In my adulthood, I’ve tried to find more books to read that would educate me about China and Vietnam, my father and mother lands, that are written from the perspective of people who are actually Chinese and Vietnamese. It’s been a pretty big mix of movies, documentaries, fiction, non-fiction, and perhaps one of my favorite book genres — historical fiction. It’s been easier to find books on Chinese culture and the Cultural Revolution. It’s been more of a challenge to find books that are written on Vietnam’s rich history (especially the French colonial period and the Vietnam War) that are NOT told from an American or European perspective, but rather that of a native Vietnamese person. Then I finally stumbled across a book recommendation in my Modern Asian Moms (MAMs) group called The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai. From the first page, I knew it would be an easy read, a real page turner of a book. And oddly enough, it was just published in 2020, so it’s a relatively recent book. Some people criticize the book and say the language is too simple since the book was written in English, which is the author’s second language after Vietnamese (someone on Good Reads actually complained that he had to look up words in a dictionary only a handful of times as a person who knows English as a second language… because apparently, that should be the barometer of “complex language”).
When I say the book was an “easy” read, I meant that it took no time to get into the story. It’s actually a really hard book to read when you think of all the brutal portrayals of hardship, death, rape, hunger, and exposure to Agent Orange and its effects on not just the people it physically touched, but future generations; one baby born in the book (this was a time pre ultrasounds) was born without any arms or legs; she had a forehead that was three times the size of her body, and she died within seconds of being born. But it made me realize even more how flawed the western portrayal of the Vietnam War was, as it was nowhere as simplistic as it was taught to me in school. There were people in the North who were recruited to the Southern Army and vice versa. There were many people who were pro French and actually reaped plenty of benefits of French colonialism. And there was a mass re-education camp that was like a prison after the war, which pretty much everyone on the Southern Army was forced into. The land reform of the 1950s created immediate violence and destruction across all of Vietnam; people who were wealthy were stripped of everything they owned and many were executed publicly and brutally.
I thought about what my mom said about growing up poor and the contradictions of the stories she shared. Her dad, my paternal grandma, died when she was only 6, from choking on his own mucus. But he was a highly educated man who was fluent and literate in both Vietnamese and Chinese. She said in her younger days, her dad was a respected “high official” in government. What that meant for her family once the war started, I’ll never know because my mom doesn’t like to talk about it. I don’t even think she’d like to know I’m reading books on Vietnam or the war at all. She seems to want to wipe all that out of her memory, which is not unlike many others who lived through that difficult period in Vietnamese history.
There are two protagonists we shift point of view from in the book: the grandma in the 1950s and her granddaughter in the 1970s. The grandma says, “Do you understand why I’ve decided to tell you about our family? If our stories survive, we will not die, even when are bodies are no longer here on earth.”
It’s the stories of our families, of our lives that keep people alive. And though I’ll probably never fully know my mom’s stories of Vietnam, I’ll have sources like this historical fiction book for me to lean on for at least a glimpse of what she experienced.