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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation
by Tran Tu Binh, David G. Marr, John Spragens Jr.
The Red Earth is a fascinating and strange historical document. In the early 1960s, North Vietnam published over 100 memoirs by veterans of the 'protracted struggle' from 1925-1940 as part of preparing the people for the war against America. At the time, Tran was ambassador to China, a key role. This memoir focuses on his early career as an organizer at a Michelin rubber plantation, where Tran helped lead a successful strike.
Tran was a member of the emerging Vietnamese intelligentsia. His parents were poor peasants, but they managed to send him to seminary, where he learned Latin, French, and how to write before being kicked out for opposing the priest over a funeral for a Vietnamese historian. He worked as an itinerant Bible teacher, before poverty and a desire to 'proletarianize' himself, to join the workers, lead him to sign on as a laborer in a rubber plantation.
Rubber harvesting is hard, dangerous work under good conditions, and French colonialism was far from good conditions. The contract, which the mostly illiterate workers couldn't read anyways, promised a certain amount of food and good treatment. Instead, workers face starvation rations, arbitrary beatings, and no medical care. Tran describes workers kicked to death, shackled and forgotten until they starved, or simply worked to death on the plantation. Rape was omnipresent, and according to Tran due to poor food, rice of the worst quality and rotten slated fish, all children were stillborn. Transported hundreds of miles and cut off from community, they had no support but each other.
Tran was part of an embryonic party cell, and as a natural organizer he formed links with the other workers to create a union. In 1930, they successfully organized a strike, shutting down work at the factory, driving off the French soldiers, and then beating and disarming a small patrol sent to recapture the plantation. Some of the strikers argued for a general revolt, for building barricades and fighting to the the death, but Tran knew that would lead only to annihilation. He argued that they must outwit the enemy. The strikers left their guns by the manager's mansion, and said they'd return to work if conditions improve.
It was a victory, but these were amateur revolutionaries, and due to poor security, all the ringleaders, including Tran were arrested and sentenced to prison. Jail was a true revolutionary college, and when Tran left, he was a committed communist and organizer, though the book does not cover that part of his life.
The Red Earth is a fascinating account of collective action and an illuminating portrait of how and why the Vietnamese Communist Party organized as it did, heading into the deadly struggles post 1945.
Tran was a member of the emerging Vietnamese intelligentsia. His parents were poor peasants, but they managed to send him to seminary, where he learned Latin, French, and how to write before being kicked out for opposing the priest over a funeral for a Vietnamese historian. He worked as an itinerant Bible teacher, before poverty and a desire to 'proletarianize' himself, to join the workers, lead him to sign on as a laborer in a rubber plantation.
Rubber harvesting is hard, dangerous work under good conditions, and French colonialism was far from good conditions. The contract, which the mostly illiterate workers couldn't read anyways, promised a certain amount of food and good treatment. Instead, workers face starvation rations, arbitrary beatings, and no medical care. Tran describes workers kicked to death, shackled and forgotten until they starved, or simply worked to death on the plantation. Rape was omnipresent, and according to Tran due to poor food, rice of the worst quality and rotten slated fish, all children were stillborn. Transported hundreds of miles and cut off from community, they had no support but each other.
Tran was part of an embryonic party cell, and as a natural organizer he formed links with the other workers to create a union. In 1930, they successfully organized a strike, shutting down work at the factory, driving off the French soldiers, and then beating and disarming a small patrol sent to recapture the plantation. Some of the strikers argued for a general revolt, for building barricades and fighting to the the death, but Tran knew that would lead only to annihilation. He argued that they must outwit the enemy. The strikers left their guns by the manager's mansion, and said they'd return to work if conditions improve.
It was a victory, but these were amateur revolutionaries, and due to poor security, all the ringleaders, including Tran were arrested and sentenced to prison. Jail was a true revolutionary college, and when Tran left, he was a committed communist and organizer, though the book does not cover that part of his life.
The Red Earth is a fascinating account of collective action and an illuminating portrait of how and why the Vietnamese Communist Party organized as it did, heading into the deadly struggles post 1945.