The mountains sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Oneworld, 2020. ISBN: 9781786079503.
(Age: 14+) Highly recommended. As a young girl in the school taught
by her grandmother Dieu Lan, Huong wonders why foreign armies keep
invading her country, Vietnam: first the Chinese, the Mongolians,
the French, the Japanese and then the American imperialists. As the
Vietnam (or American) war continues, it is her grandmother's stories
that keep her hope alive. Learning that her grandmother has survived
the French occupation, the Japanese invasion, the Great Hunger, and
the Land Reform, Huong is determined that she will find safety once
again with her parents Ngoc and Hoang, both soldiers in the war
against the American enemy and the South Vietnamese.
Readers of this novel will learn through Dieu Lan's stories of the
horrific ordeals the people of Vietnam have endured. The chapters
alternate between the struggles of Huong and her grandmother during
the Vietnam war, and the past stories of Dieu Lan's suffering of
mass famine in 1945, the brutality of land dispossession and
massacres during the Land Reform movement in the 1950s and then the
conflict of the Vietnam War. Dieu Lan was the mother of six
children, each of whom she had to find some way of protecting, even
if it meant actually abandoning them to ensure their survival away
from her. It is a heartrending story. When Dieu Lan retraces her
steps to find her children again their outcomes are not always what
she would have hoped for.
Each of Huong's relatives is affected by the Vietnam War, through
separation from family, to beatings and rape, to Agent Orange
poisoning, to traumatic amputation. But somehow, the spirit of Dieu
Lan survives and even forges a way towards Buddhist forgiveness,
peace and calm. It is a harrowing story, but one of the delights of
this novel are the Vietnamese proverbs that Dieu Lan passes on to
Huong, "fire proves gold, adversity proves men", "soft and
persistent rain penetrates the earth better than a storm", and "only
through love can we drive away the darkness of evil from this
earth".
Millions of people lost their lives during the Vietnam War. This
novel tells the stories of some of them, in the hope to learn from
the past and prevent future armed conflict.
Themes: Vietnam War, Famine, Endurance, Survival.
Helen Eddy
