Fire in the Lake Quotes

“... a real program of social and economic reform [in Vietnam] would have involved a real conflict ... between the peasants ... and the landlords and the city people... [it] was difficult ... because it required a concern for the peasants ... it was those capacities ... its American supporters lacked.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“In his failure Nhu had withdrawn so far into himself that in the end his face was a mask that no longer opened onto the real world.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“There is an old Thai proverb to the effect that it is worthwhile to try and help an elephant that is trying to stand up, but perfectly useless to help one that happens to be falling down.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Americans ignore history, for to them everything has always seemed new under the sun.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“The villages of northern and central Vietnam stood like small fortresses in the center of their rice fields, closed off from the world by bamboo hedges.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“The laws of the emperor are less than the customs of the village,” runs the best-known of Vietnamese adages. In Vietnam it was the village rather than the clan that stood as the primary community.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“In both cases the Vietnamese leaders assumed Chinese political culture while rejecting, or at least attempting to reject, Chinese political domination.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“From the tenth century onwards they defended themselves from China with a ferocity that perhaps could only come from a consciousness of the fragile borders of their identity. In the great patriarchate of the empire Vietnam was the unfilial son.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“In the third and fourth centuries B.C. the Red River Delta sustained two kingdoms, Au Lac and Van Lang, whose people the Chinese called simply southern, or Yuéh (Viêt in Vietnamese). During the ten centuries of Chinese suzerainty the Viêt peoples settled slowly into a new ethnic and cultural pattern. Vietnamese history began in Chinese writing, and the Vietnamese nation took shape along the political and cultural lines of force emanating from China.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“According to ethnologists, the Vietnamese derive not from a single Chinese tribe, but from a mixture between tribes of Mongolian and Austro-Indonesian origin; their language has grown from both Chinese and Southeast Asian”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“On the official propositions about Southeast Asia rest all the strategic wisdom of, and the moral justification for, the American war in Vietnam. This being the case, it is interesting to take a look at those propositions in the light of the political history on which they are based. What was Vietnam’s relationship to China and to the other countries around her? What was the relationship between northern and southern Vietnam, and what, precisely, was Vietnamese nationalism? To answer these questions it is necessary to go back beyond 1954 to see how Vietnam initially developed as a nation,”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Unlike the Westerner, the Vietnamese child is brought up not to follow certain principles, but to accept the authority of certain people. The “Three Net Ropes” of the traditional society consisted in the loyalty of the son to his father, of the wife to her husband, and the mandarin to his emperor. The injunctions to filial piety and conjugal obedience were unconditional.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“The Confucian texts, for instance, provided the foundation for the imperial law. (Is not the law… true virtue? asked one of the nineteenth-century intellectuals. “In the law we can… find complete expositions of the three duties [of a prince, a father, and a husband] and of the five constant virtues [benevolence, righteousness, propriety, knowledge, and sincerity] as well as the tasks of the six ministries [of the central government].”20 ) As one historian has pointed out, the texts established a social contract between the government and the governed,”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“the French occupation changed the Vietnamese way of life permanently. Since the Second World War the Vietnamese have been waging a struggle not merely over the form of their state but over the nature of Vietnamese society, the very identity of the Vietnamese. It is the grandeur of the stakes involved that has made the struggle at once so intense and so opaque to Westerners.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Our customs and habits were so perfect that in our country, in our ancestors’ tombs, and in our homes, all things were in a proper state. But from the moment they arrived with their ill luck, Happiness and peace seem to have departed from everywhere.8”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Like the Chinese, they considered those who lived outside of its seamless web to be by definition barbarians. When the Vietnamese conquered peoples of other cultures — such as the Chams — they included these people within the structure of empire only on condition of their total assimilation. The peoples they could not assimilate, they simply surrounded, amoeba-like, and left them to follow their own laws. The various montagnard tribes that lived beyond the zone of wet-rice cultivation retained their own languages, customs, and governments for thousands of years inside Vietnam. But with the arrival of the French forces in the nineteenth century the Vietnamese confronted a civilization more powerful than their own; for the first time since the Chinese conquest in the second century B.C. they faced the possibility of having to assimilate themselves.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“The mandarins, the literate elite, directed all their scholarship not towards invention and progress, but towards a more perfect repetition of the past, a more perfect maintenance of the status quo.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Citizenship” in a Vietnamese village was personal and untransferable. In the past, few Vietnamese ever left their village in times of peace, for to do so was to leave society itself — all human attachments, all absolute rights and duties.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“they tried to persuade him to go with the others, he refused, saying, “I have to stay behind to look after this piece of garden. Of all the property handed down to me by my ancestors, only this garden now remains. I have to guard it for my grandson.” Seeing the soldiers look askance, the old man admitted that his grandson had been conscripted and that he had not heard from him in two years. He paused, searching for an explanation, and then said, “If I leave, the graves of my ancestors, too, will become forest. How can I have the heart to leave?”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“The Vietnamese worshiped their ancestors as the source of their lives, their fortunes, and their civilization. In the rites of ancestor worship the child imitated the gestures of his grandfather so that when he became the grandfather, he could repeat them exactly to his grandchildren. In this passage of time that had no history the death of a man marked no final end. Buried in the rice fields that sustained his family, the father would live on in the bodies of his children and grandchildren. As time wrapped around itself, the generations to come would regard him as the source of their present lives and the arbiter of their fate. In this continuum of the family “private property” did not really exist, for the father was less of an owner than a trustee of the land to be passed on to his children. To the Vietnamese the land itself was the sacred, constant element: the people flowed over the land like water, maintaining and fructifying it for the generations to come.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Vietnam is no longer a closed economic system, but the idea remains with the Vietnamese that great wealth is antisocial, not a sign of success but a sign of selfishness.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Culturally as geographically Vietnam lies half a world away from the United States. Many Americans in Vietnam learned to speak Vietnamese, but the language gave no more than a hint of the basic intellectual grammar that lay beneath. In a sense there was no more correspondence between the two worlds than that between the atmosphere of the earth and that of the sea. There was no direct translation between them in the simple equations of x is y and a means b. To find the common ground that existed between them, both Americans and Vietnamese would have to re-create the whole world of the other, the whole intellectual landscape.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“Its success with its chosen contender would depend not merely on U.S. military power but on the resources of both the United States and the Saigon government to solve Vietnamese domestic problems in a manner acceptable to the Vietnamese.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam

“But, as Otare Mannoni has pointed out, gratitude is a strange emotion in that it is made up of two seemingly contradictory expressions: first, that the individual is deeply indebted to his benefactor, and second, that he is not indebted at all. Gratitude is, in effect, a compromise, and one made almost uniquely by Westerners, to reconcile the demand for obligation with the need to maintain personal independence.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam