Review: Dust Child

Vietnamese poet, nonfiction writer and translator Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's first novel in English, The Mountains Sing, was an internationally lauded bestseller. Her sophomore title, Dust Child, which began as her Ph.D. thesis, is an emotional story that follows families from opposite sides of the globe, traumatized by war and its aftereffects. Nguyễn precedes her fiction with facts: "During the Việt Nam War, tens of thousands of children were born into relationships between American soldiers and Vietnamese women. Tragic circumstances separated most of these Amerasian children from their fathers, and later, their mothers. Many have not found each other again."

Nguyễn introduces 18-year-old Trang and 17-year-old Quỳnh, sisters struggling to repay their parents' staggering debt to violent moneylenders in 1969. When a childhood friend returns to their village with stories of high-paying Sài Gòn office work, both sisters follow her to the city. They join her at the Hollywood Bar, catering to U.S. servicemen. To live through war comes at a high price.

Arriving in Hồ Chí Minh City in 2016 are veteran Dan and his wife, Linda. Being engaged to Linda when he served in Việt Nam didn't prevent him from loving, impregnating and deserting local bar girl Kim. Knowing nothing about Kim, Linda has convinced Dan that returning to now-peaceful Việt Nam will help him face his never-ending terrors. The couple meet Phong, whose father was a Black American soldier and whose immigration application through the Amerasian Homecoming Act was again denied. In hearing about Phong's life, tragic as it's been as a mixed-race orphan--a "dust child"--with an obvious "enemy" father, Dan hopes he might learn more about his own abandoned child. Surprising revelations are guaranteed.

Nguyễn moves the narrative smoothly over 50 years. Writing in English is "an attempt to decolonize literature in English about Vietnam," she says in a statement on her author website. Her careful storytelling challenges "Hollywood movies and novels written by those Westerners who continue to see our country only as a place of war and the Vietnamese as people who don't need to speak--or, when we do, sound simple, naïve, cruel, or opportunistic." Through compelling multilayered fiction, Nguyễn intimately humanizes war's victims, regardless of nationalities. Nguyễn also demands linguistic accuracy, long elided in English. "I always stripped diacritical marks from Vietnamese names and words, to make things look and sound easier," Dan confesses in a letter. "My Vietnamese teacher highlighted the importance of Vietnamese tonal marks to me. He pointed out that by writing Tài's name as Tai, I called him 'Ear' rather than 'Talented.' " Nguyễn deftly wields her own polyglot talents to reclaim lives too long overlooked. --Terry Hong, BookDragon

Shelf Talker: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai turns her Ph.D. thesis into her sophomore novel in English, highlighting the extended families of Việt Nam War survivors