History of Vietnam

Many Americans never heard of Vietnam before the U.S. was enmeshed in the Vietnamese War beginning in the 1960s. Some remembered when the region was called Indochina and may even have known that the French were the colonial power in the region for most of a century, but the lengthy history of conflict in that region was largely removed from the observations of most Americans. As the book Revolution in the Village by Hy V. Luong shows, however, how the colonial era changed life in the villages of Vietnam and continued to do so into the 1930s, a time when there were increasing actions being taken to oust the French, with the French fighting back. Both sides made use of the village structure and altered village life as they sought to achieve their goals. The Yen-Bay uprising is the central action analyzes in the beginning of the book, though there was a long history for the development of anti-colonialism in Vietnam before that event. Luong argues that local traditions played an important role on shaping the response of villagers to both the imposition of colonial capitalism and to the socialist polices of the Vietnamese revolution and sets out to prove the logical connection.

The French era in Vietnam started after some 900 years of self rule, and it began with a treaty that was humiliating to the Vietnamese when it was accepted in 1862. Even the French were surprised at the way this treaty was accepted by a people who had resisted Chinese incursions for 900 years. In

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lf devout and religious. Luong describes village life in terms of Confucian values, as seen in everything from the gender-based division of labor, with leadership roles filled always by men, through the communal life of the village, with its male-oriented and class-centered model of social hierarchy within the community and the family alike: It was a hierarchical model in which descent was traced through men, residence was patrilocal, and authority, both domestic and public, rested primarily with wealthy and educated men not engaged directly in manual labor, the prominent role of women in household production processes notwithstanding (Luong 71). One such household is described in some detail, the household of Bang, a classic polygynous, patrilineally extended family firmly rooted in the Vietnamese male-oriented model of Vietnamese kinship. The extended family under one roof was a Confucian ideal. The fact that this model persisted in 1928 shows that the period of French colonial rule did little to disrupted this traditional form of family and social organization in village life. This is also the model "clearly dominant among the precolonial and colonial elite" (Luong 72). As noted, agriculture was the primary economic so

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