The Mountains
Sing (Author : Nguyen Phan Que Mai)
“No, my mother died when I was
ten. She was a Corps diplomat and was murdered trying to negotiate a truce with
the enemy.”
“The enemy in that war you fought in?”
“Yes. It’s why I joined up. I was young and naïve
and somehow thought I could avenge her death.”
“You couldn’t because you lost the war?”
“No, we won – but there’s no vengeance to be found
in war. Turns out, it doesn’t work that way.”
― The
Risks of Dead Reckoning
War has never been a solution to anything yet somehow, world
over, across the ages that’s what men have turned to in their hunger for power.
Each war, whether won or lost extracts a heavy price from those fighting it. We
like to portray stories of bravery, valour, sacrifice and victory, making a war
sound a noble cause in the name of the motherland. Deep hidden are stories of horror,
loot, rape, murder, loss and unspeakable grief. Young lives gone too soon,
brutally. Young men forced to draft against their and their family’s will,
younger generation misled by false propaganda depending on the whims and
fancies of those in power, using brutal force on its own citizens and those of
the so-called enemies – all these are devices used by the power hungry to
ensure that their power remains intact.
The book in reference – The mountains sing – is the author’s
debut novel and tells the story of a family whose four generations are ravaged
by the Vietnam War in the two decades from 1955-1975. What is narrated as a story
of one family is clearly the reality for a lot of families whose lives have
been ravaged by war across the world.
The novel begins with the life of two protagonists – an elderly
woman who is a school teacher and her young granddaughter who is her responsibility
while the rest of her able children – her two sons, her daughter and her son in
law are on the battle field – fighting against the South Vietnamese and
American troops. Bomb attacks, rushing for safety in bomb shelters, black outs
and starvation are an everyday part of their life.
As the novel progresses, we get to hear the complete story of
the Tran family who began life as wealthy landowners in the fifties. They have
earned their wealth through sheer hard work and honest labour- a progressive
family that values education for its boys and girls along with the value of
hard work and believes in sharing their wealth. Everything is destroyed when
the Land Reforms Act blindly states that every wealthy farmer is an exploiter and
their land needs to be confiscated and distributed among the poor. Not to stop
at that, the authorities also have a target number of landowners to be tortured
and killed to prove their adherence to the law. This forces the matriarch of
the Tran family to escape with her young children to the capital city of Ha
Noi.
The story talks about her and her children’s life as they
fight for survival and growth in a war ravaged country. It talks about those who
go out and fight on the battle field, those who stay back and wait for their
loved ones to come home, it talks about those who run away and escape to so
called greener pastures. It talks about ghosts that haunt all of the above. It
also gives us a window into the language and culture of Vietnam. The use of
proverbs in the regular conversation adds a very poetic touch to the lovely
prose
The author, a Vietnamese poet, has lived herself through this
turbulent and painful times and depicts the pathos of the war in a raw and
moving manner. She has chosen to write this in English which is for her an
acquired language but in no way disappoints.
