Every month we get together with a few fellow readers to chat about our monthly bookclub book. It's a vastly mixed group - which we love - that never fails to bring both lighthearted thoughts and in depth questions to the last Sunday evening of every month.
This month we read Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai. Previous writing by Quế Mai include bestselling novel The Mountains Sing, along with a fair amount of translation work in poetry. Quế Mai is set to attend Galle Literary Festival 2025 so we thought it would be a good one to cover.
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WHAT'S IT ABOUT? Dust Child follows the lives of four characters who battle with loss and family turmoil as a result of the Vietnam War. The tale spans across multiple timelines, jumping back and forth to build the real tale of Amerasian challenges and the emotional impact of war. While the story starts as a tale of four, the characters converge into an unexpected crossing.
BOOKCLUB THOUGHTS... It seemed the Amerasian story was new to almost all of us. Everyone found interest in learning about this and for that reason, stayed engaged. We felt that the author tried to cover a few too many storylines by delving into PTSD with the American protagonist and probably we would have preferred one or the other.
There was a strong agreement of distaste for the writing style. Most found it a bit basic with too much dialog. We were all surprised to learn that the author is a poet! We stumbled through the Vietnamese words, loosing some of the meaning along the way
The key Amerasian character, Phong, was written very well - we all bought into his story and really felt his pain. We read that Quế Mai interviewed many Amerasians to hear their stories and understand their lived experience and this really came through. The American couple, Dan and Linda, less so. Dan is a war veteran who flew helicopters in Vietnam in his early 20's and Linda, a charitable and kind, wife to Dan. Both characters felt shallow and stereotyped, particularly Linda, with some comical scenes of an ignorant American in Vietnam- it begged the question, how much time had the author spent in America? Or was this written purely from the eyes of the Vietnamese of Americans in Vientnam? Two further interesting characters were sisters Trang and Quýnh. On this the group were divided. Some loved hearing and understanding what might lead a young Vietnamese girl to prostitution, others felt it was exorcised and exaggerated which made for a great debate!
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CONCLUSION
Look, our bookclub has some pretty avid readers in it. Id say there are more than three regular readers of long form Russian literature and some with literary degrees from Oxford. Perhaps this book wasn't written for us, however, we do all agree its an important story to be told, and perhaps this composition means that its more accessible to the masses? It was certainly an easy read.
While its not a masterpiece, we hope people read it as its a story and learn about the Amerasian experience as well as the Vietnamese perspective of the war.
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FURTHER READING: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen