CHALLENGE: What seems to be the author’s perspective toward the Vietnamese people? What specific words or phrases in this section led you to infer that perspective? (here's the text)
In 1627, a young white man arrived in Hanoi, bearing gifts and speaking fluent Vietnamese. Father Alexandre de Rhodes devoted himself to the cause that had carried him 6,000 miles from France to Vietnam: “saving” the souls of the non-Christian Vietnamese. He preached six sermons a day, and in two years converted 6,700 people from Confucianism to Catholicism. Vietnam’s emperor, wary that the Frenchman’s religion was just the calling card for an invasion force, banished Rhodes from the country.
Two centuries later, the French proved the emperor right. In 1857, claiming the right to protect priests from persecution, a French naval force appeared off Vietnamese shores. In 26 years, Vietnam was a French colony.
The French turned the jungle nation into a money-making venture. They drafted peasants to produce rubber, alcohol, and salt in slavelike conditions. They also ran a thriving opium business and turned thousands of Vietnamese into addicts. When France arrived in Vietnam, explained Paul Doumer, architect of the colonial economy, “the Annamites were ripe for servitude.”
But the French, like the Chinese before them, misread their colonial subjects. The Vietnamese spurned slavery, and organized a determined resistance, using their knowledge of the countryside to outwit the French. “Rebel bands disturb the country everywhere,” complained a French commander in Saigon. “They appear from nowhere in large numbers, destroy everything, and then disappear into nowhere.”

French colonial officials made clumsy attempts to pacify the Vietnamese. They built schools and taught French culture to generations of the native elite, only to find that most Vietnamese clung proudly to their own traditions. When persuasion failed, the French resorted to brutality. But executions only created martyrs for the resistance and more trouble for the French. As one French military commander wrote with foreboding before returning home: “Everything here tends to ruin"