Over the years, I've read a number of accounts about people caught up in Viet Nam's turbulent history. Lady Borton's After Sorrow; Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War; Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places; Dang Thuy Tram's Last Night I Dreamed of Peace; and many others... So I when I started to listen to Nguyen Phan Que Mai's 2020 novel, The Mountains Sing, I confess to thinking: "Yes, this is tragic. But I've heard it before."

Nevertheless, there's a luminous something that sets this book apart. Partly it's the epic sweep of the saga (it covers a massive swathe of history, from the French colonial period until what is more or less the present), and partly it's the way the extraordinary resilience of its protagonists shines through.

There are two narrative strands. Huong is our contemporary narrator; Dieu Lan is the grandmother who is filling Huong in on the family history, partly to distract her from the difficulties and dangers around them, and partly because she believes: "History will write itself in people's memories, and as long as those memories live on, we can have faith that we can do better."

Particularly where the Land Reform is concerned, "literature has been doing history’s job... [by recording] this brutal episode in Vietnam’s past, which saw villagers denouncing neighbors as exploitative capitalists".


Ha Noi, December 2006

Dieu Lan's eldest child, Minh, is separated from the family during the Land Reform persecution, and heads for the south. We meet him only late in the narrative, when his life is nearly over. His wife, children, and parents-in-law have fled the country on board a boat, and he never knows their fate. Next is Ngoc, mother of Huong, who is traumatized not only by the horror of medical practice in wartime conditions, but also by the experience of rape (by enemy soldiers from the south). Dat comes back from the war without his legs, and with an alcohol problem. Thuan is killed. The youngest son, Sang, fathers a child born without limbs, because of his exposure to Agent Orange. Huong's father never returns, and is presumed dead.    

Grandma is a survivor, managing to make it through the French occupation, the Japanese invasion, the Great Hunger, and the Land Reform, though losing close relatives every time. To escape the kangaroo courts of the Land Reform she flees to Hanoi, protecting the four oldest children by parking them in safe places en route. Once arrived in Hanoi, with only her youngest still in tow, she starts learning and labouring in order to establish a home in which to regroup them -- only to have them again scattered by the American war and the accompanying civil war.  



This is the author's first book in English. Using a second language gave her distance, she maintains, enabling her to reflect more calmly on the traumatic events she is describing. (In this, her reasons are similar to those of Nino Haratischwili, the author of the other family saga that's been occupying me of late.)

The events Que Mai describes are undeniably brutal.

The devastation of war -- whether against the French, the Japanese, the Americans, or other Vietnamese -- comes through very clearly, as evidenced by the details above. On top of all that is the devastation of ideology, which pits family member against family member even when the war is over. For those who want to rise in the ranks of the party, a brother who fled south, or a mother who engages in black-market activities, are something of an embarrassment.



Que Mai draws on written sources and numerous conversations with people who survived the war. But she also incorporates elements of her own family history. She was born in the north of Viet Nam, but grew up in the south, "destitute, hungry and horrified by the ruins of war". To help her family get by, she worked in the rice-fields, and sold goods on the streets: "We hardly had enough to eat... I could only write The Mountains Sing having lived through difficult times." Her father's mother died in the Great Hunger of 1945, along with her youngest son and her brother. During the land reform of the 1950s, her grandfather was beaten and put in prison, where he died. But as she says, "If you talk to Vietnamese people, you’ll see that most have gone through tremendous events. Any Vietnamese family’s history can be written into a novel."





Positioned as we currently are, in the middle of this devastating pandemic, you can't help but think: These people were so much worse off... They had decades and decades of violence and disruption to deal with, driven by forces way beyond their control -- and yet they managed to still cling to hope. In the course of the narrative, we see that people somehow heal. Relationships heal. Past enemies are always waiting in unexpected places to ambush you, but humans can manage to forgive, and move on.

Two of Dieu Lan's maxims make a fitting conclusion:

"Good luck hides inside bad luck."

"We'll only die if Buddha lets us die."