Review | 80 years of Vietnam’s fraught history distilled in poet’s debut novel The Mountains Sing
- Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s first novel follows four generations of one family through eight decades of recent history in Vietnam
- One idea proposed by the interconnecting stories is that of a series of impossible choices made between ideals and harsh reality
The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, Oneworld. 4/5 stars
The Mountains Sing is the first novel by Nguyen Phan Que Mai, one of Vietnam’s leading poets, writers and translators. The story distils the past 80 years of her homeland’s fraught history into the volatile fortunes of the Tran family.
This idea is embodied by our two narrators. The first is Tran Dieu Lan, whom we first find walking around bomb craters in the streets of 1970s Hanoi. Her life’s mission is to protect granddaughter Huong, whom she calls Guava. Her self-appointed duties include finding the nearest air raid shelter, performing improvised evacuations to the countryside and sacrificing her vocation as a teacher (and not a few ideals) to earn money on the black market.
This is partly to alleviate the shock of the bombings (books offer Huong temporary escape from reality), but there are deeper purposes. “As long as I have my voice, I’m still alive,” Lan explains. Later she expands this idea: “If our stories survive, we will not die, even when our bodies are no longer here on earth.”
What transforms this romantic notion into something at once poignant and unsentimental is Lan’s constant proximity to death: her father is beheaded by a Japanese invader, her mother by a Vietnamese sociopath who collaborates with the French and Japanese. Her husband is poisoned by a fanatical Viet Minh comrade; her brother Cong sacrifices his own life for those of his family.
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Lan begins her autobiography in the 1930s. The Trans are prosperous farmers in French Indochina. While they bridle against imperial rule, they prefer the promise of bloodless independence, dangled like a carrot by the French, to the calls for violent revolution issued by the communists.
The family saga of suffering (which is foretold by a fortune-teller) begins with Japan’s invasion, in 1941. After the murder of Lan’s father, the family survives famine, civil war and more deaths, only to lose everything during the land reforms of Ho Chi Minh’s first government.
Branded class traitors, they are reduced to begging for life’s basic necessities, thereby fulfilling the fortune-teller’s bleak prediction. Finally accepting the bitter reality that she has too many mouths to feed, Lan hands her children to strangers to give them a chance of survival.
As Que Mai slowly brings our two narrators together, we increasingly feel the absence of the lost generation that separates them. These are the Vietnamese, including Lan’s own children (and Huong’s parents, Dat and Ngoc), who fought in the killing fields against the Americans and the South. A few survivors do eventually return, but they are shadows of their former selves.
There are many ways to read The Mountains Sing: as history transformed into epic fiction; as war story; as a family saga of love and hate, division and potential salvation
There are many ways to read The Mountains Sing: as history transformed into epic fiction; as war story; as a family saga of love and hate, division and potential salvation. One idea proposed by the interconnecting stories is that Vietnam’s 20th century history was a series of impossible choices: between ideals and harsh reality, between loved ones and the wider masses, between surviving one horror and being responsible for another.
While some of Que Mai’s characters can give voice to their impossible choices, others cannot: “Many of my friends aren’t able to speak either,” Dat tells Huong, in an attempt to explain Ngoc’s stubborn silence.
This emotional underpinning excuses the mildly clumsy way that some stories are insinuated into the wider narrative: Huong discovering her mother’s elliptical, but conveniently clear-headed diary entries about her terrible past; Dat suddenly recalling his own wartime experiences in a robotic reverie.
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For Que Mai, the desire to expose these buried subtexts is touchingly clear. She was born in North Vietnam at about the same time that Lan tells Huong: “In your schoolbook, you won’t find anything about the land reform […] A part of our country’s history has been erased, together with the lives of countless people.”
This call for transparency not only echoes her earlier faith in story as a form of legacy, it eases us towards another central creed: “Only through honesty can we learn about the truth.” For Lan, this is justification (and an apology) for telling Huong about the murder of her grandfather, and bringing her to tears: “There is only one way we can talk about wars: honestly.”
One of the things that makes The Mountains Sing a very good novel – rather than just a good one – is how Que Mai infuses this candour with genuine humanity. Her prose can startle with its blunt reminder that Vietnamese children continue to be killed by American bombs hidden in the ground. But it can also sympathise with a captured American pilot who only hours before was dropping bombs on innocent people.
Such large-hearted, hard-won perspective matches the best of Que Mai’s characters, who strive to see the truth, no matter how terrifying, melancholic or achingly beautiful it may be. One might say the same for The Mountains Sing – a terrifying, melancholic and achingly beautiful first novel.
