Season In Red Serves Up A Rich Tapestry

Sun Herald

Sunday November 5, 2006

Reviewed by Heidi Maier

Good Morning Hanoi: A Year On The Airwaves In The New Vietnam

Iain Finlay and Trish Clark

(Simon & Schuster, $29.95)

A Season in Red: My Great Leap Forward Into The New China

Kirsty Needham

(Allen & Unwin, $24.95)

FOR fledgling and established journalists alike, some experiences cannot be confined to the pages of a daily newspaper. The stories that need to be told are simply too many and too dense to be given justice in such a tightly packed forum.

For Iain Finlay, Trish Clark and Kirsty Needham, working and travelling in Asia was the catalyst for the events and encounters that have resulted in two travel memoirs.

Veteran reporters who spent a year working in Vietnam's fledgling radio broadcasting community, Finlay and Clark stress that Good Morning Hanoi is about what they identify early on as "the new Vietnam", though the book focuses less on the nation as a whole and more on its capital Hanoi.

Assuming that your average Australian reader's knowledge of Vietnamese culture and history is, at best, virtually non-existent, we're told early on - in the first of many condescending passages - that "today, Vietnam is a country that is powering into the future at full throttle, trying to make up for lost time".

Such grating condescension is thankfully absent from Needham's interesting, often pithy, memoir.

The young reporter, whose fascination with China inspired her to learn Chinese and relocate to study, live and work in Beijing, writes openly and engagingly about the expectations she was forced to discard after living for only a short time in the surreal and often contradictory country that had become her passion. She exhibits a healthy and endearing sense of self-deprecation.

Although both books seek to immerse the reader in the myriad details that constitute the life of an expat - the difficulties and rewards - the approaches adopted by the authors, and their ultimate success, are markedly different.

Finlay and Clark's Good Morning Hanoi is rich with attempted political and social contextualisation, but its tone too often crosses the line from informative to condescending.

While it is understandable that the authors wouldn't feel comfortable assuming a uniform level of reader familiarity with 21st century Vietnam, the constant repetition of certain facts and phrases becomes tiresome and annoying, rendering the reading experience more frustrating than pleasurable.

By comparison, Needham's prose is at once informative and refreshingly conversational. At her best she contrasts the obvious freedom of life in the West with the oppressive atmosphere that pervades youth culture in China.

One of the highlights of the memoir comes when she describes her short-lived job as an agony aunt for a teenage magazine. Her days consisted of reading and responding to letters from teenagers whose lives were radically removed from anything within the realm of her own experience.

Detecting cultural and moral minefields, Needham was unable to offer advice and her column - her first and last as an agony aunt - never made it to print.

Her "carefully worded advice" to a girl being asked to spy on her classmates was replaced by text from government education officials exhorting the importance of loyalty and honesty.

Reading the rewritten column was, for Needham, the moment at which "it began to dawn on a failed agony aunt just how far the correct government line stretched across the newspaper floor".

Unlike Good Morning Hanoi, A Season In Red offers a witty, interesting insight into parts of modern Chinese life and society that many readers will find revelatory and provocative.

© 2006 Sun Herald

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