The Quiet American
As a rule, I don’t read books about countries I am in. Witness the backpacker who spends his day with nose buried inside guide book, all the while a lush green landscape soars outside the bus window. I could not bring myself to read Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides, while passing through The Isle of Skye. It also felt woefully inappropriate to read Dubliners while living on Pearse Street and I likely would have had my ass kicked if I were seen reading Zadie Smith while still living in Willesden Green. Such was the case with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and Saigon.
Back in the loving arms of Ilsan-sauga, I was able to relax and reflect on my (albeit tame) experiences through Greene’s richly layered narrative. Greene’s observations on imperialism, colonialism, war, love and death all resonated deeply with me. With a cold, rational voice, the book delivers a powerful, elegant and honest argument against, not only American interventionism, but war itself.
First published in ’55, Greene could not have forseen – or rather saw with stunning clarity – the trouble that has been wrought by half a century of interventionist American foreign policy. Back then, Vietnam was the lynch-pin to American prosperity in the East. “If Indo-China goes,” warned America, “Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes.” Greene’s ‘old colonialist’ responds,
What does ‘go’ mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I’d bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields, they’ll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don’t like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember – from a buffalo’s point of view you are a European too.
This is exactly the feeling I am overwhelmed when I travel. Years ago, as a university student, whose world rarely escaped the orbit of the number-ten-bus, I couldn’t wait to get out into the world and ‘help those who needed it most’. Now, when I see those people, their children, eat their food, walk their streets – I know that, if anyone, it is I who need the help.
