Burmese Democracy

From a review of a new book by Thant Myint-U, grandson of UN General Secretary U Thant:

He tries to nudge readers away from getting too fixated on messianic solutions. Democracy was a preoccupation among the junta’s critics, but the country wasn’t quite prepared for how a competitive political system might work — especially one where the peace process itself entrenched a belief in the existence of fixed ethnic groups. Protecting minority rights, such as those of the Rohingya Muslims, has proved to be an unpopular proposition among the Buddhist majority; it’s been much easier to rile up voters with rank appeals to identity. As Thant Myint-U puts it, “fear and intolerance” offer convenient cover for opportunists seeking to hide a “failure of the imagination.”

Combined with this whipping up of virulent nativist sentiment has been a headlong plunge into free markets, as Burma lurched from being one of the poorest and most isolated countries in Asia to another aspirant on the capitalist world stage. Thant Myint-U acknowledges the real economic gains that have been made over the past decade — a growing middle class, a new kind of self-made entrepreneur unconnected to the cronyism of the old regime — but he also notes that Burma is still a very poor country where extreme inequality and attendant anxieties have flourished. A population buffetted by economic upheaval and climate change is especially prone to paranoia. He’s skeptical of what neoliberalism offers, even in a best-case scenario: “Relentless environmental destruction and congested cities, compensated for only by the opportunity for lots of shopping. Is this really the only future possible?”

Today's Place to Daydream about: Yogyakarta

Today I cast my mind to unfamiliar territories on the other side of the world, to Yogyakarta, a city on the Indonesian island of Java. It has long been the capital of a Hindu sultanate and the name comes from Ayodhya, the sacred Indian city said to be the birthplace of Rama.

The sultans survived from the 1500s to the present day because they have cleverly caught multiple waves of history. In the 1750s civil war broke out between two brothers of the ruling family, one of whom chose to ally himself with the Dutch colonists. After the Dutch helped him win, the new sultan recognized Dutch suzerainty and thus kept his throne down to World War II. (Above, the Taman Sari or water palace.)

After World War II the Indonesians revolted against the Dutch and the then sultan of Yogyakarta played a leading role in the revolution. Yogyakarta was the capital of the revolutionary republic in 1946 to 1948, after the Dutch captured Jakarta, and after the rebels were victorious the sultan secured a special status for his city, which is nominally still ruled by the family. (Sultan's audience hall)

The city reaped another benefit from its time as the capital: Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia's largest with 55,000 students. Not waiting for the war to be won Indonesia's leaders went ahead and set up the college in 1948 on the site of a medical school founded by the Dutch, and it was up and running by 1950.

The great volcano of Mount Merapi looms over the whole district.

The commercial heart of Yogyakarta is Malioboro Street, a shopping district with many Dutch colonial buildings. I imagine it was named by the Dutch for the first Duke of Marlborough, the British general who led combined Anglo-Dutch armies to victory against Louis XIV. These days it is notable as one of the best places to buy traditional Indonesian crafts like batik prints.

Malioboro Street in colonial days.

On the outskirts of Yogyakarga is Prambanan, a famous Hindu temple complex dating to the ninth century.

The temples were "discovered" by the British after they took over Dutch Indonesia during the Napoleonic wars; British governor Sir Thomas Raffles, a famous character in British colonial lore (founder of Singapore, winner of several small wars, author of A History of Java), sent surveyors to document the site. You can see that the temples were in a ruinous state in the nineteenth century.

Rebuilding of the temples was begun under Dutch rule in 1918 but little progress was made until the 1930s, and then World War II brought everything to a halt. Reconstruction was completed after independence and the temples were opened by President Sukarno in 1953.

Twenty miles further from Yogyakarta is the Buddhist temple of Borobudur, the largest in Indonesia. It was built a few years before Prambanan by a Buddhist king; his successors converted to Hinduism and built Prambanan to announce the change.

A common tourist trip is to leave Yogyakarta in the very early morning to see the sunrise at Borobudur, then visit Prambanan in the afternoon.

If you're in the mood for something more physical you can hike around Mount Merapi or be lowered into Jomblang Cave and take your picture with Heaven's Light.

Seems like a fascinating place to explore.

Shamanism, Daoism, and the Kargaly Diadem

The Kargaly Diadem is a magnificent golden artifact from a nomad tomb in the Tian Shan region of Kazakhstan. In 1939 it was "found by chance in a heavily disturbed burial in a crevice in the Kargaly valley." In 2012 it was part of "Nomads and Networks," a traveling exhibit of objects from Kazakh museums that toured the US and Europe. Oddly the museums hosting that exhibit did not feature it among the highlights you can see online, and the Times also ignored it. I discovered it last month while perusing a Tumblr of random beautiful objects. It dates to between 200 BCE and 100 CE.

What got me about this diadem is this figure. What is that? It looks like a sprite from one of the Victorian fairy books. And riding a dragon? Did that action ever appear in art before 1880?

And there are more such figures on the diadem. Who are these mysterious beings riding deer and goats through this fantastic forest?

I searched around online but all I could find were a couple of references to the catalog for the Nomads and Networks exhibition. Not seeing any alternative, I ordered a copy, and it came today. It is magnificent and full of strange lore.

The catalog told me that Chinese sources of the Han Dynasty make frequent mention of the Wusun, a nomadic people who were often Chinese allies against more hostile tribes such as the Xiongnu (Huns). The tombs in the Kargaly Valley show strong Chinese influence and may represent the Wusun leadership. In 105 BCE a Han princess married the Wusun king, taking with her "imperial carriages, clothing, and equipment for royal use, and a rich store of gifts," perhaps including jewelry like this diadem. (Illustration shows a gold plaque from the Tenlik Mound, thought to be a Wusun burial.)

The catalog calls the sprites "winged furry creatures," and it suggests that they resemble Yuren, "winged people", from the art of Han China. The Yuren were one species of Xian, "Immortals," beings who populate heaven. This sent me scurrying around the web looking for sources on the Yuren. I eventually found just what I was looking for, a 2011 article by Leslie Wallace titled "Betwixt and Between: Depictions of Immortals (Xian) in Eastern Han Tomb Reliefs," which you can find on JStor. Sadly the illustrations are these low-resolution black and white things, but the text is marvelous.

Wallace writes:

Immortals (xian 仙) are depicted as feathered sprite-like or dragon- or snake-tailed figures climbing stylized mountains or floating in swirling cloudscapes on tomb reliefs from the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). These images represent immortals as transient figures moving through an intermediate realm where they are often joined by deer, tigers, dragons, birds, heavenly horses (tianma 天馬), and other animals. 

Wallace

analyzes the physical hybridity of immortals, their transitory existence, and their role as shaman-like intermediaries, demonstrating that Eastern Han representations of immortals repeatedly emphasize their liminal nature and close connection to the animal world. Their position betwixt and between physical forms and realms of existence was the basis of their spiritual power, enabling them to assist the deceased in their transcendent journey to paradise.

There is a Han encyclopedia called Shanhaijing, "Classics of Mountains and Seas", which seems to be the Chinese version of Pliny the Elder. It describes several classes of hybrid beings, including the Yuimin or "feathered people."

The earliest textual  source describing immortals as winged creatures is found in Yuan Yu, "The Far-Off Journey," a poem from the famous Chuci or "Songs of the South", a compendium first written down around 100 BCE.

Having heard this precious teaching I departed,
And swiftly prepared to start on my journey.
I met the winged ones on the hill of Cinnabar;
I tarried in the ancient land of Immortality.
In the morning I washed my hair in the Valley of the Dawn,
In the evening I dried myself on the shores of heaven.

The early Daoist immortals were much like ancient shamans. (Modern illustration above.) They flew through the air, often mounted on animals like these dragons; they journeyed to heaven and the land of the dead; their travels were often fueled by sacred mushrooms. On their journeys they met many strange peoples, including the Yuren, whose prominence in tomb art suggests that they inhabited the borderlands of death through which all souls passed.

More Chuci:

I visited Fu Yue on a dragon's back,
Joined in marriage with the Weaving Maiden,
Lifted up Heaven's Net to capture evil,
Drew the Bow of Heaven to shoot at wickedness,
Followed the Immortals fluttering through the sky,
Ate of the Primal Essence to prolong my life.

So from this mountain tomb comes a remarkable object indeed, a golden crown woven with spirit beings from the mystic realms where shamans wandered. Its inspiration is Chinese, but it may actually have been made on the Steppes, which means that Wusun artisans shared this lore with the Chinese. Perhaps they had a different interpretation of these beings from the Shamanistic netherworld, but then again perhaps their new queen explained it all to them. Was she a priestess herself, a wanderer in those lands? Surely whoever wore this diadem engaged in rites related to those shadow realms even if she did not journey there herself. But it is more fun to imagine the queen or her daughters donning this crown as they inhaled the sacred smoke or chewed the sacred mushrooms, preparing for the long journey into the twilight lands in search of wisdom, or to guide lost souls toward their final homes.

Manchukuo and the Economic Miracles of Japan and Korea

In 1931, after a manufactured "incident," the Japanese Army conquered Manchuria. They then set up what is always referred to as "the puppet state of Manchukuo," with a Chinese Prime Minister and the sad Pu Yi (the "last emperor of China") as head of state, but with all real power wielded by Japanese "deputies." Manchukuo was a brutal colonial regime where hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans were treated as slaves, but it was also a grand experiment in economic planning.

Manchukuo had vast deposits of coal and iron ore and by 1931 it already had the beginnings of an industrial complex. The Japanese leadership set out to make it into a economic engine that would power their war machine. They sent thousands of young Japanese to make this economic explosion happen. In a peculiar irony, many of the economics and engineering majors sent to Manchukuo were leftists. Knowledge of Chinese was a prerequisite, and at that time it was mainly leftist or otherwise counter-culture Japanese who studied Chinese, a decadent tongue rejected by nationalists. Also, in the 1930s it was difficult to find a good job in Japan, and left-wing leanings made it even harder; it was actually illegal in Japan to write or speak anything that advocated changing the political system. Shut out of the Japanese bureaucracy and the big corproations, ambitious left-wing students flocked to Manchukuo.

Japanese-built Steel Works in Manchukuo

In Manchuria, those Japanese planners achieved what they set out to. They multiplied production of iron ore, coal, and steel, and expanded the economy into chemicals, automobiles, airplanes, and more. They built an impressive railway system to move all this around, which is still in use. At first this was done by direct state intervention, under a five-year plan modeled on Soviet plans. But in preparing for the second five-year plan it was decided to open up the field for investment by Japanese industrial conglomerates, the zaibatsu. Sold on the virtues of dictatorial control and a vast work force of semi-slaves, the zaibatsu responded enthusiastically. Nisan moved its headquarters to Manchukuo and created an industrial empire, and the other top firms also made large investments. But the economy remained state-directed, companies investing only in enterprises approved and generally created by the state planning agencies.

The director of Manchukuo's economy in this period was a man in his late 30s named Kishi Nosusuke. In 1941 Kishi moved back to Japan and became Vice Minister of Commerce and Industry, a post he held until the end of the war; most historians think that by 1943 he was in charge of Japan's economy. At the war's end he was jailed by the Americans and charged as a war criminal, but his trial never came up and in 1948 he was released. After a few years of retirement he re-entered politics as a conservative legislator and in 1957 he was elected Prime Minister of Japan. There he continued to promote the same economic policies Japan had developed in the early 20th century and perfected in Manchukuo: private investment firmly guided by the state toward national goals.

GDP per Person in South Korea, 1911 to 2010

But it wasn't only Japan that benefited from the great colonial experiment in Manchukuo:

At the height of the Cold War, in 1961, a staunch anticommunist took power in South Korea by coup d'etat. Following the Japanese wartime model of a planned economy under military rule, boosted by Korean zaibatsu operating in tandem with the government, the South Korean economy grew apace. The strongman in question had graduated in 1942 at the top of his class from the Manchukuo Military Academy in Shankyo, and had been a lieutenant in the Japanese Kwantung Army. In 1948, he was expelled from the South Korean Army for taking part in a plot against Syngman Rhee. His Japanese name during the war Takagi Masao. His real name was Park Chong-hee. One of his great Japanese supporters was Kishi Nosusuke, a fellow veteran of the Manchukuo puppet state.  (Ian Buruma, Year Zero: a History of 1945, p. 270)

The World War II era was not just a time of immense conflict, but the apogee of rational planning in economic affairs. All the wartime economies were under government control, even in the US, and it led to staggering production of war material: to take one example, the US launched more than 6,000 ships during the war years, including 28 aircraft carriers. From that experience most of the world took the lesson that planned economies did better, and outside the US the economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s was heavily planned and managed by governments. Then in the Rust Belt era of the 1970s that started to go sour, and people in Europe and the US turned toward freer markets and lower taxes to get growth going again. I wonder: was either the obsessive planning of 1930 to 1970 or the turn against it rational? Or was it just a change of intellectual fads? Did central planning make more sense in the coal and steel era than today? Or was it that consumer choice was just not very important in 1930 to 1970, so central planners were better able to make what was wanted? I find this all puzzling, and I have grave doubts that neoclassical economics can really explain any of it.

Burma: What Democracy Can't Do

Depressing news from Burma, where democracy has only made the country's ethnic conflicts worse. We all cheered when pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and led her party to a landslide victory over parties backing the half-mad generals of the military junta.

But as soon as democracy seemed on the rise, the non-Burmese peoples of the country's mountainous north began to agitate for independence. The people of the north (Karen, Kachin, Mon, San and others) were never really ruled by the Burmese until the British conquered them and attached them to their colony of Burma. When Burma was granted independence, British officials who knew the north warned that the hill peoples would not accept Burmese domination, and they have not. Burma's early post-colonial leaders promised seven ethnic minorities an eventual referendum on independence, but that never happened. The ongoing conflict has been one of the main reasons, or at least pretexts, for the military's big role in Burmese politics, and the military has for decades been strongly against independence or autonomy for minority groups.

Aung San Suu Kyi, to her credit, has tried to organize talks with no preconditions, but the military has balked, and so have many members of the pro-democracy movement. So she has moved very cautiously. Peace talks have also been opposed by some of the ethnic rebel groups, some of which have been accused by Human Rights Watch of being little more than drug-smuggling gangs. While the government dithers and the generals work to prevent any real dialogue, the conflict worsens. And that's without even getting into the problem of the Rohingya, Muslims who look more like Bangladeshis than other Burmese and who are considered by most Burmese to be recent interlopers not deserving of even the restrained oppression meted out to long-resident minorities.

One thing democracy cannot do, it seems, is to resolve conflicts among groups of people who are not sure they want to be in a country together at all.

Pilgrimage Scroll

Details from a scroll showing a Shiite pilgrimage, purchased by cartographer Carsten Niebuhr in Karbala, Iraq, 1761-1767. Source.

Meanwhile at first International Bamboo Architecture Biennale

Interesting planet we live on.