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Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory. By CHRISTOPH GlEBEL. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. xxii, 255 pp. $40.00 (cloth).
This is an audacious and imaginative work from an author with a knack for close and relentless work with sources. It tells the life story of Vietnamese Communist Party stalwart Ton Due Thang, details the mythology that grew up around him, and deconstructs the claims made about him to shed light on changing self-conceptions and internal contradictions within the party over the course of its existence, from the 1920s to the present day. It is a strikingly original achievement and an important contribution to Vietnam studies.
Born in the Mekong Delta in 1888, Ton went to Saigon at the age of eighteen; received training as a mechanic; journeyed to France during World War I; and was in Toulon in the immediate postwar period, when strikes and mutinies broke out among workers and military personnel stationed in the port. After returning to Vietnam, he joined in popular struggles and in 1927 was admitted into the Revolutionary Youth League, a precursor to the Communist Party. A year later, he became involved in a quarrel that led to the murder of a party member; was convicted by the French; and was then incarcerated in Con Lon prison, where he remained until the August Revolution of 1945. An elder, a worker, and a southerner, with a modest...