Play Book Tag discussion

Reading this was a much-anticipated pleasure for me. I was supposed to be going to see Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai speak in Seattle in March 2020, which – for obvious reasons – didn’t happen. I then ordered the book from my then-local bookshop in lieu of the signed copy I’d meant to buy at the event, as a small gesture of support during the lockdown. Rather than read it when it arrived during that stressful time, I decided to treasure it and enjoy it as a treat once we were settled in the UK. The movers had other ideas, and stuffed it into an odd space in a packing box, leaving the spine permanently skewed, but I managed to see the funny side and decide that that made it an even better souvenir of this crazy year, and then… oh, you wanted a review of the book’s actual contents?

I’m not sure I can separate out my impressions of the book from my emotions about reading it, but I’ll try. The first thing to say is that I read it straight after reading Gone With the Wind, which was seriously weird, since there were some disturbing echoes in their descriptions of landowners losing their wealth and status, but my sympathies and perceptions of the books' relationships to truth were so different. (I was quite relieved a little further on in my Vietnamese reading spree when I read a story in The Refugees in which a character adopts the name Vivien after watching Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone in seeing some resonances there.) Overall I found this to be a very readable and flowing story of the impact of Vietnam’s turbulent 20th century history on several generations of one family, written in the style of a good historical novel. The section on the heartbreakingly difficult decisions made by a mother to give her children the best chance of survival was particularly eye-opening and moving.