Over the Moat
Love Among the Ruins of Imperial Vietnam
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Cultures clash, but love conquers, with some fascinating twists and plenty of intimate details.” —Kirkus Reviews
James Sullivan's Over the Moat details his travels in Vietnam to bicycle from Saigon to Hanoi. He has just finished graduate school and has an assignment to write a magazine story about a country that is still subject to a U.S. trade embargo. But in Hue, the old imperial capital of Vietnam, the planned three-month bike trip in the fall of 1992 takes a detour.
Here, in a city spliced by the famed Perfume River and filled with French baroque villas, he finds himself bicycling over a moat to visit a beautiful shop girl who lives amid the ruins of the last imperial dynasty of Vietnam. She falls for him, but there's a catch. Several other suitors are vying for her hand, and one of them is an official with the city's police force. Over the Moat is the story of Sullivan's efforts to win Thuy's favor while immersing himself in Vietnamese culture, of kindly insinuating himself in Thuy's colorful and warm family, and of learning how to create a common language based on love and understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1992, fresh out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Sullivan and a classmate are hired by Bicycling magazine to report on their trek from Saigon to Hanoi. The plan mutates into a book-length memoir cum love story when 27-year-old Sullivan, from Massachusetts, meets and falls for a Vietnamese shop girl in Hue. The eponymous moat refers to one he must cross on his bike every time he visits Thuy, who lives with her family within the walls of an old imperial citadel. Sullivan extends his trip and then returns for another year to court her no easy task, given the horde of other suitors, cultural differences and some distrust of Americans. Being an outsider has its benefits, however; as the other admirers keep their visits brief, he writes, "I pretended not to know. I stayed and stayed. I bid farewell... waving while they smoldered into the dark, handicapped by custom, undone by the ignorance of a guy who wore a Day-Glo yellow rain jacket and shorts in a country where only children wore shorts." Sullivan's style is somewhat unpolished and disjointed, detracting from the otherwise engaging tale. Perhaps a few more years (or a couple more trips abroad) would have produced deeper insights than "People had been coming East for answers for centuries, and in some way, I believed that I'd come East to answer questions I hadn't ever asked.... Whenever I tried to focus on the answers, as on a ship on the horizon, I couldn't quite convince myself that they were really there. But if I looked askance, there was enough resolution for certainty."
