Studies of The Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2019. xviii, 259 pp. (B&W photos.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-21825-1.
The title of Haydon Cherry’s new history of early twentieth-century Saigon, Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City, might undersell its contributions to the analysis of urban life in Indochina. The stories themselves are well researched and told, richly detailed, and offer captivating glimpses of individual efforts to survive the poverty and inequality of colonial Saigon. And of course, the title signals the author’s intention of countering dominant historiographic approaches to colonial-era Vietnam by focusing on the quotidian struggles of poor people—stories typically omitted in Western-authored political histories or locally-published revolutionary biographies. But these are not mere stories, idle and disconnected from wider political-economic forces. To the contrary, Cherry’s accounts animate individual experiences within the contexts of the regional rice trade and the institutions of colonial rule, offering useful insights into, among other topics, the drivers and impacts of migration, biopolitical strategies of administrative control, and the consequences of social and ethnic identities.
Presented as a “social history” of colonial-era Saigon and the surrounding region, Down and Out in Saigon is structured around the experiences and pathways of six poor residents of diverse origins, detailing the livelihood strategies of those lurking in the shadows of the city once considered the shining “pearl of the Orient.” Following an introductory chapter devoted to the “vagaries and vicissitudes of the regional rice economy” (3) which conditioned individual life trajectories, the next six chapters follow a rough chronological sequence, each focusing on one person appearing in the colonial ledgers between the years 1904 and 1929: a prostitute, a Chinese labourer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an invalid, and a poor Frenchman. Cherry draws upon a wide variety of historical sources to flesh out these often-elusive biographies, including administrative records and statistics, newspapers, letters, and most notably, documented interviews with the six protagonists and others in their orbits, allowing the poor and forgotten “to speak in their own words” (5) as much as possible. The author weaves together enough fragmented bits of information concerning these actors to “trace [their] itineraries” (3) and speculate on the circumstances, motives, and decisions that brought them to Saigon and into the web of French surveillance and intervention.
Cherry’s first chapter demonstrates how the performance of Cochinchina’s rice-based economy had an overdetermining effect on the lives and livelihoods of Vietnamese farmers, Chinese immigrants, and French colonists alike. He explains how plentiful harvests triggered intensified economic activity among producers, buyers, millers, and exporters, thereby lifting the entire region and fueling both urban migration and consumer demand in the markets of downtown Saigon and Cho Lon. And he shows how natural disasters and faraway wars could throw the entire Cochinchinese economy into upheaval, prompting desperate villagers to pull up stakes and try to earn a living in the city. In fact, all of the subjects of Cherry’s “stories of the poor” can be considered migrants to Saigon of one kind or another—Vietnamese people from surrounding villages or other parts of Indochina along with settlers from China or France—and accordingly the analysis of migration figures prominently in all chapters, so much so that it could easily be identified, along with the economics of rice trading, as a central theme of the book.
Saigon was and remains a city of transplants, and Cherry’s strategy of tracing the paths of his protagonists throughout their sojourns—rather than choosing an artificial spatial boundary for the work—results in the inclusion of a variety of urban and rural sites, Cho Lon most prominently among the former, and Bien Hoa Province representative of the latter—the place of origin of the young woman who became a prostitute, and a stop along the way to Saigon for the Chinese migrant. Interestingly, Cherry notes the frustration expressed by French authorities at the perceived “taste for moving” among the Vietnamese, even as histories of Tonkin point to the opposite complaint: that the Vietnamese are unreasonably “attached” to their native places (que huong) and unwilling to heed the call to open new areas for settlement (Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam, Singapore: NAIS Press, 2005). These contradictory discourses could be explained by regional factors, with northern Vietnamese claiming stronger connections to their homelands, but the discourse of dangerously unmoored villagers finds more relevance in this case: Cherry acknowledges the pull of native-place ties in Cochinchina, but shows clearly how poverty and crisis can overcome even the fiercest loyalties to home villages, generating the uncontrollable exodus from the countryside that provoked such handwringing among colonial administrators.
Other insights into colonial-era migration patterns emerge as Cherry’s analysis follows each actor’s pathways, demonstrating occupational specialization among those with common origins, circular migration as an economic strategy to accommodate both urban employment and ongoing village-based responsibilities of planting and harvesting, and the role of Saigon’s informal economy—including such professions as day labourer, rickshaw driver, and prostitute—to absorb excess labour arriving from the countryside.
In places where a lack of historical records force Cherry to speculate on the options facing his protagonists, readers are treated to yet more insight into the livelihood strategies of Cochinchina’s poor. For example, he covers the different occupations to which a young village child could aspire, as well as the unexpected last-resort strategies undertaken by the downtrodden in Saigon, including checking into prison or assuming the identity of a monk to receive alms and shelter. In this way, six stories become capable of speaking to the experiences of countless more poor people living in or passing through Saigon whose names feature even less prominently, if at all, in the historical record.
With its person-centred approach and depth of investigation, Down and Out in Saigon represents a significant scholarly achievement within the fields of Vietnamese studies, Asian history, and urban studies. Readers from all backgrounds interested in the topics of colonialism, public health, migration, and the interplay between governing structures and individual agency will also find much of value within the book. In addition to these contributions, the author’s lively and expressive writing style make it a pleasure to read and suitable for a variety of audiences, from the undergraduate to specialist levels.
Timothy Karis
University of Florida, Gainesville