Dust Child is a beautifully crafted, haunting exploration of the lasting psychological wounds inflicted by the Vietnam war. Novelist and award-winning Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai shapes her second novel around historical events and then brings them to life through a multi-perspective cast of fictional voices.
She probes unsettling aspects of the war’s legacy: the exploitative relationships of American GIs towards sex trade workers, the Amerasian children they fathered and left behind, and the persecution and abandonment these children faced. Quế Mai tackles serious themes with an absorbing narrative and a poet’s light, economical touch.
Moving back and forward in time, the heart of the story is set in full motion in 1969 when sisters Trang and Quynh leave their traditional life of rice farming in the Mekong Delta for the city, hoping to rescue their family from debt; a choice that leads the women into sex work.
Quế Mai challenges western privilege with a poet’s precision
Forwarding to 2016, Phong, abandoned at birth and stigmatised for his Amerasian background and dark skin, applies for a visa to enter the US through the Amerasian Homecoming Act but must prove a DNA parentage link. Meanwhile, American wartime helicopter pilot, Dan, stationed in Saigon at the height of the war, returns as a tourist alongside his wife. He harbours the secret he abandoned his Vietnamese lover, pregnant with their child when he returned from the war. The sisters’ narratives eventually intertwine with Phong and Dan’s, often in unexpected ways.
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Quế Mai draws on research and interviews conducted for her PhD as well as her own involvement in reuniting Amerasian children with their families. She challenges western privilege with a poet’s precision, prying open familiar narratives and gently lowering in new insights, language and ideas with a shift so subtle, one moment the reader is listening to an absorbing tale and the next, finding themselves staring at the unburied bones of the forgotten, the exploited, and the ghosts of their broken dreams. Dust Child is a masterful display of Quế Mai capacity to evoke compassion through her lyrical prose.
