A Chat With: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
Winner of our 2021 prize, we sat down with Dr Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai to discuss her incredible book The Mountains Sing. An unsparing and lyrical coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Vietnam, the novel is a powerful family story and the horrors of the war together into a haunting tale of identity, love and loss.
Emily Powter-Robinson, from Em’s Shelf Love championed the book in our 2021 campaign and chatted with Quế Mai on all things books, the blogging community, the publication journey and much more. An incredible and fascinating conversation, we had the difficult task of having to edit down nearly 8,000 transcribed words of a wonderful interview to fit into this feature!
Emily: What does winning the Blogger’s Book Prize mean to you?
Quế Mai: Oh you should have seen my reaction when I heard the news! This prize is very special because you have fiercely championed my book. I was really moved to read your review. Thank you so much for your kind help. Winning the Blogger’s Book Prize is very special, so I’m thrilled and very honoured by the kindness and compassion of everyone.
The author’s name is on the book but behind each book there are so many people who work hard for it. I’m a Vietnamese author, and to publish me and this book with a lot of Vietnamese language, my name spelt how it is on the cover, and all the character names written in the authentic Vietnamese way, it’s a risk that my agent and my publishers took, and I’m so honoured that so many people work so hard for this book. Marketing, publicity, the bookstagram and blogging community have just been amazing. I have not been to a bookshop to see my book on a shelf, but I see it in people’s homes when they post on social media, and it’s just unreal.
Emily: How has it been launching your book during a pandemic and what sort of challenges did you have to overcome within the publishing process and getting it out there to readers?
Quế Mai: You know, I was just reading the news about the pandemic and statistics show 2.8 million people have died because of Covid. This is not just a number but grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and I feel so sorry that their lives have been taken away from this world so suddenly.
It has been difficult to launch my novel during this difficult year, but these challenges are small compared to the fight of survival of so many people. I’m just very thankful for the valuable support that my novel has received from bloggers, booksellers, and librarians. This gives me hope and light.
The best thing about launching a book is that you sign copies for your readers, you meet them personally and say thank you. I have not been able to do that, so I hope that this will be over soon so next year I can travel again.
Emily: That’s one thing I’ve found, books have really helped me through the pandemic and especially reading The Mountains Sing, I felt like I travelled to Vietnam through your writing. I love the ability that books have to take you somewhere else outside of your own world and own life.
Quế Mai: I echo you completely in this! Books really saved me in the past year. I don’t think I could have coped without books. We can travel through books and make friends. It has been a good year for reading.
Emily: How have the blogging community and the bookstagramming community played a part in The Mountains Sing's journey? And how important is the blogging community to you as an author?
Quế Mai: I’ve learned so much from the book blogging community in the past year. Many bloggers and bookstagrammers review books out of their passion for literature. Your knowledge is truly amazing, you yourself and others have been fighting for diversity within literature, for representation. I really think your contribution to literature should be acknowledged. As an author, I highly appreciate your help spreading the word and for your active role in changing the literary landscape.
Emily: I know you’re also a very accomplished poet and you’ve got lots of poetry collections. What made you to want to write a novel, specifically this novel?
Quế Mai: I consider The Mountains Sing the largest poem I have ever written. It is a poem for my homeland, a poem for the countless lullabies my mother sang me, a poem for Vietnamese women who had to bear the burden of war and conflicts but who had to be pillars for our families and our communities. So, I decided to write The Mountains Sing in the format of a novel because I wanted to put the reader into the story right away, so they travel through Vietnam’s history to meet our people, taste our food, listen to our language, experience our traditions and see the landscape.
Emily: You said that you spent seven years writing and researching this, was it quite a cathartic experience to speak to people in your family, people from villages, and to write this book for them?
Quế Mai: I think the root of this novel started from my childhood. My time living in both North and South Vietnam made me realise how much our communities and families were divided and still being divided by many of our historical events. From my early years, I started talking to people and gathering information for a novel that I wanted to write. I worked for many years in development assistance in many regions of Vietnam, so it instils my knowledge gained from that, from many conversations I had with my family members and acquaintances, from my years of reading and also from my masters and my PhD in creative writing at Lancaster University.
It could be very difficult, but I was always very inspired. There were many nights when I woke up because I heard my characters calling me, they were telling me “get up and write, you cannot sleep until our stories are told, our stories cannot sleep.” I was really compelled to write this novel because they are inspired by real-life stories. What difficulties I had in writing this novel were minor compared to theirs, what my parents and ancestors had to go through to survive. Even though this book is about war and devastation and death, I wanted to capture the spirit of hope.
Emily: That’s something that really shone through when reading it, that these characters seemed so very real. I read quite a lot of historical fiction but it’s something that made this stand out from others in the genre that I’ve read because it was inspired by true events and real people. It was amazing to read.
Quế Mai: thank you! I wanted the book to be authentic too so, for example, I have a chapter where I write about Uncle Dat’s journey through the Trường Sơn Mountains during the war and to write that chapter I interviewed I don’t know how many veterans. After interviewing people, I thought I had to experience the real thing, so I went to the jungle, I went at night, I had to experience how eerie it was, it was so dark, and really frightening. But I had to feel that for myself for when I wrote about it. I wanted every detail to be correct in the way that it has to be authentic to the setting.
Emily: Something that really stood out for me when reading it was your inclusion of Vietnamese proverbs and the recurring motif of the wooden bird that Uncle Đạt brings home for Hướng. So, I wanted to ask about your inclusion of those and why it was so important to you to have this focus on language and the significance of the origins of language?
Quế Mai: The Vietnamese language is very beautiful, it’s lyrical, so I wanted to capture some of its beauty in The Mountains Sing. It’s not just for artistic reasons but for representation, so I could represent Vietnam beyond the wars and conflict. Proverbs are an important part of our language and we use them very often in our daily life, so they naturally come into The Mountains Sing. For example, if I had a bad day, my mum would console me by quoting the proverb Trong cái rủi có cái may - Good luck hides inside bad luck.
The Sơn Ca is the symbol of love (for Hương), the symbol of hope for her and her father’s reunion. It also means The Mountains Sing which inspires the title for my novel. I also used the Sơn Ca to highlight the impact of the wars on nature and as a symbol of destruction beyond the death of human beings - during the Vietnam War, many tonnes of Agent Orange chemical were sprayed onto Vietnam. The chemical killed many living things including Sơn Ca birds whose songs were silent.
My book uses Vietnamese diacritics. Due to the long history of being colonised, the Vietnamese language suffered a lot of loss. Within English text, the Vietnamese language is stripped of diacritics, so I wanted to undo the loss by having the diacritics in the text because those are as important as the roof is to a home. For example, the word Ma (ghost), má (mother), mà (but), mả (grave), mạ (young rice), mã (horse). With little tonal differences, you can give the word a very different meaning. I wanted to preserve the complexity and colour of our language via the use of diacritics.
Emily: Something else that stood out to me was the sensory descriptions you use, especially when you’re talking about food, the lack of food during the Great Hunger and then there’s also a focus on how it can heal families and bring communities back together. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about that and the importance of food generally in Vietnamese culture?
Quế Mai: Food is so important to Vietnamese culture; one cannot write about Vietnam without writing about food. Food brings people together, nourishes our souls, and strengthens our connection to our heritage, so the act of cooking, of offering it to our ancestors is the act of celebrating our heritage. Sadly, during the wartime and during the Great Hunger, millions of Vietnamese did not have food to eat. My father remembers very vividly his hunger and what they had to do to survive, like eating the fronds of banana trees.
Because of the lack of understanding on trauma and PTSD, the women in our community used food as a form of healing, so when the soldiers returned home they did not know what to do, there was no medicine so they used food to try to heal family members.
Also, in Vietnamese culture, parents and children do not say “I love you” to each other. There’s some barrier that prevents us from saying this, so we express our love by cooking for each other. The act of cooking and offering food is the act of expressing love.
Emily: You write about the trauma of war and the inherited trauma of war, and especially the trauma that is inherited by women, and that’s something I found really interesting because I think so many narratives about war are male-centric, focusing on these soldiers who were fighting on the front line and quite often women are excluded from this. Why was it so important for you to write about these women and especially this close bond between a grandmother and granddaughter?
Quế Mai: Many women and children of war are innocent victims and I think we should honour them. My book is about women who have no choice but to bear the burden of war, and to become the pillars for returning soldiers. I think another reason for me to document the voices of women is that if you look at literature about Vietnam, via Western works and even Hollywood movies, Vietnamese women are often represented as prostitutes, who are absent of trauma, who are not complex. So, I wanted to write about the women who surrounded me when I was growing up, the women who surround me today in my life and to represent our women in our full complexity.
We should have more stories from grandmothers. Grandmothers are my heroes. They have so much wisdom and in Vietnamese culture, grandmothers are the storytellers, they pass on stories from one generation to the next. When I was born, both of my grandmothers had died, so I decided that one day I would write a book with a grandmother in it so that I could have a grandma. I just love talking to elderly women, so I loved working on the voice of Grandma Diệu Lan.
Emily: You’ve spoken a bit about the stereotypes and representations of Vietnam in Western cultures, I have to say I felt quite ashamed almost when I read your book about how little I knew about Vietnamese history and I’ve seen you speak before in interviews about how so much of Vietnamese history was censored. Did you feel, because of this, you had more responsibility to share the stories of people who hadn’t had the chance to do so before?
Quế Mai: Thank you for your honesty. It’s not your fault as a reader that you didn’t know much about Vietnamese history before The Mountains Sing because most books in English about Vietnam are written by Westerners who place the West in the centre of those books.
I spoke recently to a reader and she told me she did a University course on the Vietnam War, and all the books used in that course were written by Westerners, none of it was a Vietnamese own voice and story. I’m appalled at how we are still colonised via literature. That’s why one of the reasons I had to write The Mountains Sing in English, to decolonise literature about Vietnam and to write against the stereotypes, and I’m really happy that my book is being taught in schools and universities in the US, UK, Vietnam and many countries in the world. There’s still so much to do to decolonise our curriculum and our reading so that literature is more inclusive.
When it comes to censorship, the Vietnamese government has strong control over what’s being published in Vietnam. Books that deal with sensitive periods of our history are often censored: an entire book, a paragraph or even a sentence. In Vietnam, it’s not a free market; all publishing houses are government owned. Unfortunately, censorship in literature exists in many countries and that’s why writers and artists play an important role in recording untold stories so that they’re not forgotten.
I felt a great sense of responsibility when I wrote this book. I felt like I owed it to those who told me their personal stories, to honour their memories fairly. I collected a lot of information over the years so, for a while, I felt like I wouldn’t be able to include everything. That created a crisis because I felt like I wasn’t capable of honouring everyone’s memory, but then I began to see the research I had done formed the garden on which I grew a tree. For my tree to stand solid, I needed a rich garden of research. Then readers’ interactions with the book give flowers and fruits to the tree.
Emily: How much can you tell us about your second novel?
Quế Mai: I’m really excited about my next novel. It’s about Amerasians, children of American soldiers and Vietnamese women, born and abandoned during the Vietnam War. They are the forgotten victims of the Vietnam War and 98% of Amerasians have not been able to find their parents. I interviewed a lot of people, and the stories are just incredible, so I felt like I had to write a book about their experiences.
Emily: My final question, how are you spending the prize money from this competition?
Quế Mai: I’m really grateful for the cash prize that comes with this award. I will be using it to buy books for the children who are undergoing cancer treatment in hospitals in Vietnam.
There are many children currently being treated for cancer in Vietnam, and doctors have told me that the rate of childhood cancer is very high due to the long-lasting impact of Agent Orange which causes cancer and birth defects in younger generations. In Vietnam, the childhood cancer survival rate is only 10%, it is heart-breaking. Since 2010, I’ve been working as a volunteer and set up several libraries in hospitals. I found that books help ease the pain of the children, help them escape the difficult situations for a short time.