" I researched for this novel my whole life: first by listening to the elderly Vietnamese people. A lot of Vietnamese history is untold (due to censorship reasons) and I wanted to document it. I spent a lot of time at my parents’ villages talking to people about their personal experiences. I interviewed countless people who fought on different sides of the war. I grounded my research through reading fiction and non-fiction books, watching movies and documentaries as well as visiting museums, libraries, special document archives…"~Nguyen Phan Que MaiI was quite charmed by Nguyen and I ordered her novel from Algonquin Books.
Through her fictional family, the author takes us into the history of Vietnam across the 20th c. Tragic and heartbreaking losses pile one upon another. At the heart of the story is a woman of infinite courage and resilience who, against all odds, gathers her scattered family home.
"The challenges faced by Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountain..." Grandma tells her granddaughter Huong. "The war might destroy our houses, but it can't extinguish our spirit."
Grandma is an educated, progressive thinker who is horrified by the extremists and their propaganda. Born to an enlightened land-owning family, under Land Reform she and her children flee for their lives. On the road, Grandma finds places to shelter her children, vowing she will return once she establishes a safe haven.
For Huong and her Grandma, books offer companionship, escape, and enlightenment. From American books Huong learns that Americans were "just like us," people who loved their families and worked hard to earn their food. To understand why the Japanese were so brutal toward her people, Grandma turned to books. "The more I read, the more I became afraid of wars. Wars have the power to turn graceful and cultured people into monsters." She has seen how citizens were "nothing but leaves that would fall in the thousands or millions in the surge of a single storm."
The novel's family are North Vietnamese. This perspective will shake some American readers with references to "American imperialism" and America's Southern Regime.
"I had hated the American and their allies so much before that day. I hated them for dropping bombs on our people, killing innocent civilians," Uncle Dat tells Huong. But after witnessing the massacre of teenaged American soldiers who were bathing and playing in a stream, Dat's hatred turned toward war.
After hearing her uncle's war experiences, Huong thinks, "Somehow I was sure that if people were willing to read each other, and see the light of other cultures, there would be no war on earth."
Nature can also save. The rice plants "rustling their tiny, green hands," the perfume of a rice straw bed, the song of a bird.
The Mountain Sings is the name of a bird whose song can reach heaven and return the souls of the dead through its song. Huong's father and uncle had heard these birds traveling to the front lines, and her father carved a wood bird which her uncle gives her.
It is a lovely image, centering the novel. The novel is a song, an ode to the memory of the millions who died, and a bridge that connects our cultural gap.
Read an excerpt at
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_be.pdf?1584638143
Read the author's essay at
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ae.pdf?1584637834
Resources are available to help reader, including
The family tree
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ft.pdf?1587145622
Historical timeline
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ht.pdf?1587146238
A book club kit is available
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_dg.pdf?1582824144
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