Vietnam: The Mountains Sing, by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

When looking for books from Vietnam, most references I found were to books written by South Vietnamese, usually after leaving the country, about their wartime experiences. When I discovered "The Mountains Sing" at our local library, it was a little different - firstly, because it is a family saga covering a greater time period, from before the Second World War to the present day, and secondly, because the author grew up in North Vietnam.

Even though there were protests in New Zealand about the Vietnam war, wanting the Americans and allies to withdraw, the Communist north was still portrayed as the enemy at the time. I was pleased to discover a much more nuanced picture of events in this novel. The Tran family at the centre of the saga are hard-working farmers living a relatively comfortable life until a series of misfortunes befall them. The patriarch of the family is killed by the Japanese during the occupation. After the war, the Communist instigated Land Reform results in them being denounced as landlords exploiting the poor, and they lose their land. Grandmother Tran Dieu Lan moves to the city, where several of her sons of the family enlist to fight in the war against the south and against the American "imperialists", with devastating results. The story is told through the eyes of Dieu Lan, and through those of her granddaughter Huong, whose mother also served in the war as a medical doctor, and returned traumatised.

Despite the hardships, the story takes a more positive turn towards the end, as young Huong studies hard at high school, and falls in love. She is a keen reader and writes "I had resented America, too. But by reading their books, I saw the other side of them - their humanity. 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." This book surely shows the humanity of the North Vietnamese, through a variety of well-rounded characters. There were a couple of plot points which I felt were somewhat contrived in order to tie up all the loose ends, but on the whole I enjoyed the book very much.

Nguyen Phan Que Mai was born in North Vietnam in 1973 during the Vietnam war. She worked as a street vendor and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to study in
Australia. She returned to Vietnam where she worked in sustainable development with various agencies including the United Nations. She is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction and non fiction in Vietnamese. She currently lives in Indonesia. The Mountains Sing is her first book in English and was published in 2020 by Algonquin Books of Capitol Hill, a division of Workman Publishing.