Over the Moat: Love Among the Ruins of Imperial Vietnam

Product Description

“Cultures clash, but love conquers, with some fascinating twists and plenty of intimate details.” ―Kirkus ReviewsJames 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.

From 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 [the others] 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.”
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“Cultures clash, but love conquers, with some fascinating twists and plenty of intimate details.” ―Kirkus Reviews“Over the Moat tells a tale we sorely need to hear at this moment in history…Elegantly written, redolent of our universal humanity, this is an important book.” ―Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain“What a wonderful premise for a novel. But Over the Moat isn’t fiction: it’s a true story. Sullivan’s tenacity, passion, luck, and the purity of his love come through in his prose, and he has succeeded admirably both in the telling of this story and in the living of it.” ―Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country“Over the Moat takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the country and the culture, never letting us forget that, as Americans, we’re just visitors.” ―Stewart O’Nan, author of The Names of the Dead and editor of The Vietnam Reader“James Sullivan has written a brilliant, intimate account of desperation. Cast within the layered textures of contemporary Vietnam, this is a vivid book with irresistible underpinnings: desire and discovery.” ―Lewis Robinson, author of Officer Friendly“Here is a book that carries us on a thoughtful jou