Poet Veita Jo Hampton, left, and photographer Scott Charles Clarkson collaborated to produce the book “Windows to Vietnam — A Journey in Pictures and Verse.” Released in July, “Windows” takes a look at modern-day Vietnam, its people and culture.

By Chris Boyd, Peninsula News

Many Americans have visions of Vietnam as a war-torn country ripped apart by years of fighting, a place where Americans aren’t welcome and progress is terribly slow, if not nonexistent.

Rancho Palos Verdes resident and photographer Scott Charles Clarkson and Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Veita Jo Hampton destroy these stereotypes in their new book, “Windows to Vietnam — A Journey in Pictures and Verse.” Clarkson and Hampton will be on hand today at the Peninsula Center Library for a presentation starting at 1 p.m. All are welcome to attend.

“The preconceived notion that Vietnam was a closed society, a highly closed society, and certainly a war-torn society weighed heavy on my life,” said Clarkson, 53, a Torrance attorney and world traveler who spent just nine days capturing more than 1,000 digital images in Vietnam. “I knew that there was something more to it than my preconceived notions and I knew this was an opportunity to get into Vietnam and expose those notions … It’s still a highly agrarian society, but Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi were bustling. The moment I reached Vietnam, the preconceptions were exploding.

“[The people] are looking forward, and that was the most astounding thing of all,” he added. “They’re incredibly optimistic.”

RPV resident Marcia Haber organized today’s program at the library. “There’s this beautiful symbiotic relationship between the photographs and the poetry … Hopefully, new generations will discover the beauty that Scott and Veita Jo have discovered,” Haber said. “It’s an opportunity for people to heal the past. It just opens the door that here we are today, and this is a new generation.”

“Windows to Vietnam” includes photos of ancient temples and natives working in rice paddies, but there also are pictures of thriving cities and marketplaces. One of the book’s leading images shows a KFC restaurant on a corner in Ho Chi Minh City — the photo fascinated Hampton.

“I had a preconceived idea of what to expect him to see in Vietnam, and it turned out not to be true,” said Hampton, a former professor of photojournalism, documentary photography and media writing. “I live in a small town, Shelbyville, Tenn., and on the corner of the main street there’s a KFC … At first [the parallel] was amusing, and then it was stunning considering what I had known to be true of Vietnam in the late 1960s and early ’70s. It is a total transformation.”

“Since the mid-’80s, the economy has grown by billions of dollars due to exported products such as crude oil, coffee, rice, seafood, textiles and footwear,” Clarkson explains on his Web site, www.windowstovietnam.com.

As the second-largest coffee exporter in the world, second only to Brazil, Vietnam is back on the map. Last year, the country entered the World Trade Organization.

“It’s the second-largest growing economy in Asia,” Clarkson said.

Though the country remains under a single-party socialist republic, Vietnam has a 98-percent literacy rate, according to Clarkson.

Unknown to many Americans, the country has endured two wars since the Vietnam War — a war against Cambodia in 1978 and another with China in 1979. Perhaps as a result, the Vietnamese “resoundingly” do not harbor resentment toward Americans, Clarkson said.

“We’re ancient history to them,” he said. “Half the population of Vietnam is under 35 years old.”

Collaboration

Clarkson and Hampton go way back, all the way to St. Charles, Mo., where Clarkson in the early ’70s attended the high school where Hampton taught journalism. He wasn’t enrolled in any of Hampton’s classes, but Clarkson liked hanging out with the journalism students.

Fast forward 30 years to 2002, when Clarkson worked through a former high school peer and used the Internet to find Hampton, who received his images of Vietnam in January 2006. She selected a group of photos and began writing poetry based on Clarkson’s daily e-mail journals and notebooks.

“I fell in love with the photographs,” Hampton said. “I started writing to the pictures and asking if I could write the poems for his photographs.”

Sometimes the two e-mailed each other twice a day as they collaborated on the project. “The e-mails went back and forth for a year,” Clarkson said. “Those were in conjunction with the knowledge that we were creating a book.”

The result was a 178-page publication — filled with more than 130 photographs and 30 poems — released in mid-July and scheduled to go into a second printing in February 2008.

There were challenges in creating the book. “I’d write poetry that would be too edgy or add too much political weight, and that’s not what we were trying to accomplish,” Hampton said.

It still worked out. “Her poetry was capturing remarkably the essence of the people and the culture,” Clarkson said.

Though some of the major publishing houses showed little interest in “Windows to Vietnam,” book sales have taken off — a few days ago, the book distributor was sold out. To date, it’s been showcased at the Texas Book Festival, the Miami International Book Festival, the Minneapolis Book Fair, the California Central Coast Book Festival and the Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival. It’s scheduled to appear at the highly attended Los Angeles Times/UCLA Book Festival in April 2008.

At the book festivals she’s attended so far, Hampton found that the photos and words “become a cathartic for veterans who spent many, many months there on their tour of duty.”

A few vets say they never want to see or experience Vietnam again, but one man began crying after he saw the photo of the Ho Chi Minh street with a KFC. “He said, ‘I was there in 1967, and there were bodies piled in that intersection,’” Hampton recalled. The man then bought the book.

“I was very happy to see the veterans who were glad to see the book and explore the book,” Clarkson said.

“Windows to Vietnam” also can be eye opening for families who have adopted or are going to adopt children from that country. “This is an opportunity for parents of Vietnamese adopted children to let more people around them know about the Vietnam experience today,” Clarkson said.

Clarkson hopes the book opens more eyes across the United States. “The concept of Vietnam has been in our psyche for the last 40 years … It’s not just one more place on the map for Americans over 40 or 45 years old. The concept of Vietnam has been repressed by Americans,” he said. “This book and my travels to Vietnam have been an effort to get past that screen. This book is one of the first steps to allow Americans to see Vietnam as it is today, as a vibrant country with remarkable people. It helps clear away some of the cobwebs that may have developed in many Americans’ thinking about Vietnam.”

Today at Peninsula Center Library, local residents have a chance to meet Clarkson and Hampton, as well as some special guests, including Robert Jones, formerly a ranking U.S. government official assigned to the American Embassy in Saigon during the Vietnam War. The program begins at 1 p.m., and there is no charge to attend. For more information about “Windows to Vietnam,” visit www.windowstovietnam.com, and to order a copy of the book, visit www.amazon.com or www.barnesand-noble.com.

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