THE MOUNTAINS Nguyen Phan Que that is SINGBy Mai
Halfway through “The Mountains Sing,” the novel that is first English by the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai, a grandmother explains by herself to your granddaughter she’s caring for in Hanoi within the early 1970s while US bombs rainfall around them. The grandmother has been entrusting to the child the story of her life, rendering in harrowing detail its half-century span of resistance and survival in the face of violent dispossession, colonization, foreign invasion and civil war with the rest of their clan dead, missing or away fighting, and their home reduced to rubble.
Right Here, at the book’s core, the grandmother, Dieu Lan, provides reason she hasn’t before revealed that her spouse and bro were murdered and her eldest son torn from her during the ruling regime’s land reform two decades earlier:
“We’re forbidden to share with you activities that relate genuinely to past mistakes or the wrongdoing of these in energy, for they give themselves the proper to rewrite history,” she tells her granddaughter, nicknamed Guava. keep reading
