Vietnamese author Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel to be translated into English, the award-winning The Mountains Sing (2020), spun an epic household saga centered on the Vietnam War. Her luminous new novel, Dust Child, is much less spacious however nonetheless focuses on reverberations from that warfare. Through intersecting tales of Vietnamese and American characters, Dust Child portrays the heart-wrenching collateral harm that resulted from a fleeting love in the course of the warfare.
In the opening chapter, set in Ho Chi Minh City in 2016, Phong is a middle-aged man making use of for visas for his household to to migrate to the U.S. below a program for kids of American troopers and Vietnamese moms, so-called Amerasians. Phong’s software is rejected as a result of of a youthful infraction. In later chapters, Quế Mai develops a visceral sense of Phong’s life as an outcast, “a child of the enemy,” a “dust child” who’s half Black American, half Vietnamese.
In the guide’s second chapter, additionally set in 2016, we meet Dan and Linda, who’re flying to Ho Chi Minh City for a trip. Linda hopes the journey will assist her husband, who was a younger helicopter pilot in the course of the warfare, along with his PTSD. Returning to the nation for the primary time for the reason that warfare, Dan needs to find the fates of his Vietnamese girlfriend, who went by “Kim,” and the kid he fathered along with her, a secret he has saved from his spouse for a few years.
In the third chapter, set in 1969, we meet 20-year-old Trang and her 17-year-old sister, Quỳnh, working within the household’s rice fields. Crushed by debt from their father’s sickness, the sisters determine to go to Saigon to work. They wind up working as “bar girls,” catering to American troopers, and Trang takes on the alias “Kim” for her work in Saigon’s boisterous Hollywood Bar.
With this setup, the novel’s plot takes on a way of urgency. How are these characters linked? Will they discover each other, and in the event that they do, what would be the consequence? At sure junctures, the plot creaks and shudders because it turns. But Quế Mai offers readers with great linguistic play, and thru her deft and illuminating descriptions of the intimate particulars of her characters’ private lives and troublesome selections, we find yourself caring deeply for them and hoping for his or her well-being.
In the novel’s afterword, Quế Mai writes movingly of her analysis into the challenges of Vietnam’s disparaged Amerasians and the way she drew inspiration from the various tales she heard and documented. Through her creativeness, she has remodeled these tales of mud into one thing akin to gold.
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