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Personal Recollections David G. Marr, November 2019

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Personal Recollections David G. Marr, November 2019 Southeast Asian Studies at ANU – Personal recollection Personal Recollections David G. Marr, November 2019 I was born in Georgia and grew up in New York, Ohio and California – a not uncommon trajectory in America during the 1940s. As the eldest of six children, my parents told me early that a scholarship would be required to get to university. We had a full set of National Geographic magazines, whose foreign images kept me entranced for hours on end. At Santa Barbara High School I especially enjoyed the history and civics classes, as well as extra- curricular debating opportunities. I was a dedicated member of the high school Reserve Officer Training Corps, and counsellor at summer Boy Scout/Explorer camps. The most attractive university offer was a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps full scholarship to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1955. I majored in International Relations and minored in Asian Studies. A course on China with Professor Wing Tsit-chan was particularly inspiring. Approached in senior year by a State Department recruiter, I had to reply that I was obliged to spend at least three years in the US Marine Corps. Commissioned in 1959, I chose Okinawa as my first posting and learned some Japanese on the side. I applied to Headquarters Marine Corps to study Japanese at the Army Language School in Monterey, but was offered one year of intensive Vietnamese instead. That proved to be a life changer. Assigned as interpreter for the first Marine helicopter squadron sent to Vietnam in 1962, I soon came to question our strategy and tactics if not yet the justification for fighting there. I married Phan Thị Aí and in 1963 was posted to the Fleet Marine Force Intelligence section in Hawaii. I left the Marines in 1964 to begin a National Defence Foreign Languages graduate scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, taking part in the Free Speech Movement and earliest teach-ins concerning the Vietnam War. For my master’s thesis I spent the summer of 1965 interviewing Vietnamese students in Saigon, Dalat and Huế about their political attitudes and choices. This could have led me to a political science doctorate, but by now I had no desire to become associated with US government machinations in Vietnam. I turned to history and obtained a Fulbright grant to conduct research in Vietnam and Japan on Vietnamese anti-colonial movements. It was this work that convinced me that US withdrawal from Vietnam was imperative. I joined a student demonstration in downtown Saigon that put me on the Republic of Vietnam’s black list for the duration of the war. Back in Berkeley I took part in formation of the nationwide Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. In 1969, George McTurnan Kahin invited me to teach at Cornell University, where interest in Vietnam was peaking. I completed the reworking of my PhD thesis, published as Vietnamese Anticolonialism (University of California Press, 1971). In 1971, I co-directed formation of the Indochina Resource Center in Washington to lobby for US exodus from Vietnam. In late 1974 I visited North Vietnam. By early 1975, with US forces withdrawn and public interest in Vietnam evaporating, I was eager to get back to academia. But no university in the US was interested in hiring a Vietnam historian. I was lucky when a friend, Christine Pelzer White, sent me a small clipping from the Canberra Times advertising a two-year research fellowship at the Australian National University. We arrived at Canberra airport in June 1975 to a warm welcome from Anthony Reid and Christine. We were provided a nice ANU-owned house in the new northern suburb of Flynn. Soon I was meeting members of the Australian Moratorium, who since 1971 had campaigned against the war in Vietnam. I joined the Australia-Vietnam Society, and began editing its monthly newsletter, ‘Indochina Issues’. Australians clearly realized that Asia was important to their future. The ANU was certainly congenial to research. The Library proved quite strong on French language books about Vietnam, there were relevant Vietnamese periodical subscriptions, and George Miller spearheaded a sustained, complicated effort to obtain books from Vietnam. A 1976 colloquium on Southeast Asian history introduced me to a host of scholars working on other countries of the region. Anthony Reid and I edited the resulting volume, Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1979). Weekly departmental seminars occurred across a wide range of Pacific and Southeast Asian topics. Elderly Professor Oscar Spate attended religiously, offering trenchant comments. In the British tradition, wine and fruit juice were provided. The Coombs Tea Room was crowded mid-morning and mid- afternoon, offering everyone an opportunity to engage informally across departments and disciplines. I was invited to offer lectures in the Faculties without having to be responsible for undergraduate courses. I especially remember taking part in Bruce Kent’s Faculty of Arts course on Comparative Asian revolutions. Anthony Milner gave me a similar opportunity on several occasions in the Faculty of Asian Studies. He and I convened a 1984 conference on ‘Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th centuries’ that attracted forty historians, epigraphers, archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists. (Volume published in 1986 by the Singapore Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and ANU Research School of Pacific Studies.). I also lectured in the Vietnamese language classes taught by Dr.Marybeth Clark. Research fellows and Visiting fellows made important contributions to our department. It was not possible to bring anyone from Vietnam yet, but two French scholars, Professors Jean Chesneaux and Pierre Brocheux, had a positive impact. Nayan Chanda proved a lively visitor. I learned a lot from Philippine specialists, notably Alfred McCoy, Norman Owen and Milagros Guerrero. I contributed chapters to books edited by these three scholars: Alfred W. McCoy, editor, Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (1980); Wang Gungwu, M.Guerrero and D.Marr, editors, Society and the Writer: Essays on Literature in Modern Asia (1981); and Norman G. Owen, editor, Death and Disease in Southeast Asia (1987). School fieldwork funding was quite generous. In the late 1970s I spent many delightful months in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris working my way through almost 10,000 Vietnamese books and pamphlets published during the period 1920-1945. This was only feasible because the librarian in charge, Mme. Christiane Rageau, allowed me direct access to the stacks rather than having to apply to receive five titles at a time in the Reading Room. I think I conveyed some of the excitement of this intellectual encounter in my resulting book, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (UC Press, 1981). In 1978 I was able to conduct research in Vietnam again for the first time in eleven years. (My wife Aí was not permitted to accompany me, but went independently. I was able to meet her family in Đà Nẵng. Our first trip back together was in 1984.) My host was Professor Phạm Huy Thông, Vice Chairman of the Vietnam Committee for the Social Sciences. He delegated me to the deputy head of the Historical Institute, Dr.Dương Trung Quốc, who became a lifelong friend. I was granted preliminary access to 1945-1954 archive materials, and accomplished a few interviews. But I was equally interested in facilitating future contacts between Vietnamese. Australian and American academics. I tried to put scholars in direct touch with each other, although mail connections remained tenuous. Subsequently the Association of Asian Studies in the US sent more than 2,000 books to me in Canberra, which were then repacked and shipped in 33 mail bags to five institutions in Vietnam. One outgrowth of my next trip, in 1980, was formation of the Australian Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam, with Vern Weitzel as key collaborator. I had noticed that Vietnam’s natural scientists had significantly more leeway to interact with western colleagues than the social scientists. French contacts predominated at both institutional and personal level. The US Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam had to contend with Washington’s embargo. We facilitated visits to Vietnam by Australian biologists, botanists, physicists, chemists and physicians. With Dr Helen Jarvis, I initiated an international Vietnamese Union catalogue in which several libraries in Vietnam would play an equal role. In 1980, I also took part in an eight-member delegation of ANU Southeast Asian Studies academics travelling to China. Professor Wang Gungwu led us around adroitly to relevant institutions. I met a number of Chinese scholars working on Vietnam. The most unusual experience was interviewing Hoàng Văn Hoan, the Vietnam Communist Party leader who had fled to China in 1978. For seven years in the 1980s I was a member of the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council’s Joint Committee on Southeast Asia. We met twice a year to deliberate area studies initiatives and award research grants. I saw my principal responsibility as promoting contacts with Australian counterparts, with an additional role of facilitating exchanges with Vietnam in the face of the US embargo, which was not lifted until 1994. In 1985, Dr.Christine White and I organized a major Vietnam conference at the Institute of Development Studies (Sussex, England) that included participants from Vietnam. (David G. Marr and Christine P.White, editors, Postwar Vietnam: Dilemmas in Socialist Development (Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1988)). In early 1988 I helped organize a visit by Joint Committee members to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. An increasing number of American and Australian social scientists began coming to Vietnam in the next few years. My role as facilitator was essentially over. I collected information about Vietnam omnivorously. Kristine Alilunas-Rodgers assisted me to compile, edit and publish a general bibliography.
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