Book review: Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s Dust Child fails to dig deep into lives of Vietnamese mixed-race children

Dust Child

By Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Fiction/Oneworld Publications/Paperback/339 pages/$29.04/Amazon (

amzn.to/43vweXB

)
3 stars

This sophomore novel by Vietnamese poet-author Nguyen Phan Que Mai is a middling, feel-good exploration of the lives of Amerasian children left in Vietnam after the Vietnam War.

Born of American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers, Amerasians form an underclass in communist Vietnam referred to as the bui doi, or dust of life.

Their Caucasian features are seen as evidence of their mothers’ wartime betrayal and many are discriminated against, leading indigent lives and often homeless.

It should make for a sordid story full of grit, but Que Mai, author of the best-selling The Mountains Sing (2020), has chosen to shear it of any teeth by offering a rather sanitised version of events.

Instead of focusing on the lives of these Amerasians, she shifts the centre of her story to an American veteran’s return to Vietnam and the search for his former mistress and child. It is a deeply unsatisfying take and feels like a wasted opportunity.

The American veteran in question, Dan, supplies one of a trio of narrative strands.

Still suffering from trauma from the Vietnam War, during which he was a helicopter pilot, Dan has returned to Vietnam with his wife Linda, who believes that going back to “the land of fear” would help Dan process his feelings and give their faltering marriage a new hope.

But Dan’s trauma also stems from his guilt at having abandoned his then pregnant Vietnamese girlfriend, whom he knows only as Kim.

Kim’s name is really Trang, and she, together with her sister Quynh, was pressured into being bar hostesses in Saigon during the war to repay a family debt.

It is from Trang’s perspective that Que Mai writes most convincingly, taking readers back to a time of her relative innocence, when whether to sleep with customers for more money was still a moral question.

Her venture into the sex industry that developed around American servicemen during the war is one that ensnared some 300,000 to 500,000 women, all driven by helplessness and partial access to information such as a preliminary brief that said all Trang had to do was “drink tea” with the soldiers.

The problem, though, is that Trang and Quynh remain tropes.

Trang’s relationship with Dan could be one of thousands of relationships across the country during the war – which may be the point – but which hardly justifies the pages dedicated to their love story, during which readers are clearly expected to feel something.

Weaker still is the third perspective of Phong, a black Vietnamese tre lai (mixed child), one of many Amerasians looking for a way to take his family to America in the belief that a better life awaits there.

Phong having a black father is an interesting choice, but Que Mai does not do enough research on the community of Amerasians in Vietnam, and readers never get a sense of how his experience might have differed from those of his counterparts with white fathers.

Instead, her focus is relentlessly on this demographic’s yearning for their American fathers, given token diversity only by characters citing news reports of other mixed-race children and their fathers seeking out one another.

Que Mai herself was inspired by one such BBC report: the upshot is that there are no Amerasians here who live independently of America or who have overcome this father complex.

Perhaps a more complex story might be found in the marginal character of former South Vietnamese soldier Thien, who once thought North Vietnamese soldiers were “creatures with buffalo heads and horse faces” and is now helping Dan on his quest.

Resentful of being left to pick up the slack after the Americans left, he tells Dan: “I served your d*** war and now I serve you.”

A dollop of this anger and cynicism would have served Dust Child excellently.

If you like this, read: Go As A River by Shelley Read (Transworld, 2023, $19, Amazon, go to

amzn.to/475kFcS

), in which a white Colorado girl pregnant with the child of her black lover finds peace away from her community.