I am delighted to publish a special issue of Rising Asia Journal, guest edited by Eric Henry, Emeritus Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where I was a graduate student of History and Journalism). The issue marks the 50th Anniversary of the Reunification of Vietnam and the End of the War. It comes after our previous special issue commemorating this same anniversary, guest edited by Tuan Hoang, Professor at Pepperdine University in California, entitled, “Postwar Music in Vietnam and the Diaspora” (Volume 4, Issue 3, Autumn, September to December 2024). Together, the two issues demonstrate our deep interest in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.
In this special issue, “The Creators of South Vietnam: At Home and Abroad,” we present a series of eleven profiles of Vietnamese writers, artists, musicians, and a scientist. The portraits were written in Vietnamese by Dr. Ngô Thế Vinh, who is both a practicing physician and a prolific writer, and they were translated by Professor Henry from the original text in Vietnamese. It is a collaborative effort between Dr. Vinh and Professor Henry. The profiles exhibit Dr. Vinh’s vast knowledge of South Vietnamese literary, cultural, scientific, and military history, as well as Professor Henry’s formidable expertise in Vietnamese and Chinese language and culture.
The author of these literary portraits, Ngô Thế Vinh, was born in 1941, and graduated from the School of Medicine of Saigon University in 1968. While in medical school, he edited a journal, Y và Tình Thương (Medicine and Compassion) that published articles, editorials, and fiction. With a natural literary bent, he began writing novels—The Green Belt (Vòng Đài Xanh), which deals with the problems of the Montagnard people in Vietnam’s central highlands, won South Vietnam’s National Prize for Literature in 1971, and established his position in literature. He was a young man in a hurry, publishing three novels in three years—Storm Clouds (Mây bão, in 1963), Night Shadows (Bóng đêm, in 1964), and Gusty Weather (Gió Mưa, in 1965)—all pre-1975 works. After 1975, he was imprisoned in different Communist reeducation camps for three years. The resourceful young novelist used the time to improve his Chinese language skills. In 1983, he arrived in the United States: as a student at the State University of New York, he became a medical intern, a resident, and eventually a physician. Dr. Vinh currently lives in Southern California, where he works as a staff physician at the Long Beach Medical Center. Through his years in the United States, he stayed active as a writer, and produced two works about the ecological consequences of China’s dams on the Mekong River, and two Vietnamese language books carrying articles on South Vietnamese cultural figures from which the items in this issue of Rising Asia are chosen.
Our guest editor and translator, Eric Henry, was born in 1943, and earned a PhD in Chinese Literature at Yale University in 1979, and then taught at Dartmouth from 1980 to 1982, and at the University of North Carolina from 1982 to 2011. An accomplished pianist, he was employed as a freelance keyboard musician from 1961 to 1980. He served in the United States Army from 1968 to 1971: his tenure included a one-year intensive course in Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute at Fort Bliss, Texas, and a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam (1970–71). His scholarly publications are: Chinese Amusement: The Lively Plays of Li Yu (Archon Books, 1980), In Whose Eyes, a translation of the memoirs of the film director Trần Văn Thủy, and The Garden of Eloquence (Shuoyuan 說苑), a bilingual version of a Chinese Han dynasty compendium of historical anecdotes. He has prepared for publication a bilingual edition of another ancient Chinese work, Tales from the Principalities (Guoyu 國語). His articles on early Chinese history and culture have appeared in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and in other journals, and his articles on Vietnamese literature and historical legend in Vietnam Forum, Crossroads, and the Michigan Quarterly.
In this special issue of the journal, Dr. Vinh’s portraits of eleven individuals include: Mai Thảo, a fiction-writer, editor and poet; Nhât Tiến, a novelist and playwright; Nghiêu Đề, a visual artist and book illustrator; Cao Xuân Huy, a war memoirist; Trần Mộng Tú, a poet and journalist; Dương Nghiêm Mậu, a fiction writer who remained in Vietnam after 1975; Phạm Duy, a songwriter, memoirist, and musicologist; Võ Phiên, a fiction-writer, poet and literary historian; Đinh Cường, a visual artist, poet, and art historian; Thanh Tâm Tuyền, an iconoclastic poet and fiction writer; and Phạm Hoàng Hộ, a botanist who devoted his life to the scientific study of the trees and plants of Vietnam. Professor Henry explains that these figures had numerous interactions with each other, and each had his own way of coming to terms with war, oppression, exile, and modernity.
In the regular departments of the journal, we are delighted to publish innovative articles and book reviews. In a pathbreaking research article, a team of four scholars—Rimmo Loyi (Luke Mìngkéng) Lego (Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey), Alessandro David (University of Florida), Madhurjya Buragohain (English and Foreign Languages University), Dhruba (Takar) Mili (Dibrugarh University), and Hariprasad Doley (Jawaharlal Nehru University)—explore the possibility of creating a new unified Tani language from its various dialects spoken in the Northeast Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. They polled the attitudes the Tani youth in these two states on the preservation of Tani dialects that face pressure from the popular languages, Hindi and English. Their survey used online questionnaires, field-based interactions, and feedback from Tani youth to assess their attitudes toward language preservation. Their study showed 63.2 percent of Tani youth strongly supporting the unification of Tani language, and 61.2 percent supporting the creation of an independent writing system. Aside from this, 85.4 percent were convinced that a unified language would help preserve their endangered culture. The findings recommend effective strategies for the preservation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Tani people in the face of prevailing challenges.
In their research article, Aman Tripathi and Areeza Saifi (Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Sungshin Women’s University, Korea, respectively) explore the film, Parasite (2019), directed by South Korean Director Bong Joon-ho, that signposts economic inequality, deceit, and the human condition by its poignant portrayal of the intertwined lives of two South Korean families from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds: the rich employers and poor domestic workers. Their study uncovers the underlying messages and implications of Parasite within the context of broader social discourse, drawing on structuralism, as well as Marxist, and postmodern frameworks to analyze the film’s critique of capitalism, social mobility, and the inherent struggles within a rigid South Korean class system. They analyze narrative structure, character development, and visual symbolism in order to contribute to the academic discourse on inequality, demonstrating how Parasite mirrors the precariousness of upward mobility in today’s hyper-competitive, capitalist society.
Salikyu Sangtam (Tetso College, Nagaland), our regular writer in “The Rising Asia Review of Books,” reviews Toh Han Shih’s Is China a Menacing Empire? The reviewer argues that at a time when China has become a punching bag, Is China a Menacing Empire? offers a much-needed, objective analysis of current world affairs. In the book, Toh questions the one-sided narrative about China, and investigates the truth behind the criticisms leveled at China. The book surveys the apprehension over the rise of China, illustrating the anxiety of the United States and the west by demonstrating the racial undertone of their worries. The author argues against allegations of China’s “debt trap” diplomacy, and weighs in on the “corrupt” dealings of China on foreign soil, pointing to China’s efforts to tackle corruption internally, and indicating the complex nature of corruption.
In the chapter on Hong Kong, Toh argues that the fears over China’s desire to forcefully bring Hong Kong under communist grip are unfounded, and demonstrates why the “one country, two systems” policy is essential for China’s own interests. In the concluding chapters, the author addresses the prospect of war between China and the United States by presenting plausible scenarios, but highlighting the importance of co-existence, and recommending strategies to manage China—through its inclusion, not exclusion.
Farheen Yousuf and Priyanka Garodia (Advanced Study Institute of Asia) review Yasheng Huang’s The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, in which the author investigates the factors behind the evolution of the Chinese state. Huang uses historical and qualitative analysis to attribute the success of the Chinese state to the EAST model—Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology that produced a unified state with a homogenized society. Huang suggests that the reasons that made the autocratic Chinese state extremely powerful may also be the reasons for its possible decline—such as its capacity for large-scale mobilization, centralized control, and the ability to quickly implement top-down policies. By “decline,” the author means a gradual erosion of the state’s economic vitality, social cohesion, and political legitimacy when confronted with complex, multidimensional crises, particularly the crises it produces. Huang notes that most crises were created by the Chinese Communist Party’s own decisions in the first place, such as the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the Tiananmen Square protests (1989), and recently the COVID-19 pandemic (2020)—and the author acknowledges that the state has an excellent record of managing its own crises. Yet, the cycle of crisis creation and resolution gestures towards fundamental systemic weakness: that the autocratic structure cannot self-correct without major internal conflict or outside pressure. Huang, therefore, argues that the Chinese state might decline in the coming years if the CCP does not allow the airing of differences in opinion or thought, and some form of democratization within the party space.
We are delighted to present the proceedings of the Rising Asia-Bengal Chamber of Commerce & Industry Summit on “The Rise of the East,” held at the historic premises of the BCC&I on December 20, 2024. The Summit, an initiative of Rising Asia Foundation President Aniruddha Lahiri and the Bengal Chamber, offered a wide variety of strategies on the economic development of Bengal, India’s Northeast region, and the eastern region. Important presentations were made by Dr. Amit Mitra, the Cabinet-ranked Principal Chief Advisor to the Chief Minister of West Bengal and the Finance Department of the Government of West Bengal; senior World Bank officials; deans and professors of universities; business leaders; and literary figures.
