Women bore much of the burden of the Vietnam War, but their voices have long been absent from the trove of literature on the topic, author Nguyen Phan Que Mai says.
Speaking ahead of yesterday’s 45th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Que Mai says her new novel The Mountains Sing — written in English — aims to shine a light on the stories of women who not only endured and survived conflict, but had to rebuild shattered lives time and again.
“I’ve read a lot of Vietnam War fiction in English and most of it is written in the voices of men,” the poet and writer said.
“I grew up with incredible women around me,” she said, adding that while many sons and fathers lost their lives in combat, it was women who had to deal with the heartache and the consequences.
“My childhood was full of images of women who were waiting for the return of their loved ones from the war. My village was basically empty of men and the women later had to carry on, had to raise the kids and survive,” she said.
The Mountains Sing is written from the perspective of a Vietnamese grandmother and her granddaughter. It tells the story of four generations of their family through much of the 20th century, spanning the French colonial period, the rise of communism, the war with the US, to present day.
Novels such as The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American have become classics, but offer few details of the female experience, while Vietnam’s most celebrated novels on the topic, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winner The Sympathizer and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War were written by men.
Que Mai wanted to take a fresh approach.
“I wanted to show the Vietnam War and Vietnamese history from another angle, from the angle of Vietnamese women,” she said. “I could see that women are the people who bear the burden of the war.”
She believes it is vital to help people see there is more to the nation than the war, hailing it as a place full of complexity, colors and culture.
Born in 1973, Que Mai spent most of her childhood in the south in the post-war years after her father, a teacher, was relocated from the north.
They moved to the tip of the Mekong Delta in 1979, where the land was lush and fertile, but bullet shells had to be removed to plant rice, she said.
Like many people at the time in Vietnam — which was under a US embargo — they were dirt poor and her family rarely had enough to eat.
She rose every day at 4:30am to catch shrimps in nearby rice fields, before heading to school. After class, she would sell water spinach and cigarettes on the street.
Despite reunification on April 30, 1975, division between the north and south was as tangible as ever, she said, recounting a terrifying first night in her new home.
“I was eating dinner and I heard a ‘boom’ — someone had thrown a rock at our house,” Que Mai said. “The southern people considered us invaders.”
Four decades on, many of those old wounds have yet to be healed. For those who fought in the brutal conflict with the US and for the family members left behind, there is still unresolved trauma, she said.
“I have a friend who fought in the war and he cannot sleep with a ceiling fan in the room, because he still thinks of American helicopters chasing and shooting him, and for many people the war still hasn’t ended because their loved ones haven’t returned home,” Que Mai said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the