Fragments of the Present

As an Anthropology student at the Australian National University, Taylor spent two years in South Vietnam (92-94), then returned to this country in 95, 98, and 99. Faced with a unique southern identity, he decided to define the "idea of the South".

North and South Vietnam despite decades of postwar communist control are two completely different countries from the political, social, economical, and even musical aspects. In the first decade after the 1975 fall of Saigon, the communists controlled everything down to the toothpaste the Vietnamese used. Faced with poverty and income loss, southerners began to peddle their cherished belongings to the black market in order to survive. While goods in state stores were scarce, everything was available on the black market. Goods and money sent home from overseas Vietnamese swelled this illicit economy. As a result, the southern economy rebounded. A southern reformist, Nguyen Van Linh spearheaded the doi moi (renovation) policy officially moving the country to free market economy. The "modern" South thus replaced the "backward" North.

This unique southern free enterprise spirit did not sit well with Hanoi, which did everything to undermine it and ironically to profit from it at the same time. "Corruption, abuses of power, and administrative incompetence" became the hallmarks of communist Vietnam. However, the free southern spirit traced back to the pionering spirit of the South Vietnamese who settled in the Mekong delta some four centuries ago, lives on. If Saigon lost the war in 1975, it won the peace a decade later. Despite acknowledging past "errors", the communists still refused to release their grip on power.

The author is to be congratulated for his most interesting study and his keen observations of the South Vietnamese mind.