Kindle. The greatest hits of wartime Sài Gòn from the 1930s to the 1970s. Specifically we follow the titular Chinese headmaster Percival Chen as he does little more than whore and gamble in Chợ Lớn while his brotherly lieutenant, fellow Chinese Mak, runs his English school. For whose benefit, we are supposed to ask, but it is always clear that Mak has deep roots in the Vietnamese independence movement that transcend the partition of the country.
As a semi-authentic, sentimental dynastic tale it's fairly engaging. The prose is flabby and needed a good edit; the repetition-in-the-small (paragraphs that repeat the previous paragraph but with a tad more colour) recurs so often, too often. Regularly stuffed in the middle is a tendentious sentence that asserts this is how things went, how things must go, as if the author lacks faith in the persuasiveness of his narrative structures. And of course so much could go other ways and did. The characterisation is generally weak; Percival is a muppet and Mak is underdrawn. The women are just sex objects or madams, all creatures of the demimonde, mostly victims. The dialogue is highly suspect: there's no chance that Chen would identify as Viet Cong to the occupying forces of Sài Gòn. It seems unlikely "Việt Minh" is the right term for Mak's network. Such inaccuracies are just laziness this late in history.
In a broader context, Andrew X. Pham provided a lot more colour and historicity in his recent Twilight Territory. The Chinese perspective is far more valuable than that of the Western journos of, for instance, Koch's Highways to a War (and see also Neil Sheehan's memoir) and I'd be keen to read a better treatment. I vaguely recall Violet Kupersmith mining a similar vein.
