Legacies of a war
DUST CHILD
Nguyen Phan Que Mai
By JESSIE NEILSON
Nguyen Phan Que Mai is a Vietnamese novelist and poet who grew up during the war years and its aftermath. She writes in both Vietnamese and English, and Dust Child, like her debut novel The Mountains Sing, was written in English. Her latest work is epic in scope, spanning the mid 20th century to the present. Using three main interweaving story lines, it looks at the individual human cost of the war and the suffering and silences that are left.
When addressed politely, Phong is ‘‘tre lai’’. However, more frequently he is termed a ‘‘bui doi’’: the dust of life. As a baby in 1972, Phong was left swaddled outside a Vietnamese orphanage, dangling in a Bodhi tree. Postwar, Phong’s orphanage has been taken over by the army. Government reeducation camps and New Economic Zones abound.
Phong had been bullied throughout his childhood as an Amerasian, the American father long gone. Eager to leave his povertystricken homeland behind and become more than simply detritus, he and his family apply for visas to the mythical USA.
It is 2016 and while Phong is trying to leave Vietnam, middleaged Americans Dan and Linda Ashland are preparing to visit. As a war veteran, Dan, and his marriage, have been traumatised for decades. He and his wife hope that by returning, he can lay the ghosts of his war to rest.
As both couples find themselves stranded in Vietnam, it is more than ghosts that appear. A third narrative, which quickly dominates, tells of two young Vietnamese sisters, Trang and Quynh, teenagers during the war. We follow their stories as they leave their impoverished rural backgrounds, desperate to make something of themselves. Unfortunately, they are immediately caught up in the currents of war. At the Hollywood Bar in Sai Gon they work for Tiger Madam, aware they are walking on a ‘‘rope of fire’’.
Nguyen Phan Que Mai dedicates this tale to Amerasians and all those touched by violence, specifically the countless young women whose lives are described as being nothing but ‘‘firewood in the furnace of wars’’.
Though at times plot details are overwrought, Dust Child is a poignant, upsetting work, telling of multiple nationalities wrecked by war. It is about searching for meaning, and of forgiveness, or the impossibility of it. As Phong ponders, how fickle is perceived identity: that through emigration, and only through that, a child of dust could, perhaps, be turned into a person of gold.
Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant
In a 2019 interview in The
Guardian, Myers mentioned that he was ‘‘working on a quartet of novels set across 1300 years’’ and that each one was ‘‘separate and quite small’’. Subsequently, he amalgamated the quartet into a single book focused on the life, legends and legacy of St Cuthbert, a Northumbrian monk of the 7th century.
The four books of the published novel are each constructed quite differently. The first, ‘‘Saint Cuddy’’(Cuddy being the familiar folk form of Cuthbert), covers the amazing journey of Cuthbert’s coffined body around the northeast of England, as a group of seven monks and two servants seek to evade the ‘‘wolfcoats’’, or Danish invaders. The two servants, both foundlings — a girl, Ediva the cook, and a boy, Owl Eyes the groom — appear, with slightly amended names and functions, in all four books; their narrative task to bind the texts over time and place. This first book is a rich amalgam of quotations from sources and commentators, celebratory poetry of Cuddy’s cult and comparisons between the otherworldliness of the religious and the earthy practicality of Ediva and Owl Eyes.
Book two, ‘‘The Mason’s Mark’’, is set in 1346. It is a splendid evocation of medieval Durham, rich in local dialect words, short stabbing Middle English and the violence of the times. It is centred on the romance between stonemason Francis Rolfe and Eda, an alebrewer. Eda is more than unhappily married to brutish mercenary bowman warrior Fletcher Bullard, but happenstance favours Eda.
‘‘Stories we tell one another are all that shall remain when time dies and even the strongest sculpted stones crumble to sand.’’
A playlet forms an interlude. In 1650, Oliver Cromwell defeats the Scots and 3000 of them are imprisoned in Durham cathedral, without food or water, until they perish. The cathedral itself plays chorus to the dying.
The third book tells the story, in pedantic Walter Scott prose, of an Oxford archaeologist, called in by prebendaries of the cathedral, to witness the opening of St Cuthbert’s tomb. Ghouls and nightmares underline the moral quandary of such a venture. That leaves the fourth book, this time set in 2019, where a contemporary manifestation of the original Ediva (Eva) and Owl Eyes (Michael) find a common interest in the stories of Cuddy and the cathedral’s history. Michael ‘‘becomes aware, perhaps for the first time, that he is part of history too, and that history is neverending. He is one more link in a chain of people — of experience — that stretches deep into a past, a past where people spoke and ate and lived differently, but perhaps thought similar thoughts and desired similar things. A continuum, he thinks. Is that the right word here? We are all part of a continuum’’.
The attraction of Myers’ enterprise lies in his remarkable skill with words, in his ability to evoke different eras with language and prose appropriate to them, at the same time keeping the interest of the reader in what happens next.
Peter Stupples, now living in Wellington, used to teach at the University of Otago