Born into the Việt Nam War in 1973, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai grew up witnessing the war’s devastation and its aftermath. She worked as a street seller and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to attend university in Australia. She is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction published in Vietnamese, and her writing has been translated and published in more than ten countries, most recently in Norton’s Inheriting the War anthology. She has been honored with many awards, including the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hà Nội Writers Association, as well as many grants and fellowships. Married to a European diplomat, Quế Mai is currently living in Jakarta with her two teenage children. For more information about Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, visit her at www.nguyenphanquemai.com.
I always believe that writers
are somehow haunted into writing their books. What was haunting you?
The death of my grandmother. She
was killed in the Great Hunger of 1945. She was tied to corn plants and was too
weak to break away. My father knew the man who had murdered his mother, and
told me that after the Great Hunger, that man moved away from our village. I
never knew what happened to that man so I created the character Wicked Ghost in
The Mountains Sing. I showed the reader how Wicked Ghost was punished
for what he’d done. But in the end, Wicked Ghost was forgiven somehow. In other
words, this novel was my way of searching for healing, for forgiveness, because
being able to forgive is the greatest gift that one can give him or herself.
I was fascinated and horrified
and heartbroken to read how what is often taught in school about Viet Nam is
not the real experience. How difficult was it for you to share all that you
know?
It took me seven years to bring
this book to the finish line and I am still deep into it. I was born in a small
village in the North of Vietnam, grew up in the South of Vietnam and my first
trip out of Vietnam took place in 1992 when I was 19 years old. So I lived and
breathed Vietnam and I still do. There was so much that I witnessed, so many
stories that I heard, so many things which moved me therefore the most
difficult decision was to decide what not to include in the book. The original
manuscript purchased by my editor Betsy Gleick at Algonquin Books is much
longer than the final length. I am very lucky that Betsy gave me the editorial
vision and the courage to make my decisions regarding what to tell and what not
to tell in The Mountains Sing.
The Mountains Sing is about Vietnamese
history, which is a living history, witnessed by millions of people. There is
no single version of this history because it is very complexed, personal, and
emotional. In my position as a writer, despite my family’s experiences, I
wanted to be objective. I wanted to present a version of history which as many
people as possible can relate to. That’s why I interviewed hundreds of people
for The Mountains Sing, I read countless books in Vietnamese and
English. I learned so much by working on this novel and despite the challenges,
I enjoyed every minute of it.
The challenge also comes from the
fact that English is my second language and I only had the chance to learn it
at 8th grade. Yet I wanted to write The Mountains Sing with a
poetic language that embraces the Vietnamese culture and ways of expressions. I
needed my Vietnamese-English dictionary quite a lot, but basically I wrote this
novel with my Vietnamese instinct, with the ca dao songs that echo from deep
inside of me.
You’ve previously written a
poetry collection. What was it like to delve into a novel?
I’ve published eight books in Vietnamese
language and The Secret of Hoa Sen (BOA Editions, 2014) is my collection
of Vietnamese-English poetry, translated by myself together a poet I deeply admire
– Bruce Weigl (who is a Vietnam veteran
and whose poetry collection Song of Napalm is stunning).
I think my love for poetry took its
roots from the very first day of my existence in this world. The year was 1973,
in the middle of the Vietnam War and things were extremely difficult. We did
not have enough to eat, and my mother made up for the lack of food by nursing
me with lullabies and ca dao songs. Essentially poems, these songs are
passed down from one generation to the next, so you could say that poetry helped
raise me and keep me alive.
Poetry is a part of my being and I
could not help but sneak snippets of poetry into The Mountains Sing,
either through the translation of Vietnamese poetry or via my own use of images
in the expression.
What kind of writer are you? Do
you map things out or does the story somehow find you?
I have always wanted to write a
novel with a grandmother and a granddaughter in it. It’s because I never had a
grandma and I wanted to have one who would tell me the history of our family.
But I didn’t know how to start such a novel.
Then in 2012, while traveling to a
self-defense class together with my husband and our Vietnamese friend, I asked
the friend what it was like for him during the war. He told me about the bombings
of Hanoi in 1972, when he was a young boy living with his grandma. Both of his
parents were working in Russia and his grandma tried to protect him from the
bombs. My friend’s bombing experiences were so horrific that years later, when
he was a grown man traveling on a business trip, he got onto an airplane and as
soon as the plane’s engine started, he started shaking. The airplane’s noise
brought him immediately back to the terror of the American bombings. He shouted
and screamed and had to get out of the airplane.
My friend’s story was so moving that
when I came home that night, after cooking my kids dinner and putting them to
bed, I sat down at my writing desk. I found real audio clips on the internet with
urgent voices warning citizens against approaching American bombers. I listened
to those audios and with tears running down my face, started to write a scene
which would later become chapter 1 of The Mountains Sing.
So to answer your question: I did
not know what would happen to Grandma Diệu Lan and Hương when I started The Mountains Sing. But I knew that I needed to write about Vietnamese
history and the Vietnam War and
place Vietnamese people in the center of it. Tens of thousands of book about
the war are available in English and they are mostly about American people. I would
like readers to hear stories from Vietnamese people, and from women and
children in particular.
What’s obsessing you now and
why?
How to stop wars with my writing.
How to highlight the evil of wars and their devasting impact on individuals,
families, societies, cultures… for generation to come. When I was growing up, witnessing
how terrible the Vietnam War’s aftermath was, I was so sure that humans would
not be stupid enough to wage another war. Now I know that I was naïve. I am sad
to see wars taking place every day now somewhere on our planet. I see myself in
a normal citizen of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.... I feel for them. I think that
if we don’t know how to stop spreading hatred and foster dialogues and
understanding, the human race will kill ourselves off this earth someday.
With the above obsession, I have written
my second novel, also about the Vietnam War but set mainly in the current time.
It took me five years to research and write this novel and I also put all my effort
into it. I have just sent the manuscript to my brilliant agent Julie Stevenson who
is reading it. I can’t reveal the storyline yet but I am truly excited about
this novel.
I hope The Mountains Sing
illuminates my love and respect for nature. In the words of Grandma Diệu Lan, “whenever humans fail us,
it is nature who can help save us.” But
the sad reality is that the human race is destroying nature at an alarming rate. We cut down forests to erect
commercial projects, we use too much plastic, we pollute and we consume. I wish
to write a book one nature someday so that I can paint pictures about the
breath-taking natural landscapes of Vietnam. And I hope my books will encourage
international readers to visit my homeland: it is truly a beautiful and
fascinating country.
Caroline, thank you so much, for
spending your time reading The Mountains Sing and for your kind compliment
about it. To have a New York Times Bestselling author read and excited about my
novel is a real gift.
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