Joel Brinkley: Vietnamese eat dog meat

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Joel Brinkley eats his words (and they don’t taste good)
Last Updated: Friday, February 15, 2013 04:40:00

An Indochinese tiger, Mi, plays with her cubs at the Hanoi Zoo. Had Joel Brinkley, a professor of Journalism at Stanford University and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, been truly interested in the illegal wildlife trade in Vietnam, he could have gone to any number of illicit restaurants that have been identified by this newspaper and written about animal consumption that actually threatens the region’s ecology rather than grosses out tourists.
When Joel Brinkley came to Vietnam in December, he heard no birds.

He saw no dogs out for walks.

“Where’d they all go?” he asked his reader, at the beginning of the month, in one of his weekly columns for the Tribune News Service. “You might be surprised to know: most have been eaten.”

Who is Joel Brinkley?

You might be surprised to know that he’s a 23-year veteran of The New York Times, a professor of Journalism at Stanford University and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Brinkley’s column, “Despite Increasing Prosperity, Vietnam’s Appetites Remain Unique” used a recent WWF report about the country’s dire wildlife epidemic as a springboard to diagnose its people as singularly aggressive. Prof. Brinkley concluded that this aggression had been brought on by centuries of eating weird meats.

He cites the unnamed work of anonymous “anthropologists and historians” as the basis of his argument.

“Pshaw,” wrote Christoph Giebel, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington who has written extensively on Vietnam. “Who would those be?”

Who, indeed?

Giebel’s confounded response to Brinkley’s writing was just one of many that I received after emailing the piece to several of Brinkley’s peers and posting it onto the Vietnam Scholar Group list serve.

The replies to both my emails and requests for comment varied. At least two scholars, who asked not to be named, categorized Brinkley’s work as racist, while two Southeast Asia specialists from Stanford’s East Asian Studies Department seemed to regard it as grounds for legitimate inquiry.

Meanwhile, a growing pool of incredulous locals, expatriates and journalists have emailed me demanding to know why the piece was published or even written.

“If I had not known that Professor Brinkley is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, I would not have taken this article seriously,” wrote Hong Kong Nguyen, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism who now works as a reporter for a private agency in Hanoi.

Nguyen said she was “enraged” by certain passages in the piece.

She was not alone.

“Brinkley's piece claims Vietnamese people are to a significant extent scavengers, eating whatever rats and stray dogs they find,” wrote Erika J. Peters, a food historian who has written extensively on Vietnam’s food ways and colonial history.

“Leaving aside periods of actual famine and starvation, that is completely unfounded. Furthermore, citizens of the United States have no standing to accuse the Vietnamese of military aggression. Consider how many overseas wars we fought against smaller countries in the twentieth century alone, compared to Vietnam's wars over a thousand years with an imperialistic China.”

Professor Michael Lestz of the History Department at Trinity College found Brinkley’s history rather retrograde.

“During the Vietnam War era and after, the Vietnamese were sometimes referred to as 'the Prussians of Southeast Asia,” he wrote via email. “This nomenclature overlooked the fact that many of the wars of Vietnamese history were defensive ones, whether against the Chinese, Mongols, Cham, or, for that matter, the French and Americans. Relating protein need and the wider patterns of national defense is tenuous at best.”

Brinkley himself seemed confused. In an article published by the SF Gate a week before, he described Vietnam as having been invaded by China 17 times. In the subsequent piece, he cites Vietnam’s defense against invasion as evidence of Vietnam’s aggression.

He also asserted that the people of Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia have mostly spent the last few centuries sitting around passively eating rice.

Professor David Chandler, one of the foremost scholars on Cambodia and the region, characterized Brinkley’s column “amazingly shallow.”

He pointed out that Thailand launched far more incursions into Cambodia than Vietnam, and that one could hardly describe Khmer people as more passive than Vietnamese people.

“To say Cambodians are ‘passive’ sounds odd, given the record of the Khmer Rouge or the violence of Cambodia's civil wars or the centuries when they dominated much of Southeast Asia,” he added. “They get ample protein from fish. This has had nothing to do as far as I can determine with either their warlike or passive qualities.”

Brinkley’s column includes just one actual Vietnamese person—the unnamed woman selling “rats” in Da Nang. The picture appeared in the SF Gate and the Chicago Tribune.

When I reached Brinkley, by telephone two weeks ago, he sounded exhausted and annoyed.

When asked about the cross-border slaughters of Vietnamese civilians in the Mekong Delta that ultimately moved the nation to go to war with the Khmer Rouge, Brinkley snapped: “You know I’ve written a book about this.”

When pressed, he characterized the slaughters as “minor” or, possibly, things that never happened at all.

“Nobody knew what was going on then,” he said-a rather remarkable claim.

When asked how many civilians have to die before a war is considered “defensive” rather than “aggressive,” he said he didn’t know.

“That’s an unanswerable question.”

The interview proved as mind-bending as his column. What was Brinkley thinking? What was his point?

When asked if he really believed Cambodians were “passive,” he seemed to say that they have never been able to afford meat but, due to an innate cultural virtue, have not deigned to eat wildlife-a claim Brinkley seemed unwilling or uninterested in supporting with citations, quotes or evidence.

He repeatedly insisted upon his extensive experience and authority on the subject. But the only person he quoted in his piece was an anonymous Western blogger who declared that he could “not imagine anything more gruesome” than someone eating a dog for dinner.

“I could not agree more,” Brinkley wrote.


Joel Brinkley, a professor of Journalism at Stanford University and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize
When I asked him if he actually couldn’t imagine anything more gruesome than someone eating a dog, he scoffed.

“Well isn’t that a silly question?” he asked.

It was, I admitted.

But was it anywhere near as silly as writing an editorial describing a nation that had spent its entire existence defending itself from invasions as singularly aggressive and then attributing that aggression to its diet?

Brinkley responded that we would have to agree to disagree on that point.

“Look man,” I finally said. “You covered a genocide. Is the idea of eating a dog even in the upper registers of gruesome things that you can imagine?”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

That was about as much as any of us have been able to get Brinkley to admit.

After a flood of outraged comments posted on the Tribune website, Brinkley posted a defense of his piece on Jim Romenesko’s media blog. His response was written to a weak defense of Vietnam offered by ex-New York Times writer Paul Von Zielbauer. “Vietnamese people – despite the taste among some for certain kinds of food that we may find offensive – are lovely people to a remarkable degree,” Zielbauer wrote.

After owning that his dietary argument “was perhaps not as well phrased as it could have been,” Brinkley dug even deeper into his claims and posted a picture of the Da Nang woman cleaning rodents.

I can tell you, as an American, that Brinkley and Von Zielbauer wouldn’t dare to pontificate on the dietary habits of a particular race of people at home, much less hold a public debate on whether that groups is “aggressive” or “lovely… to a remarkable degree.”

Vietnamese people are people. They love. They fight. They eat different things. Some of them are jerks. Some of them are nice. Some of them are all of these things and more, depending on the day that you meet them.

But Brinkley proved himself almost as poor a historian and ethnographer as a journalist.

Had he been truly interested in the illegal wildlife trade, he could have gone to any number of illicit restaurants that have been identified by this newspaper and written about animal consumption that actually threatens the region’s ecology rather than grosses out tourists.

He could have gone to Nghe An, where village posses have literally murdered dog thieves or he could have taken a walk, anywhere, and met plenty of rats and cats and dogs that no one has any interest in eating.

For god’s sake, he might have even sat down and eaten a field mouse or a dog to get some sense of why people actually do it and who they are.

Instead, he snapped a few photos of domestically raised animals he found disgusting and then dashed off a snide opinion piece couched as a piece of analysis.

The worst part is that Brinkley hasn’t come to terms with what he did. And no one has forced him to do so.

The Tribune Media Services has posted this rather incoherent notice at the end of the piece:

“Tribune Media Services (TMS) recently moved an opinion column by Joel Brinkley about his observations from a trip to Vietnam that did not meet our journalistic standards,” the statement read.

“TMS has a rigorous editing process for its content, and in the case of Brinkley’s column that moved January 29, all the required steps did not occur. We regret that this happened, and we will be vigilant in ensuring that our editing process works in the future.”

If that weren’t embarrassing enough for Brinkley the Chicago Tribune felt the need to issue its own retraction:

On February 2, Standards Editor Margaret Holt posted a brief statement noting that Brinkley’s column had “offended many people, including those of Asian American descent.”

Holt thanked everyone for their comments which, she said, “have generally been thoughtful and added to the public understanding of the controversy.”

The thing is, by Tuesday night, neither the paper nor the service actually took the piece down—they just removed all the outraged comments.

In the meantime, Jason Nguyen of Chicago established an online petition demanding that Brinkley resign from his post at Stanford University. Nguyen had gathered 50 signatures by Tuesday night, at which point, Brinkley issued a response.
He asked everyone to remember that his opinions are his own and not those of Stanford University’s.

Then he apologized. Sort of.

“For those of you who have signed the petition, and others who are upset, please accept my regret,” he wrote. “I will keep your point of view in mind when I write about Vietnam again.”
No one appears to be particularly excited for when that next time will come.

The petition for Brinkley’s resignation has since soared to 1,500 signatures and the Asian American Journalists and the Stanford Vietnamese Students’ Associations both published pieces further condemning Brinkley’s piece.

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By Calvin Godfrey, Thanh Nien News (The story can be found in the February 15th issue of our print edition, Vietweek)

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The Worst Vietnam Article Ever
Posting twice in one day is rare for me, but I had to get this out there.

I've written before about how badly people who have never been to Vietnam misunderstand the country, particularly its cuisine. During both of the trips home I've taken since moving out here people have cracked jokes about eating dog meat and other strange dishes, and the commonly held stereotype seems to be that all of the food here is weird. I've also talked about Vietnam's image problem. Overseas the thinking seems to be that Vietnam is a backwards country where all sorts of bizarre, uncivilized activities take place. Part of the problem is that misleading articles keep getting published by major outlets. You rarely read about the modern developments of Vietnam's cities, instead you read about festivals where villagers chop a live pig in half, etc. Yesterday an article titled 'Despite increasing prosperity, Vietnam's appetites remain unique' was published on the Chicago Tribune's website. Written by Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times journalist who now teaches at Stanford, it is the most hideously misleading, offensive, and factually bereft collection of words I've ever read regarding the country. This piece deserves to be ripped at length.

Let's start with the opening two paragraphs: "You don't have to spend much time in Vietnam before you notice something unusual. You hear no birds singing, see no squirrels scrambling up trees or rats scurrying among the garbage. No dogs out for a walk.

'In fact, you see almost no wild or domesticated animals at all. Where'd they all go? You might be surprised to know: Most have been eaten."

This attention-getting opener is, pure and simple, a bald-faced lie, though many readers will no doubt gobble it up. Spend five minutes in Saigon (or any town or city) and you will actually see a ton of animals. Birds, dogs, cats, and most definitely rats are all over the place. What streets did Brinkley go down that he saw no animals? Acting like urban Vietnam is a biological wasteland is ridiculous.

Brinkley then goes on to discuss the issue of trafficking endangered animals in Vietnam, which is certainly an enormous problem, and one I've been harshly critical of. He quickly steps back into the realm of the insane, though, with this: "But what about birds and rats? Yes, people eat those, too, like almost every animal that lives here. In Da Nang in January, I saw a street-side merchant with bowls full of dead rats for sale - their fur removed but otherwise intact - ready to cook."

Yes, it is true that people eat birds - their called chickens, like much of the rest of the world. And yes, field rats are a specialty in a couple of provinces. But Brinkley makes no distinction here, he makes it sound as though the people of Vietnam roam the streets savagely attacking anything that isn't human and throwing it in the cooking pot, no matter what type of animal it is. And he saw one vendor selling rats - apparently that is representative of the entire country. I've traveled throughout Vietnam extensively in my 2.5 years here, and I've never seen such a sight, and no one I know eats rat.

The next section of the article moves from the factually questionable to the logically absurd: "All of this raises an interesting question. Vietnamese have been meat eaters through the ages, while their Southeast Asian neighbors to the west - Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar - have largely left their wildlife alone.

In each of these other countries you see flocks of birds that are absent in Vietnam along with numerous pet dogs and cats. There, people eat rice, primarily, and for many people in most of those states their diet includes little more than that.

Vietnam has always been an aggressive country. It has fought 17 wars with China since winning independence more than 1,000 years ago and has invaded Cambodia numerous times, most recently in 1979. Meantime, the nations to its west have largely been passive in recent centuries.

...

Well, certainly that played a part. But I would argue that because Vietnamese have regularly eaten meat through the ages, adding significant protein to their diet, that also helps explain the state's aggressive tendencies - and the sharp contrast with its neighbors.

Anyone with even a bit of background on Southeast Asia should be able to tell that this is a massive, steaming pile of garbage. Many people in Vietnam have pet dogs and cats. The other countries mentioned have certainly not left their wildlife alone, in fact all are rife with the same wildlife trafficking that plagues Vietnam. Vietnam may happen to be the worst offender, but most large mammal species have been wiped out across the region. As for the people in these countries eating mostly just rice, all that can be said is - what? Meat is prevalent in both Thailand and Cambodia (I haven't been to Laos or Myanmar), and it is impossible to live a healthy lifestyle by just eating rice. (Also - um, Vietnamese eat a ton of rice as well.)

Now, for those last two paragraphs. Vietnam hasn't been any more aggressive than the rest of these countries. Many of the 17 'wars' fought with China were nothing more than warlord disputes before the two countries were even unified countries, and China has been the aggressor on many occasions. The 1979 invasion of Cambodia wasn't a snap decision made because the leadership had had a particularly meaty lunch that day, it followed months of bloody cross-border raids by both sides, not to mention it was the brutal Khmer Rouge that the invasion unseated. Brinkley apparently forgot the genocide that precluded this invasion while saying that Cambodia has been passive recently. Anyway, where does this malarkey about protein making Vietnam more aggressive come from? No proof to support this curious theory is provided.

After this unbelievable section Brinkley brings the focus back to that most stereotypical meat, dog: "Right now, the favored dish is dog. In fact, dog meat is particularly prized. It's considered a specialty because it is said to contain more protein than other meats. For Vietnamese, tradition has it that whenever you have bad luck you should eat dog meat to change your fate. But you shouldn't eat it at the start of the lunar month, or the reverse will happen."

Yes, dog meat is popular with some people. But saying that 'Vietnamese tradition' dictates that you should eat it for better luck is COMPLETELY 100% ASININE. I don't know anyone who thinks this way. In fact, most young Vietnamese are just as disgusted by the idea of eating dog as foreigners are. They don't eat it, and they have no desire to eat it. This long-running assumption about Vietnam isn't even funny anymore, it's just wrong, and media outlets should stop publishing stories that perpetuate it.

Brinkley moves towards an ending by explaining that many in Vietnam are now looking to the West for influence through multimedia outlets. This is one of the few facts he gets right. He finishes with: "With that has come a new desire among some to keep pets. So now you do see an occasional dog here and there, lounging on the front porch of someone's home - but under the watchful eye of its owner. Even now, as Vietnam rapidly modernizes and matures, if the dog wanders too far from home, someone will grab it and then serve dog for dinner.

Visiting Vietnam, many Western visitors despair. As one Western blogger put it: 'I can quite honestly say it's the most gruesome thing I have ever seen.

I could not agree more."

Yes, it is true that dog-napping happens. But, again, Brinkley makes it sound as though this is guaranteed to happen if a dog wanders off. It isn't. Many dogs live happy lives here (and like I said, this is coming from someone who is critical of the way animals are treated here). It's not all fire and brimstone.

Brinkley's sweeping generalizations in his turd of an article are offensive to me, simply as someone who lives in Vietnam and has Vietnamese friends. I can only imagine how it will make people who were born here feel. The fact that someone with such an apparently illustrious career could write such a fallacious, uninformed piece is disturbing. The fact that a major publisher would run it is perhaps even worse. I sincerely hope anyone that reads it is smart enough to see through the numerous gross exaggerations and falsities. Brinkley should be ashamed of this. Vietnam deserves to have a fairer voice heard internationally, a fairer image spread to the rest of the world. When is it going to get that chance?
Posted by Michael at 5:12 PM
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1. Sign Jason Nguyen's petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/professor-joel-brinkley-stanford-university-resign-from-teaching
2. Sign Mark Nelson' petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/stanford-university-remove-joel-brinkley-no-place-for-racism
3. Raise your voice to all forums.
4. Share your voice with all your friends.

Thanks

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Apology not accepted: On Joel Brinkley, Vietnam, and intent vs. impact
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BY KYLE "GUANTE" TRAN MYHRE, GUANTE.INFO
February 11, 2013
In a February 1 piece for Tribune Media Services, Stanford journalism professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Joel Brinkley wrote about how Vietnamese people are aggressive because they eat so much meat, especially dogs.

That's an oversimplification of his article, but not by much. Brinkley reached that baffling conclusion after a ten-day tour of Vietnam, and the response to his ill-informed piece was swift, fierce and overwhelmingly critical. For direct rebuttals, you can read the comments section on the link above, or this, or this, or this.

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What interests me about this fiasco, however, is what happened next. A deluge of Tweets, blogs, Facebook posts and more illuminated how and why the piece was unacceptable. Tribune Media Services posted an apology for the piece not meeting their journalistic standards. A Change.org petition for Brinkley's resignation from Stanford received hundreds of signatures.

And Brinkley apologized. Sort of. Like so many people of privilege before him, however, Brinkley's apology reads more as "I'm sorry you're offended" than "I'm sorry I said something offensive."

Specifically, Brinkley wrote: "Vietnamese seem to be particularly sensitive to criticism, like a lot of people around the world... Some of them have told me in emails that this makes them sound barbaric, which was not my intention." He also wrote: "The column I wrote this week on Vietnam and its dietary practices has offended a great number of people. That was not my intention at all, and I’m sorry for that."

The latter one isn’t too bad, as far as apologies-I’m-still-not-buying go. But the interesting thing is the repeated use of a phrase that seems to be a trend in public apologies: "it wasn't my intention.” This is a handy, oft-used rhetorical device used to absolve oneself of responsibility after saying or doing something offensive. It may sound meaningful, but remember: if you burn a house down and people get hurt, you don't get away with it because you thought the house was empty. If you drive your car through the front window of a restaurant, the damage is done whether or not you meant to do it. If you eat my lunch because you thought I didn't want it, I'm going to be hungry regardless of your intentions.

Responsibility isn't about our intentions. It's about the impact of our words and actions.

And sometimes, our hearts really are in the right place. But saying something hurtful out of ignorance or carelessness is only marginally better than saying something hurtful out of malice-- and the impact is exactly the same. To truly make amends for hurting someone, first you have to be a big enough person to want to make amends. Then you have to openly and respectfully listen to what people are saying. And then you have to act on that new knowledge-- whether in a sincere public apology that clearly illustrates you understand what you did wrong (beyond “poor word choices” or “awkward phrasings,” because we all know that’s not really the issue), a commitment to being more careful and conscientious in the future, some sort of concrete act of contrition, or ideally, all three.

This is much bigger than Brinkley, of course (though I’m tempted to publish the private email he sent to a friend that pretty much proves he’s not sorry at all, but suffice to say I don’t think he learned much from this, except he now believes Vietnamese “are the most paranoid and sensitive people on the planet”). It’s also bigger than any “famous-person-messing-up” story. This plays out every day, in classes, workplaces, and all kinds of social spaces. Learning how to let go of our egos and defensiveness, to make mistakes gracefully, to apologize sincerely, and most importantly: to cultivate the awareness and conscientiousness to avoid those mistakes in the first place - this is the kind of work we all need to do.