Culture for sale - Exploitative forces at work in The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Gears are shifting a little bit in Camilla Gibb's The Beauty of Humanity Movement, as the story now centering a little more on the Hanoi tour guide, Tu (?), whom the Vietnamese-American visitor has hired as her driver to help her track down info about the Vietnamese artwork she is collecting and cataloging. What we start to see in this part of the novel, by looking over Tu's shoulder so to speak, is the incredible hot market for these artworks - collectors and auction houses paying thousands of dollars for pieces that would sell in Vietnam, if at all, for a few bucks. Of course the auction houses will mark these things up even more. Tu is astonished at these prices, and he cannot comprehend how a piece of art in Vietnam could possibly sell for $10,000 - maybe a hundred times his yearly wages. So, OK, we're seeing the postwar cultural exploitation as East meets the ravenous West, and we're seeing the gross inequities within the ostensibly egalitarian, Communist country, and we're seeing the noble suffering of those living in poverty, notably the elderly Pho chef Hung, who lives in a shack by a stagnant pond an keeps one step ahead of the police in his mobile kitchen, and we see a bit of life in contemporary Vietnam - Tu and his friend Binh getting high like any pair of Western doping buddies, Binh hiring a prostitute for Tu's birthday - and whether this novel succeeds at all will depend on Gibb's ability to bring these forces into collision in a way that will change the characters and affect their lives. Tu already is obviously very attracted to the Vietnamese-American art collector, but she seems miles beyond him in sophistication and worldliness, so it's hard to see where this relationship will go if anywhere (reminds me oddly of the the crush the Italian hotelier had on the American movie star in Beautiful Ruins). I do want more out of this novel than just the uncovering of the life story of the persecuted artist (the collector's father) - which seems to be what drew her back to Vietnam and what led her to seek out her father's old crony Hung. I wonder what kind of research, or experience, lay behind this piece? We've had a number of post-Vietnam War novels about the war and about Vietnamese-Americans - not much that I'm aware of about life in Vietnam, certainly not by Anglo writers.