The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The Mountains Sing , a first novel by Vietnamese poet and author Nguyen Phan Que Mai, is a saga about the Tran family, against the backdrop of 20^th century Vietnamese history, is told from two perspectives. First is that of grandmother Dieu Lan, telling her family story to her granddaughter Hu’o’ng, nicknamed Guava.    Dieu Lan, who lost father, husband, brother and child in wartime violence, recounts the brutalities of French colonization, the terror of predatory Communist Viet Minh and the harsh land reform policies, and later the Vietnam War, which the Vietnamese call the American War.  The second perspective, alternating with Dieu Lan’s stories, are granddaughter Hu’o’ng’s personal narratives about the bravery of grandma Dieu Lan, who raised Hu’o’ng when the child’s parents went off to fight. The two threads are beautifully woven.

Dieu Lan was a schoolteacher who defied village norms to enter the black market for survival money to feed and clothe her family.  Throughout her struggles, she exposed Hu’o’ng  to world literature, spurring the child’s lifelong interest in writing. The turbulence throughout Vietnam’s history tore families apart. Hu’o’ng’s reading of Little House on the Prairie imprinted her spirit with what it means to have an intact family, for which she longs. Eventually Hu’o’ng’s mother returns, ravaged emotionally by what she has seen and suffered. She is locked into silence, shutting out her loved ones, who long for intimacy with her. The reader wonders about the search for Hu’o’ng’s father, gone to the war and missing for many years. Is he alive or dead? I won’t tell you the outcome.

Author Que Mai succeeds in portraying how older women and children were disproportionately affected by war. In “the American War,” for example, they move from one place to another to escape the B-2 bombings, the devastation of spraying with Agent Orange, even as they are scrambling hour by hour to find places to sleep for a night or two. They scrounge for small amounts of food to stay alive and for safe water to drink, struggling to find the occasional healer to try to save the little ones from endemic disease. At each stage of the narrative, we learn of how villages and families were divided, between rigid Marxism and desires for independence from ideological imperatives, between fighting for the North and the South, between Ho Chi Minh and American occupiers. Revelations keep unfolding about various characters’ odysseys: who has been loyal to parties in power, who has betrayed or saved family members, who is eventually called upon to forgive whom.

During a 2018 visit to Vietnam), I found myself marveling at how friendly the people (both north and south) are to Americans. Que Mai’s characters deliver a message that their well-being depends on being able to shed the burden of anger. Throughout the book, Que Mai opens the reader’s eyes to understanding that evil and good are not limited to one or another side of the conflict.  Slivers of humanity abound to give hope. This is a book about war, love, courage and hope. It is very well told, written in English and not yet translated into Vietnamese, at which point it likely faces censorship. This reader looks forward to a time when the Vietnamese government adds it to its own “official” interpretation of Vietnamese history.