"Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai will win many more readers with her powerful and deeply empathetic second novel. From the horrors of war and its enduring afterlife for men and women, lovers and children, soldiers and civilians, she weaves a heartbreaking tale of lost ideals, human devotion, and hard-won redemption. Dust Child establishes Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai as one of our finest observers of the devastating consequences of war, and proves, once more, her ability to captivate readers and lure them into Viet Nam’s rich and poignant history."—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed
“Dust Child is satisfying, lyrical, and deeply empathetic. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is a born storyteller.”
—Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times bestselling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
"Dazzling. Sharply drawn and hauntingly beautiful."—Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees
"Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai shows us the capacity we hold to confront our pasts, for the purpose of life is not to remain intact, but to break open, to let loss be a guide, to face the echoes of longing. In Dust Child, rupture leads to emotional richness and pain creates the pathways worth walking. I truly cannot wait for the rest of the world to celebrate this book."—Chanel Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Know My Name
"Once again, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai has written a beautiful novel that shines a light on the history of Vietnam. With a poet's grace, she writes of the legacy of war across time and place and the stories that bind us. Dust Child is simply stunning."—Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost To The Water
"Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is one of the most unique storytellers of our time. She creates plots which are Dickensian in their breadth and mastery, while bravely probing the complex emotional challenges of living in a modern world full of disruption and displacement. In Dust Child, Quế Mai displays the same tenderness and compassion for her characters, hard-earned understanding of human trauma, and poetically evocative language that made her debut novel The Mountains Sing an international bestseller beloved around the world." —Natalie Jenner, internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society
"With a poet's gift for language and a psychologist's eye for the tender, error-prone hearts of mankind, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai weaves a web of impossible choices, inescapable circumstance, and searing loss, set to the backdrop of a war that changed everything . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully told, utterly unique story of love, loss, and longing that speaks to the very heart of the human experience."—Kristin Harmel, New York Times bestselling author of The Forest of Vanishing Stars
"Scenes of past and present Việt Nam come alive in these pages, drawing you into the lives of a handful of characters who become like your family, and in whose stories lies the heartbreaking story of Việt Nam's complicated relationship with America. With her generous heart and unmatched ability to write across languages and cultures, Quế Mai is the perfect guide for the wounded who search for home and healing."—Thi Bui, award-winning author of The Best We Could Do
"Well-researched, realistic, and compassionately written, Dust Child brings to life the heartbreaking experiences of young American men and young Vietnamese women who were pulled into the vortex of the Việt Nam War and the tragedy inherited by their Amerasian children. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai's powerful novel enables us to travel deep into Việt Nam's past and present days so that we can bear witness to the courage of her Amerasian, Vietnamese, and American characters. This eye-opening and fascinating novel is a must-read!"—Le Ly Hayslip, bestselling author of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and The Child of War, Woman of Peace
“The sons and daughters of American soldiers and their Vietnamese girlfriends who exhibited African American and European features were shunned by Vietnam’s monoethnic society during and after the war. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai writes of some of these "dust children" with complexity and heart. This is a powerful and moving story, brilliantly told." —Robert Mason, New York Times bestselling author of Chickenhawk
“In her riveting successor to The Mountains Sing, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai has masterfully captured the toll of war and its aftermath on a Black Amerasian, an outcast in the country of his birth, on an American vet, haunted and seeking redemption, and on two Vietnamese sisters, forced by economic hardship into circumstances they could not have foreseen. Nguyễn creates, in her luminous prose, a gripping and nuanced narrative of men and women caught in the web of war and its aftermath.” —Steven DeBonis, author of Children of the Enemy: Oral Histories of Vietnamese Amerasians and Their Mothers
"With great compassion, with a firm conviction in the redeeming power of love and forgiveness, and with the consummate skill of a great story-teller, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai weaves us into the lives, past and present, of those called “the dust of life”—the ostracized, mixed-race children of American soldiers; their mothers, compelled by war into prostitution, and their fathers, the G.I.’s who abandoned them and yet remained haunted by them."
—Professor Wayne Karlin, author of Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Deadand the Living in Viet Nam
“Achingly honest and ultimately hopeful; essential reading for U.S. audiences.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“Rewarding… with a cinematic clarity.”—Publishers Weekly
01/02/2023
Vietnamese writer Nguyễn (The Mountains Sing) focuses on “Amerasians,” the children of American GIs and Vietnamese women conceived during the Vietnam war, in this rewarding if formulaic outing. Forty-something Tấ n Phong, a half-Black half-Vietnamese “child of the enemy,” features in the first of two complementary story lines, as Phong attempts to immigrate with his family to the United States under the Amerasian Homecoming Act in 2016. The second follows Dan, a war veteran who returns to Vietnam from the U.S. with his wife, Linda. Dan carries a secret: during the war, he had an affair with a Vietnamese woman who gave birth to their child. Now, Dan wants to track them down in hopes of reconciliation. Nguyễn nimbly skips around in time to flesh out both Phong’s and Dan’s desires, pain, and guilt. By the end, the plots converge and resolve in a satisfying if somewhat predictable outcome. Though the structure feels a bit forced, Nguyễn is at her best when the characters directly address their need for absolution and acceptance, which Nguyễn stages in dramatic scenes and with a cinematic clarity. Despite the bumps, there’s much to admire. Agent: Julie Stevenson, Massie & McQuilkin. (Mar.)
★ 12/01/2022
Vietnamese author Nguyen's follow-up to her PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award—winning The Mountains Sing is a book of searches. The child of a Vietnamese woman and a Black U.S. soldier, Phong was abandoned at birth at a Catholic orphanage and has been scorned since by his compatriots as the "dust of life." He wants desperately to find his father so that he can take his family to the United States. Dan is a white U.S. soldier returning four decades after the Vietnam War in hope of finding Kim, who worked as a bar girl in former Saigon to help pay off family debts and whom Dan abandoned when she got pregnant. As these two searches converge, we learn Phong's and Kim's stories and see how Dan's views on his wartime experience have evolved: "It had taken him years of…reading to understand that he'd been sent to Viet Nam to save it from the Vietnamese, and saving it from the Vietnamese meant killing them. By the millions." Nguyen makes the suffering of the Vietnamese people during and after the war painfully real, while moving forward to reconciliation; toward the end, a key character wishes the regime would acknowledge "the human cost of the war on all sides." VERDICT Achingly honest and ultimately hopeful; essential reading for U.S. audiences.
Narrator Quyen Ngo, who also voiced bestselling author Nguyen's debut, THE MOUNTAINS SING, captivates listeners with this thought-provoking historical novel. The fictionalized account, drawn from the author's dissertation research, explores the often overlooked lives of Amerasians in Vietnam, children conceived during the Vietnam War between American GIs and Vietnamese women. Ngo's soothing voice and fluency with the Vietnamese language immerse listeners in three interweaving storylines that move between 1969 and 2016. Two Vietnamese sisters work as bar girls during the war and, decades later, a dark-skinned Amerasian named Phong looks for his parents while an American vet with PTSD named Dan returns to Vietnam. In this emotionally stirring listen, Ngo captures the story's reflective mood and elevates the characters' humanity. V.T.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Narrator Quyen Ngo, who also voiced bestselling author Nguyen's debut, THE MOUNTAINS SING, captivates listeners with this thought-provoking historical novel. The fictionalized account, drawn from the author's dissertation research, explores the often overlooked lives of Amerasians in Vietnam, children conceived during the Vietnam War between American GIs and Vietnamese women. Ngo's soothing voice and fluency with the Vietnamese language immerse listeners in three interweaving storylines that move between 1969 and 2016. Two Vietnamese sisters work as bar girls during the war and, decades later, a dark-skinned Amerasian named Phong looks for his parents while an American vet with PTSD named Dan returns to Vietnam. In this emotionally stirring listen, Ngo captures the story's reflective mood and elevates the characters' humanity. V.T.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
2022-12-14
An American GI, a Vietnamese woman, and an Amerasian man who grew up in an orphanage seek closure decades after the Vietnam War.
Nguyễn’s stirring if sometimes melodramatic second novel—following The Mountains Sing (2020)—braids three distinct experiences of war and trauma. Phong, mixed-race and certain he’s the son of a Black U.S. soldier, strives to acquire an American visa for himself and his family in 2016 under the Amerasian Homecoming Act, but without solid proof, his request is denied. At the same time, Dan, a veteran, is visiting the country, not telling his wife, Linda, that he’s hoping to find Kim, the Vietnamese woman he fell for while stationed there in 1969. The third thread looks back to that year and follows Kim—real name: Trang—as she and her sister, Quỳnh, head to Sài Gòn to work at a bar, chatting up soldiers to earn money to square their parents’ debts. The setup—based on Nguyễn’s dissertation research on Amerasian children of the Vietnam War—allows her to address various consequences of Americans’ presence. Phong suffers lifelong poverty, anguish over his search for his father, and racism; the novel’s title refers to one of many epithets flung his way. Trang is exploited, at times pressed into prostitution, and subjected to Dan’s moods. Dan, for his part, is carrying guilt over his abandonment of Trang and from keeping the relationship a secret from Linda. Nguyễn writes with an intimate, detailed understanding of Vietnamese women’s treatment during the war and the struggles of Amerasians seeking their parents in the present. The story’s impact is blunted somewhat by her efforts to wrap the story up tidily and by stilted dialogue. (“We share a common history that bonds us together stronger than any blood ties.”) But for a story spawned from academic research, it has the grace of a page-turner and sheds light on a neglected subject.
A well-turned tale of broken families across continents and decades.
