East Is East

...Regrettably, the people of Asia do not understand our idea of fair play...

...And very corrupt, they might have added...

...He was, the Americans said, a wonderful official --energetic, dedicated, smart...

...In this respect, An Eye for the Dragon will be a great guide for the uninitiated, not to mention our Asian-problem-solvers...

...As Blood-worth writes, "Europe acquired democracy, Asia had democracy thrust upon it, and many of Asia's masters look upon a parliament much as their forbears looked upon a well-turned-out elephant: it should be thoroughly domesticated and docile, and there should be no doubt as to who rides whom . . . . " American critics of the war complain that South Vietnam's President Thieu and Vice President Ky are not representative of the Vietnamese people, but only Asians who know the wily Westerner's strange ways make such statements...

...America's most destitute urban minorities live a life of Riley by comparison...

...You don't understand," she said, "I mean poor people, reary [sic] poor people...

...Yet it is precisely his ignorance--the sort any Westerner must feel in Asia--which makes this book so rare and satisfying a guide to the globe's most baffling mystery...

...There, fortunetellers are more meaningful than international politics, and growing rice is the central problem...

...Bloodworth took her to one of London's bleak, black-brick neighborhoods where families are stuffed into two-room flats, but his wife was not satisfied...

...Americans expect something good out of life...

...Reading this book, I thought repeatedly how nice it would have been if Bloodworth had written it 10 years ago, and John F. Kennedy, Robert McNa-mara and McGeorge Bundy had been able to read it then...

...What she meant, of course, was poverty like that of the indigents who live on wooden platforms above the putrid canals of Djakarta, washing in, defecating in and drinking from the brown goo that oozes beneath them...

...While there may be a handful of honest public officials in the entire region, there are surely no more...

...This simple fact continues to elude even such persistent critics of the war as the editorial writers of the New York Times, who have embraced the newest Nixon proposal enthusiastically, apparently because they think it a genuinely reasonable offer...

...Bloodworth summarizes the inadequacy of this approach in two sentences: "The Vietcong were not fighting the war...

...In Vietnam last summer President Thieu appointed one of his cousins to be a province chief in the Mekong Delta...

...Only a tiny fraction of educated Asians have much appreciation for Western political models...

...Actually, though, you can expect nothing else in Southeast Asia...

...Instead we have tried to turn the war into a test of muscle and technology, an elaborate sort of collective bargaining dispute with weapons, to be resolved in much the manner of classic American contests on football fields or at county-fair baking competitions...

...They were living it...

...Drawing the line against Communism, preserving the free world, maintaining a balance of superpowers--these pursuits seem irrelevant in the Asian context...

...It may be important for us to restrict Chinese influence in Southeast Asia, but if we are to try to do that we will have to abide by local rules...

...Asians, on the contrary, frequently expect the worst, and marvel at any good fortune...

...Because countless people in positions of power have robbed them over the years, the Vietnamese--like all Southeast Asians--have come to regard official corruption as a fact of life...

...Similarly, millions of Asians fully expect those who govern them to be mean, corrupt and useless...

...His humility is based not on any lack of information, but rather on a perception that in Asia information is not enough...

...The Nixon Administration's latest peace proposal, like all its predecessors and all the decisions that brought the escalation of the war, is as American as Rap Brown's cherry pie...

...No one has ever represented the Vietnamese...

...She asked him to show her "how poor people in the West live...

...Bloodworth tellingly describes Asia's dubious political ethics...

...They even welcome flamboyant strongmen like Sihanouk and Sukarno, admiring them for their close ties to the kings of the past or gods of the present, and ignoring (or, more often, being ignorant of) their excesses...

...Anyone who thinks he understands the situation here," Bloodworth quotes a mythical ambassador as saying, "simply does not know the facts...

...A basic and significant difference between "us" and "them" is captured in a story about his visit to London with his Chinese wife, who had never before been in the West...

...the Vietnamese Communists are battling for their country, not for a "fair settlement...

...Washington Post Dennis Bloodworth does not understand Asia, and he admits it...

...As he recognizes and makes perfectly clear, our Occidental problem-solving techniques have no relevance to the enigma that is the Orient...

...perhaps that is why there is less evident discontent in Djakarta than in East Harlem...

...Their entire world-view is profoundly different from ours, as Bloodworth demonstrates again and again in hundreds of lively anecdotes...

...Perhaps the most praiseworthy aspect of An Eye for the Dragon is the author's unswerving refusal to offer "solutions" to the "Asian problem...

...How true...

...Acceptance of authoritarian politics and winking at corruption are merely two of the hundreds of examples Bloodworth provides of Asia's fundamental dissimilarity with the West, to which we stubbornly blind ourselves...

...Reviewed by Robert G. Kaiser Former Southeast Asia correspondent...

...Indeed they were, and are...

...As we discovered in Vietnam, playing according to our own rules on an Asian field simply does not work...

...We have never accepted the fundamental peculiarity--it is tempting to call it madness--of life in Asia...

...Alas, the Vietnam monster they helped create is still tormenting us, and the American urge to "solve" Asia remains irresistible...

...With a little adjustment of moral focus," he writes, "public funds and private purse [can] be made to merge, like the double image in the viewfinder of a camera, until personal expenditure [by Asian officials becomes] a patriotic duty...

...Bloodworth explains: "The civil service is regarded as the ideal opening for young [Southeast Asian] men not so much to slave for their country as to improve their situation and that of their family...

...or the cliff-dwellers of Hong Kong whose shacks are periodically destroyed by the monsoon rains...

...or the refugees who make their homes in Saigon drainpipes and go for months without vegetables, meat or fish...