ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Thanks to Chris Gordon, community engagement and program manager at Readings Bookstore, this is the second novel I’ve come across by a Vietnamese author who actually lives in Vietnam.  During the pandemic, Chris coordinated numerous author events, and in October 2020 I blogged here, about Nguyen Phan Que Mai in conversation with Canadian author Natalie Jenner and the launch of her 2020 debut novel The Mountains Sing, which I subsequently reviewed here.  It was a rewarding book, revealing aspects of Vietnamese history that are little-known in the West, and depicting the impact of the war on women and their families.  Dust Child (2023) is Que Mai’s second novel, about the children of American servicemen searching for their parents.

I have been to Vietnam and seen for myself the astonishing economic progress they have made despite the vindictive three-decade American embargo on trade which made Vietnam one of the poorest nations on earth. So I was mildly disappointed that this novel goes out of its way to depict corruption and fraud, with Vietnamese people preying on each other.  There is corruption, as we know (and I’ve witnessed it myself in a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) city).  But the plot revolves around sisters Trang and Quynh manipulated into working as bar girls (i.e. prostitutes) because their parents are in massive debt to swindling money-lenders, and there is an orphaned Amerasian called Phong preyed upon by a Vietnamese family pressuring him into ‘adoption’ so that they can migrate to the US under his entitlement.  Because his appearance makes it obvious that he has an African-American father, Vietnamese women also wanting to migrate to the US claim to be his mother, for whom he has yearned all his life.  The emotional roller-coaster of hopes dashed time and again is a cruel reminder that the Vietnamese themselves discriminate against the children of US servicemen, hence the term ‘children of the dust’.

In a somewhat idealised portrait of a rueful US serviceman, Dan comes ‘on holiday’ to Vietnam with his wife Linda, who, despite his persisting PTSD, has been loyal to him since before his war service.  Naïvely, Dan believes that he can track down his lover ‘Kim’ without Linda finding out about their relationship and the pregnancy which he refused to acknowledge.  Wracked with guilt, Dan makes a lot of belated apologies and acknowledges that he was cruel and irresponsible, but he also makes the excuse that the war was very difficult for very young men… who turned to Vietnamese girls for comfort.  He too is preyed upon by a tour guide (with other murky enterprises on the side) who is eventually unmasked to reveal his hostility towards the GIs returning to Vietnam to exorcise their demons.

The story is told in three alternating narratives in two timeframes, 1969-70 and 2016.  It’s written in 3rd person, from Dan’s perspective; from Phong’s and from Trang’s, the elder of the two sisters.  The transitions from time period and narrative perspective were occasionally confusing and sometimes I lost track of who the minor characters were, particularly when their back stories weren’t revealed until later in the novel.  Occasionally explanations are a bit heavy-handed for the generation that knew at the time, for example, about the effects of Agent Orange and the defoliation of Vietnam’s environment (and were bitterly opposed to its use,) but I suppose younger readers for whom this is history need these explanations.

But overall, Dust Child is an important contribution to war fiction.  The issue of biracial children with GI fathers and Asian mothers is not confined to Vietnam… the review at The Asian Review of Books also mentions a novel called Skull Water by Heinz Insu Fenkl who writes from his own experience as the child of a German American GI father and a Korean mother.  I’m chasing up a copy from one of my libraries, though I have a bad feeling that it might only be available as an eBook, and I have never had any luck with the App that’s supposed to enable access.  So, we’ll see what comes of my quest.

Author: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Title: Dust Child
Publisher: One World, 2023
ISBN: 9780861546121, , pbk., 339 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Ulysses Bookstore Hampton, $32.99

Other reviews

• The Asian Review of Books

Please note: I have used Vietnamese naming conventions (family name first) and the diacritics for the title of this post but for tags, categories and the text of this review I have mostly removed the diacritics because WordPress software doesn’t recognise them and they mess up the alphabetical order in categories.