| AN EYE FOR THE DRAGON: Southeast Asia Observed: 1954-1970 Dennis Bloodworth New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-374-15129-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10: 0-374-15129-6 | 414pp. | HC | $8.95 | |
He was there. It behooves a foreign correspondent, if he wishes his dispatches to truly reflect what happens on his beat, to steep himself in the cultural milieu of the countries he covers: touring the hinterlands, not just the big cities; learning something of the local language and custom; participating in the festivals; meeting people high and people low. Dennis Bloodworth was there. His dispatches must have been really something. Perhaps someday I'll be lucky enough to read some.
Consider the account of his November 1954 trip from Saigon to Hanoi in a Viet Nam partitioned by the Geneva Accords of that year (pages 85-87). Here's a snippet:
We [after flying through a thunderstorm in a battered old Dakota crammed with peasants and their constantly shifting belongings to the port of Haiphong, still occupied by the French] crawled out at Haiphong into heavy flapping sheets of rain. The airfield was in almost total darkness and seemed deserted. Hanoi was almost seventy miles inland to the west. These are the moments when the lonely correspondent, typewriter in one hand, hold-all in the other, rain streaming down his neck, enjoys that most reassuring of all human sensations—hitting rock-bottom. He will not starve, he will not freeze to death. Somewhere beyond this fifty-acre field of twisted and uneven metal runway on which he has just tripped painfully there is another deadline. We all trudged off to the carpark and there, miraculously, was a glorified station wagon converted into a minibus, and a bearded young Frenchman in minishorts asking if anyone with 1,500 piasters (about seven pounds ten) wanted to go to Hanoi. By eleven we were rattling over the one-mile-long Paul Doumer road-and-rail bridge that crossed the Red River and led into the dead city. I found a bed in an empty brothel (all the girls had fled south). – Snippets from pages 85-87 |
According to the author, Far East correspondent (but not mild-mannered) for a great metropolitan British newspaper1, "Southeast Asia is like the durian — prickly, strange, smelly and beautiful, revolting, enchanting, an offense and an addiction." It is an apt comparison, for most Westerners find the region and its peoples endlessly puzzling. Mr. Bloodworth explains in his introduction that he writes no scholarly tome, but rather one with a reporter's viewpoint, more concerned with the interplay of eclectic historical, ethnic, religious and political currents as they manifest themselves in contemporary events.2
His first chapter compresses the early history of the region into a series of hegemonic waves: Funan, Champa, Chen Le, Srividjaja, Madjapahit, the more recent kingdoms of the Thais, the Shans, the Laos, the Siamese, Nam Viet, Dai Viet, Annam — surging, spawning new religions, subsiding, until modern times when the round-eyes thrust themselves into the bubbling oriental cauldron they regarded as inscrutable.
The remaining 34 chapters provides sketches of individual nations. In table of contents order, they are: Singapore, India, The Philippines, North Borneo... Intermingled with these are snapshots of significant events like the February 1960 visit of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ("Mr. Peaceful Coexistence") to Sukarno's Indonesia. Of this, and the ensuing cascade of Soviet "gifts", Bloodworth writes,
| The generosity of Mr. Peaceful Coexistence had brought Indonesia to the brink of ruin. But ruin, of course, means poverty, and Asian poverty is the friend of Asian Communism—when Communism is the devil the poor don't yet know. |
An Eye for the Dragon imparts a host of cultural and historical details in a vividly colorful fashion. I cannot recommend it too highly.
This enjoyably informative narrative is supplemented by:
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