 connections. I'm your host Grace Chang and I'm joined here today by Michael Van, Professor of History and Asian Studies at Sacramento State University in California. We're going to be talking about bringing Southeast Asian history to life through various projects that Dr. Van has been working on including a graphic history on the great Hanoi Rat Hunt as well as other projects he's working on. So welcome Dr. Van to the program. Thank you. Or Mike if I may. Nice to see you here and welcome back to Hawaii. You are originally from Hawaii, correct? I'm from Oahu. It's my hometown. I went to Honhau-olee and to Ilani School class of 1985. It's always a pleasure to come back. That's wonderful. And you're back here for the World History Association conference that's going to take place in a couple days. The regional affiliate of the National World History Association is having a conference of the Hawaii World History Association paired with the California World History and Pacific Northwest World History Association. Yeah and your work is really fascinating. Like you deal with some global history subjects, but your focus is on the French colonial history in Asia, but you're interested in empires generally and in particular Southeast Asia as your area of focus. So can you tell us a little bit about your work, your background and expertise in this? Sure. My interest is really in how great powers came into Southeast Asia and what that meant for the region politically, economically, but especially culturally, was the cultural impact of both colonialism and the period of the Cold War, which I view as a new form of imperialism. And my primary work has been on colonial Vietnam, particularly the city of Honhau. I've also done a project on colonial Cambodia and the history of the city of Nongpen, the capital of Cambodia, and then some smaller projects on Indonesia. Oh that's neat, going to so many different sites throughout that region of the world. And you have a new project that's going to be out soon at graphic history on a kind of an obscure episode in French colonial Vietnamese history, the great Hanoi Rat Hunt. What is that about? What do you mean obscure? Not everybody knows about the great Hanoi Rat Hunt. This is big news. I live in a cave, I don't know. So this is something I found in the archives and this has been actually talked about in the book. I was doing a traditional urban history of Hanoi, which was a very rich and fruitful project, but to be honest, it got pretty dull. I was looking at maps and tax records and acreage of buildings and construction projects and so forth. And every now and then my eyes would start to wander in the archive card catalog and I look for odd sounding dossiers. And to amuse myself I'd call up an odd dossier and just read what was in there. Sometimes I'd be amused and sometimes I wasn't. And I found a card for a dossier marked destruction of dangerous animals in the city. I said, oh what's that? So I called that up and this dossier came out and the first thing I saw when I opened up this big bundle of papers was a form that was stamped some point in June 1902 and it was a list of the number of rats that were killed in the city of Hanoi that day. And it was about 20,000 rats. And I began to go through the dossier and there were all these stamped daily reports of thousands and thousands of rats being massacred. And I said, well what is this? This is kind of crazy. And I spent a couple hours with a dossier and what I figured out was that as part of the French project to modernize Hanoi, the French colonized Hanoi for about 80 years, they rebuilt the city as a classic colonial dual city and they put in modern industrial infrastructure. And the French were particularly proud of their sewer system. If you've seen Les Mis, the sewers play an important role there, so Victor Hugo, and the sewers for the French were a symbol of modernity. And they constructed the Vietnamese as backwards, as inferior, in needing of improvement via colonialism. So they put in the sewer system, brand new state of the art sewer system, and we're very very proud of it. It didn't serve the Vietnamese neighborhoods very well. They really served the French neighborhood much better because it's an unequal colonial dual city. And they were always fine and good to about 1902, when all of a sudden there was this huge invasion of rats. And these rats are an invasive species, they're not indigenous to Vietnam. And when they got into the city, this brand new colonial city, with a brand new sewer system, they found a completely new ecosystem that was perfect for them. Underground, no predators, lots of stinky stuff that rats like to eat. And so the sewers became overpopulated with rats, hundreds of thousands, millions of rats. And they began to get into other parts of the city, and even began to get into the fancy French homes. And the French were furious about that, because colonialism is based upon systems of white privilege, with the French having very fancy villas and so forth. So they started to have rat problems in the French part of the city. That's bad. But then this is occurring in the context of the third great bubonic plague pandemic, which starts in Yunnan, China, goes to Hong Kong in the 1890s, and then about 1900, 1901, 1902, starts to come down into French into China. And in 1902, the plague breaks out, and it's being carried on fleas, on rats, living in these sewers. And because of the sewer system, the rats have access to these French homes. And in the colonial imagination, bubonic plague, like many other diseases, were constructed as diseases of the inferior colonized so called native, not white diseases. But the sewer rats were able to bring those into white homes. So they swung into action, they ordered, remove all the rats, kill all the rats. Well, how you do that? Well, initially they sent Vietnamese sewer workers into the sewers, and they kill hundreds, thousands of rats, and bring them out. Now, people started complaining. French residents started complaining because they had these sewer workers covered in filth carrying dead rats to their neighborhood. Even though they're there to protect the French residents, these French colonists had the gall to complain about that. But they were visible and present. Yeah, but it was bringing this filth that the colonial city was supposed to disappear. So that didn't work. So then someone got the great idea of how about a bounty, or put out a bounty on all the rats, and appeal to the citizens of Hanoi to kill rats and bring them in, or give them a penny, or a couple pennies for each rat. And the colonial officials say, okay, good idea. And someone says, hey, you know, that's actually maybe not the best idea, because what are we gonna do with all those dead rats in the city hall? Just have them bring in the tails. Just bring in the tails of the rats. Okay, great idea. So they declare this bounty one penny for every rat tail brought into the city hall, and it works great. Thousands of rat tails are being brought in. They're recording these numbers that I see a hundred years later in the colonial archives, and it's all fine and good. I think they're really making a dent in the rat population until one day someone notices a rat run by with no tail. I was just thinking that. It turns out someone's been cutting off the tails of the rats, letting the rat go free to make more rats and more tails, and then collecting the bounty. Smart. That's bad. But then they go into the, they start to go into the suburbs, and they find that there's rat farms. People are raising rats, cutting off the tails, and then bringing the rewards, bringing the tails for the reward. So the whole thing backfires, and the French wind is just throwing up their hands in frustration at this whole thing. I can imagine. So this is what we mean by perverse incentive. So evidently, unbeknownst to me at the time as a trained historian, there's an economic term called perverse incentive, and evidently this is an excellent example of perverse incentive, and that's a government policy put into effect designed to eliminate something, which ironically increases the very thing it was supposed to eliminate. Yeah. So they were supposed to eliminate rats, but the bounty actually increased the number of rats. Right, right. That's so fascinating, and I mean, and the enterprise of, you know, taking up the opportunity to to get the little fee that you would have for turning in tails. Well that's one of the things I think is so amazing about it, because it's a great window into the insight of the French colonial mind and the project of imperialism as modernity and forcing things upon the conquered colonial subject, the subaltern, the Vietnamese in this case. But it also shows the various ways in which the colonized showed agency and resistance, and could work with the colonial system and undermine it. And the French officials were just so frustrated by this, and I don't have the documents for what was going on in the minds of the underground sort of black market rat farmers. I can only imagine that they were delighted and hopefully saw the irony in this whole project. Opportunity strikes, and there they were. And I can imagine that, like this makes for a great graphic and illustrated history, but yeah, I mean, you're talking about not only that it's kind of something that we would like to, you know, we can capture well in the graphic kind of form, but yeah, like the significance of it in the context of colonialism. So these kinds of colonial themes that you want to bring out with this project, what especially are you trying to illustrate through talking about this tale? Well, one of the main themes is the history of cities that have been colonized as dual cities. Cities with separate residential neighborhoods based upon racial categories. So the French explicitly marks certain neighborhoods as the European quarter or French quarter or sometimes the documents as white quarter and other neighborhoods as the Vietnamese or Asian or quote native quarter. And what you have in colonialism is the creation of these dual cities where populations exist side by side with very unequal access to the benefits of the urban system, be it the sewer system, be it supplies of fresh water, be it transportation or lighting systems, you also see dramatically different population densities where about 95% of Hanoi lived in the old quarter, which was about a third of the surface area. Meanwhile, the French population about 5% lived in a very comfortable section was only about a third of the surface of Hanoi with lots of gardens, wide streets, shady villas. So you have these two cities existing side by side divided along racial lines and really a racialization of class differences. So I thought that the comic format or the graphic history format would be a great way to represent this because you can show the two worlds existing side by side on the streets of Hanoi and show the difference between passing from the French neighborhood into the Vietnamese neighborhood. Yeah, so these attempts at segregating, but interesting, yeah, like the rats were able to kind of transcend those boundaries that the French tried to set up. And I mean, yeah, and the rats as you were saying, so they sort of symbolize carrying this, the disease of the Asians of the less civilized, but the association at that time, right, as you were saying, the bubonic plague, these kinds of epidemics and pandemics that sparked fear, all that impetus, I guess, to kind of promote this campaign to eliminate rats. Yeah, how does that associate with the broader kind of efforts to contain these pandemics at the time? Well, the historical context of the third bubonic plague is to tie directly to globalization under modern imperialism or the new imperialism. Industrialization and the European and American expansion of empire created the conditions for a global plague pandemic, industrialized transportation with steamships, the impoverishment of local communities that led to conditions where plague could spread. So plague is really a consequence of imperial globalization. Interesting. Wow, great stuff, Mike. Okay, we'll take a break and come back and continue with this. So stay tuned. We'll be back in one minute. This is Global Connections with Michael Van, and I'm your host, Grace Chang. Aloha. I'm Bill Sharp, your host for Asia and Review, a weekly show right here on Think Tech Hawaii that's devoted to substantive analytical discussion about contemporary events in Asia. By Asia, we mean anything from Hawaii, west of Pakistan, and from the Russian Far East south to Australia and New Zealand. Hello. My name is Crystal. Let me tell you my talk show. I'm all about health. It's healthy to talk about sex. It's healthy to talk about things that people don't talk about. It's healthy to discuss things that you think are unhealthy because you need to talk about it. So I welcome you to watch, talk and engage in some provocative discussions on things that do relate to healthy issues and have a well-balanced attitude in life. Join me. Aloha. Welcome back to Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Chang, joined by Michael Van of Sacramento State University, talking about the great Hanoi Rat Hunt. Hi, Mike. Welcome back. It's kind of an interesting topic. Yeah, just thinking about this as a topic of a book, but we were talking before the break about the themes that it illustrates about empire as well as bringing industrialization to the colonized parts of the world. Yeah, why we choose why you chose this form of the graphic history to illustrate that versus, you know, some other, your traditional, more written literary kind of history. Yeah. Well, initially I published this as a traditional academic article. It was a section in my doctoral dissertation. I published it in a journal called French Colonial History, and I thought it just sort of disappeared into an Orwellian black hole where most academic articles go. Yeah. And then I began to get a few emails and calls over the years from people who had read it and were interested in it. And it gets cited every now and then in the strangest of places. I got a call from Freakonomics and they wanted me to speak on the NPR podcast about it. Last year in Jakarta, Indonesia, there was a problem with rats and they issued a bounty on rats. Oh, really? Yeah. And in The Guardian, the British newspaper, there was an article that talked about this. And then the last third of the article said, well, this has been tried before. And Michael G. Van showed that it didn't work in Hanoi. And I said, wow, it's been, it's been incited in the newspaper. And I knew that there was a series at Oxford University Press called Graphic Histories. They've done a couple of great books on the history of the slave trade and on the story of a Jewish boxer in London in 1800. And really fascinating stories that use the graphic medium to give a really rich, solid presentation of an academic subject that's based on a historian's primary research. And I thought that the graphic or comic medium, we call it graphic, it makes it serious, right? But the graphic medium would be a great way to demonstrate the daily cultural life of a colonial city of a divided city, where you'd have Vietnamese and French and Chinese literally brushing up against each other, but living in two different cultural worlds, speaking different languages, having different sort of qualities of life, standards of living in the term, in terms of the homes they lived in, their professions and so forth really have these incredible divide between colonizer and colonized. And the graphic medium allows, allows me to demonstrate this in a very clear visual manner and do interesting things. I worked with the illustrator Liz Clark and we came up with the idea of having speech bubbles with different color outlines for people speaking either French or Vietnamese. And this is a visual cue that shows you that these people are living with each other in the same city, but living in different linguistic and cultural worlds. Also, the medium is great for showing just the physical difference between the two sections of the city. And then it was really fun to put the rats into this, because rats are an urban phenomenon, rats are a species that coexist with human beings. And rats do really well in urban situations, they do really well with mass transportation. And rats are really the great symbol, animal symbol of the history of imperialism. Because rats are spread throughout the world in the era of the new imperialism. So the thing about rats is they're very subversive. They're crawling around, they're going where you don't want them to go. And so they work as a great sort of visual metaphor for resistance in the empire and the shortcomings of colonial policies and so forth. Wow, wow. We need an historian to read all that into rats. And I mean, so you worked with an illustrator, you didn't illustrate these yourself, but I imagine like you need to, you were involved in kind of how to conceive these as far as different illustrations. So as an historian, do you have a training in that background? No, no. I mean, it sounds like a very, yeah, it sounds like a really challenging project, but you know, incredibly challenging, incredibly warding and fun all the way through. The most challenging moments were so much fun. No, in graduate school, historians are not trained to write comic storyboards. So what that meant is I had to do research, which meant reading a whole bunch of comics and looking at some really brilliant things. And I was not a comic book nerd. I used comics in teaching Art Spiegelman's mouse on the Nazi genocide, the Sholong or Holocaust. I've used that for over 15 years at various universities. And I've used a book on genocide in former Yugoslavia by Josako. So I experimented with teaching in the graphic medium. And I began to have to really pick apart what the authors were doing with various visual clues, what you can do with narrative. And what I really picked up on looking at a graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore is the way that graphic the graphic medium can show simultaneity, two things going on at the same time. And that is that is the nature of the colonial city, the simultaneous experience of the French and the Vietnamese within the same city. So I thought it was a really a natural fit. Now the process was totally new to me. I had to go through my academic research, go through my archive notes, and then write up a storyboard, like a screenplay and design images for each event for dialogue. Some of the dialogue is drawn from the historical record. Some of the dialogue, I had to get artistic liberty. Right. And then because this period is at the dawn of photography, I had a huge collection of photographs of specific streets and corners and buildings in Hanoi. And so I can situate events in this postcard image or in this illustration. Yeah. And it made for a really, I think I think it's looking like a pretty great sort of recreation of this historical moment. Yeah, because I mean, you're the one with the knowledge of based on your archival research and knowledge of the history. So yeah, you really have to come up with what the visual is going to include. And really interesting, you were talking about the dualism of the colonial city, from what I've seen of this work, right? You also impose yourself or include yourself in some of these strips. It's kind of what was behind that idea? That's really pure ego. No, that's actually been a theme in the whole graphic history series. And it's sort of like breaking down that fourth wall between audience and presenter. And the series wants to call attention to readers about the way in which historians make history, how they work with documents, find stories, and how historians as individuals interact with the documents. Working on the history of Hanoi is particularly rich for me, because I can show my interaction with the documents, but also my interaction with the city of Hanoi, which is a city that I know that you know well, has gone through major transformations. Since the first time I was there in 1997, probably the changes in the last 20 years. Yeah. The changes in the last 20 years, I think are really comparable to the changes Hanoi went through in the era of French colonialism, that traumatic reconstruction and reshaping and demographic and cultural shifts. So anyway, the series always includes the historian and the author as researcher and also as teacher. So one of the themes that happens, one of the themes that I put into this book is that it's all being done as a lecture to my students. And sometimes the barrier between classroom lecture and historical narrative is unclear and shady when we go back and forth to history. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, it's a really well done as far as it does make you feel like, yeah, you're in the room because of your presence, but then, yeah, giving us a visual of what that is. And you know, to be a little autobiographical, this is the reason I became a historian. Grew up in Hawaii, I love Hawaii, but we are an island in the middle of the Pacific. I'd only left the island, I don't know, five times before I was 18 when I went to college. And the way that I traveled was reading. I was a bookworm and a nerd. And I, even though I didn't leave this beautiful island of Oahu very much, I felt like I traveled around the world because I read so much. And so I think that the study of history really can be a transcendental experience where you're moving through space and time, not getting too metaphysical. But that's one of the ideas that I wanted to capture in the graphic history. And you work in various other medium also telling histories. But for example, this photo we have behind us, you also work on this piece. This is in Indonesia, right? Tell us a bit about what this is. Well, this is Luang Se Wu. And this is the most famous haunted house in Indonesia. And Indonesia, especially Java, is full of ghosts. Indonesians love ghost stories. Like most Southeast Asians love ghost stories. But Indonesians really love ghost stories. They have a whole hierarchy of different ghosts. And this building was that in the colonial era, the headquarters of the Dutch East Indies Railway Company. And it looks like a church. And it really is a cathedral to modernity and to industry. There's literally stained glass windows that present industrialization as a quasi religious experience. During World War II, it was occupied by the Japanese Secret Service, the Kempetai, and became an interrogation center and torture center. And I believe execution center. And so stories about the ghosts began to circulate there. You can imagine. And then it was in the period of independence, it was abandoned and left to rot and became a place where young men to show their bravery in the city of Semerang would go and spend the night in there. Oh God. And then about almost 10 years ago they made a horror film. Indonesians love horror films. Love horror films about the Kuntilanak, which is a special kind of ghost. It's a woman that something bad happened to her, shall we say. And these young Indonesian kids spend the night in this house and the Kuntilanak comes and gets revenge on them. So the building is incredibly famous now. After they shot the film, they refurbished it. And it is now a museum site. But it's really unclear as to what this museum is celebrating. Is it celebrating colonialism? Yeah. The Indonesian government doesn't really want to celebrate much colonial rule. That's not a popular theme. Right? Is it celebrating ghosts and this sort of spooky popular history? That's also an uncomfortable theme. So it's very unclear as to what this building represents. But it's a very popular site to visit. Wow, thank you, Mike. So hopefully next time you can join us again because you have another project on museums looking at Cold War museums in Phnom Penh, Hanoi and Jakarta. So I hope you can come back and tell us more about that and all these different ways you bring history to life. I would love to. Thank you so much, Mike. And thank you all for joining us on Global Connections. I'm your host, Grace Chang, wrapping up with Michael Vann of Sacramento State University. You can find me here every Thursday at 1 p.m. Aloha.