Saturday, February 15, 2020

Week 7_Melanie Manuel_ASA 150E

Melanie Manuel
ASA 150E 001
15 February 2020  

Nayan Chanda’s Brother Enemy discusses an unsaid relationships between Vietnam, Cambodia, and China, and I am merely speaking for myself when I say that I didn’t realize the extent of these relationships and how their power dynamics worked, at least nothing besides the fact that Vietnam and China did not like each other. I only understood this after hearing it in class. However, these relationships going beyond the Vietnam War, hearing it from a first-person account of the events that was well into the actions provides a necessary perspective. Chanda speaks without the authority of knowing better, but with the intent of releasing a truth, or even multiple truths, in the sections we were given. He ultimately presents the well-known fact that United States intervention should not have taken place in Indochina, and this much I believe to be very true. United States intervention has done very little to help relations, in its stead, only presenting the country’s true and selfish capitalistic nature. I honestly never realized or knew about the relationship shared between Vietnam and Cambodia, so this was an eye-opening piece that helped me understand these relationships a little better.


The image I included came with the title, “Vietnam’s forgotten Cambodian war,” which is odd and interesting to think about, because we don’t realize this kind of history in United States textbooks. It takes digging to understand these sorts of relationships, and it makes me wonder what the relationship between the two countries is like now. 


Works Cited

Chanda, Nayan. Brother Enemy: The War after the War, 1988.

Image Used
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29106034

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