Look at the plot................French Indochina....................Vietnam..........Laos.........Cambodia....................

Background[edit]

Main article: Tales of the South Pacific

Although book editor and university instructor James Michener could have avoided military service in World War II as a birthright Quaker, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in October 1942. He was not sent to the South Pacific theater until April 1944, when he was assigned to write a history of the Navy in the Pacific and was allowed to travel widely. He survived a plane crash in New Caledonia; the near-death experience motivated him to write fiction, and he began listening to the stories told by soldiers. One journey took him to the Treasury Islands, where he discovered an unpleasant village populated by "scrawny residents and only one pig" called Bali-ha'i.^[1] Struck by the name, Michener wrote it down and soon began to record his version of the tales on a battered typewriter.^[2] On a plantation on the island of Espiritu Santo, he met a woman named Bloody Mary; she was small, almost toothless, her face stained with red betel juice. Punctuated with profanity learned from GIs, she complained endlessly to Michener about the French colonial government, which refused to allow her and other Tonkinese to return to their native Vietnam, lest the plantations be depopulated. She told him also of her plans to oppose colonialism in French Indochina.^{[n 1]} These stories, collected into Tales of the South Pacific, won Michener the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.^[2]

There are nineteen stories in Tales of the South Pacific. The stories stand independently but revolve around the preparation for an operation by the American military to dislodge the Japanese from a nearby island. This operation, dubbed Alligator, occurs in the penultimate story, "The Landing at Kuralei". Many of the characters die in that battle – the last story is called "The Cemetery at Huga Point." The stories are thematically linked in pairs: the first and final stories are reflective, the second and eighteenth involve battle, the third and seventeenth involve preparation for battle, a pattern which continues numerically. The tenth story, at the center, however, is not paired with any other. This story, "Fo' Dolla' ", was one of only four of his many works that Michener later admitted to holding in high regard. It was the one that attracted Rodgers and Hammerstein's attention for its potential to be converted into a stage work.^[3]