VIETNAM

Countries visited: Vietnam (everywhere!), Thailand (Koh Tao)

 It’s been a while since I last posted - so this is gonna be a long one...

LOCAL STORIES

• I read The Sympathizer (tragicomedic satire, 2016 Pulitzer winner, I liked but didn’t love it) just a few months before this RTW trip - so I gave myself a pass.
• Werner watched the 10-part, 18-hour Ken Burns documentary, The Vietnam War (AKA “the American War” to the Vietnamese). He loved it. Also was interesting for instance that he had never heard of things like the My Lai massacre or the Tet Offensive - which I suppose as Americans we learn about.
• Had some good chats with expat friends in Saigon about the war / politics in Vietnam. Many were Vietnamese Americans, whose parents fled after the war and still harbored some resentment of the north. Common things heard: Of course the US lost bc the Americans were so obvious about their tactics and positions (whereas the North Vietnamese “would hide under lily pads... you never knew which lilies had a soldier underneath!”), South Vietnam would have continued being prosperous (more so than unified Vietnam today) and had the countries stayed separate would have been like North/South Korea; the Northerners subjected many to “re-education” camps and took away everything. (In Vietnamese museums, the rhetoric/story was quite pro-revolution, stating things like the North Vietnamese never tortured anyone despite, for instance, John McCain testifying that he was tortured as a POW.)
• Also, nice perspective for America-centric folks, from the always-sensible Hans Rosling: “I asked Niem to show me the monument to the Vietnam War [...] Niem drove me to one of the city’s central parks and showed me a small stone with a brass plate, three feet high. I thought it was a joke. [...] Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed. Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He drove a little way further, and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He said, “Here is where we commemorate our war heroes. Isn’t it beautiful?” This was the monument to Vietnam’s wars with China. The wars with China had lasted, on and off, for 2,000 years. The French occupation had lasted 200 years. The ‘Resistance War Against America’ took only 20 years. The sizes of the monuments put things in perfect proportion.”

REGIONAL STORIES

• Guilty pleasure admission time: I devoured all 3 books in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, joyously. They were pretty trashy (and make me wonder how clueless foreigners now perceive Singapore/China??) but also were full of fun insights into (and jabs at) cultures adjacent to my own. For instance, I recognized all too well the Hong Kongers sneering at “Mainlanders” (Mainland Chinese).
• “What Happened to Fan Bing-Bing, China’s Most Famous Actress?” (NYTimes): What happens when an actress gets too opulent to remain a good public symbol for Communist China? A nice, real-world political balance to Crazy Rich Asians! 
• “The Great Chinese Art Heist” (GQ): This is a crazy, crazy story of how a string of European art museums are now being robbed of specific items originally looted by Anglo-French forces from China’s Summer Palace in 1860. But who’s stealing them?

FAKE NEWS, VIOLENCE, and FACEBOOK ABROAD

I’ve been mildly addicted to reading about the effects of “fake news” abroad, in markets that most Facebook employees probably know nothing about and that most Facebook shareholders probably care not at all about. There’s been great coverage of this, especially some recent ones from Buzzfeed. Highlights:

• Philippines (Buzzfeed), where social media experts used FB to bring and keep Duterte to power, and justify the extrajudicial killings of “druggies” (read: the poor / political opponents).
• Myanmar (Buzzfeed) where FB helped foment hatred against the Rohingya Muslims and justify a genocide
• Dehumanizing, desensitizing speech allows for the violence that often follows it. (No genocide or targeted mass violence has occurred without such media.) And FB is the biggest loudspeaker we’ve ever had.
• Choice quote from the Myanmar article: “Questions remain as to how Facebook can scale its approach to regulating content in a country where hate speech is overwhelmingly common on social media, and enforce its rules without alienating its users or becoming the country’s de facto censor.” More context: In both of the above places, the “Facebook Free” program means that people can access the internet for free using FB (ie, all data costs are reverse-billed, for you payments/product nerds) - so that most people’s understanding of the internet is filtered through their FB feed. In Myanmar, the words “Facebook” and “internet” are used interchangeably. This, coupled with the very few local language experts (in the Philippines, 40 people) doing all the fact-checking, presents a tricky situation: Should 40 Tagalog speakers be the gatekeepers of truth/news for an entire country of 103million people?!
• Another interesting question: in policing fake news, should FB be policing “inauthentic accounts and pages” (but what if these pages post real news?) or policing “false information” (what if they’re spoken by a real authority, e.g. a president?) - h/t this article
• Also interesting reads: Facebook / Fake news in Nicaragua (New Yorker) and Sri Lanka (NYTimes)
• Related, “Not Quite Democracy” (Longreads) An interview with the author of Silicon States on how Big Tech (wrongly) sees itself as “democratizing” goods/services and heightening “transparency” (AKA why we need more public policy people in tech, nudge nudge 😉)

AMERICANA

• “Having the Wrong Conversations about Hate Activity” (Longreads): A beautiful, heart-wrenching account of race and motherhood, and casual racism in America. (Parts of this remind me of the excellent Dear White People Netflix series)
• “Bundyville” podcast mini-series: An evocative and fascinating look at the fight over ranching in national lands in the American West. The host has a clear, unapologetic point of view, but I prefer that over false neutrality. This is fine journalism.
• “Paul Manafort, American Hustler: The Plot Against America” (Atlantic): Long but well-researched and -written article about how Manafort rewrote the rules of lobbying in Washington, and how he allowed us to catch him.

INTERNATIONAL STORIES / SCIENCE CORNER

• “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World” (book) by Hans Rosling - Only the late Rosling could make demographics so fun and engaging. This book makes you immediately a more informed and better global citizen. Please read it.
• “Windfall: The Booming Business of Climate Change” (book) by McKenzie Funk: Werner finally read this book that I’ve been raving about FOR YEARS, and he also loved it. This is my hands-down favorite book on climate change, and I used to work full-time on climate change research. Why? People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them scientific facts about climate projections, but when you say that people are creating whole companies or hedge funds based on these projections, when big money bets are on the line, then suddenly people get it. Shit is going to happen, and there will be winners, and there will be losers. Also, it’s a well-written, entertaining, cheeky book - in the vein of Michael Lewis or Mary Roach.
• “Story of a Face: How a Transplanted Face Saved Katie Stubblefield’s Life” (NatGeo): I’m actually not sure how to describe this photo essay / article. It’s tragic, interesting, and philosophical. Also, those PHOTOS 😱.