The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Hà Nội, 1972. As war breaks out in Việt Nam, twelve-year-old Hương clings to her grandmother in an improvised shelter as American bombs fall around them. For her grandmother, the experience is horribly familiar. This is a woman who knows what it takes to hold a family together as a country crumbles. As now, coming of age in a nation rocked by conflict, Hương must do the same.

The Mountains Sing is not, as I first thought, a translation. It was written in English by someone whose first language is not English. It is remarkable, therefore, how beautifully written this book is. Scattered with Vietnamese proverbs, every word is meaningful and there is a wistful feel to it – a loyal and longstanding love for Vietnam.

The story alternates between Hương’s perspective and her grandmother’s. Hương experiences the terror of being bombed by the Americans in the Vietnam War in the 1970s, not knowing where members of her family are or even whether they are alive. Grandma recalls the French and then Japanese occupations and the North/South Vietnam War. In fact, the array of recollections of different phases of war or instability in Vietnam made me realise how recent it is that it has experienced relative peace.

In the midst of this conflict, the characters in this book are forced to make impossible choices in order to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. Grandma works illegally as a trader, deciding that it is worth taking this risk in order to provide for her family. Retelling her experiences as a young mother, she flees to Hanoi during the land reform with her children and has to make some agonising decisions along the way.

This plays into the theme of motherhood (or, in a more modern world, general parenthood) where you are, up to a point, damned if you do and damned if you don’t. The choices Grandma made in that turbulent time were not what was best for her children, and have lasting effects. But the alternative options were likely to be worse. From Grandma’s perspective, she was doing her best in very difficult circumstances. Of course, that does not reduce the level of suffering she caused by the decisions she made but, from the perspective of a reader seeing both sides, the fact that these were the only choices available to Grandma illustrates how unpredictable and unsettled the regime was at that time.

The book does assume a base knowledge of the Vietnam War and I admit I did have to Google things along the way. But get you get the gist. Notwithstanding your level of background knowledge, the book paints a vivid picture of the complex love one can still have for a war-torn and volatile country.