Tradition and change = Truyền thống và đổi thay

Short, clear introductions to the cultures of Southeast Asian nations are dificult to find. For years, I cobbled together collections of short articles and selections of literature for my university - level introduction to Southeast Asia and presented the historical framework in lecture. My goal was to entice students to investi-gate the material on their own or in a more advanced class.

On a trip to Vigt Ham, an area outside my own research field in the Bahasa world of Indonesia and Malaysia, I had a chance to meet Huu Ngoc and was given a copy of Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. A collection of his essays, which is over 1,200 pages. It served as a wonderful guide, containing an-swers to so many of the questions that had presented themselves. When Ohio University Press was considering publication of an excerpted version of Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, I was asked in my role as editor for the O.U. Press’s Southeast Asia Series to accept the Press’s invitation to make the initial selec-tion of essays.