A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

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A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a collection of short stories centering on Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana, USA. Each story is unrelated, in that each one of them contains different narrators, characters, areas, and foci. As a corpus, it is difficult to pinpoint a single overriding theme in the novel, though there are several recurrent themes. Such themes include love, ghosts and spirits, ancestor worship, birth and death, and assimilation. The Vietnamese language itself is perhaps the most outstanding feature of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Because it is a tonal language, all Vietnamese words and names included in the book are printed in Vietnamese script. Thus, at times, Butler is able to distinguish between a Vietnamese word spoken by a native or foreign speaker, using the Vietnamese script when spoken by a native and the Latin script when spoken by a foreigner.

Synopsis

The book begins with Open Arms, a story about a Viet Cong spy named Thâp, who resents the communists for the death of his wife. The title Open Arms refers to how Thâp reflexively moves his arms when reminded of his wife. In perhaps an effort to cheer up Thâp, the Australians for whom he worked bring him to a theater where they all watch pornographic films together. Thâp is overwhelmed by these films, pornography being something quite alien to his native culture, and simultaneously grieved by his longing for his deceased wife. In the end, Thâp is unable to assimilate, and commits a murder-suicide.

Mr. Green is narrated by a Catholic girl who is taught by her grandfather about ancestor worship. Mr. Green is a talking parrot that supposedly represents her great grandfather. She is saddened when her grandfather tells her that she cannot tend to the worship of her family members because she is a woman. Nevertheless, she takes responsibility for the endeavor after her grandfather’s death. Eventually, Mr. Green grows old and melancholy, and begins to pluck out his own feathers. The narrator finally kills Mr. Green by wringing his neck as she had learned from her mother and grandmother. The story highlights the difficulties in combining Vietnamese ancestor worship with Western Catholicism.

The Trip Back is about Kánh, who drives to the airport in order to pick up his wife’s grandfather, Mr. Chinh. Kánh is shocked when he discovers that Mr. Chinh is chaperoned by his cousin Hu’o’ng, and during his trip home realizes that Alzheimer’s disease afflicts Mr. Chinh. Kánh is deeply disturbed by this and worries if he could ever forget his wife whom he deeply loves. The situation is compounded further when his wife realizes that her grandfather has no recollection of her.

Fairy tale is about a Vietnamese prostitute nicknamed Miss Woi who was brought to the United States by an American G.I. She divorces her husband and becomes a prostitute again, and seems happy with her station in life. She meets a Vietnam veteran named Mr. Fontenot proposes to her with an apple and gives her a good life. It is in this story that Butler makes the funniest jokes concerning the Vietnamese language. Apparently “May Vietnam live for 1000 years,” can be mistaken for “The sunburnt duck is lying down,” depending on how the words are intoned. To add to the hilarity of this anecdote, it turns out that Miss Woi considers “The sunburnt duck is lying down” to be a far greater compliment.

Crickets is a sad story about a man named Thiêu, whose son is more concerned with the cleanliness of his Reeboks the game that Thiêu is trying to teach him. This particular story is heavy with symbolism, with the charcoal crickets representing Americans as large, and fire crickets representing the Vietnamese as small but quick and cunning. This distinction is further dichotomized by the father’s Vietnamese name Thiêu, and his son’s American name Bill. Thus, Thiêu’s son Bill has become completely assimilated into the American commercial culture.

Letters from my Father is the story of a Vietnamese girl’s father and his struggle to secure the release of his family to the United States. When she is finally released, her father is unsure of how to react to her, because all that he knows of her is from pictures and letters. His daughter learns more from her father from some letters that he had written to the United States government in which he angrily and poetically demands his daughter’s release, and she longs for him to love her in the way that he expressed his love in those letters.

Love is about a Vietnamese spy who worked with the United States at Homestead as an “agent handler.” In this capacity he controlled “fire from heaven,” which is what he called missiles. His wife Bu’ó’m was so beautiful that whenever he suspected her of cheating, he would call air strikes onto the homes of the men he suspecting as being complicit in the affair. This changed when he and his wife moved to the States, and without his “fire from heaven,” resorted to voodoo. The story is light-hearted yet represents the lack of control felt by some of the Vietnamese immigrant men.

The stories Mid-Autumn and In the Clearing are similar, in that they deal heavily in Vietnamese mysticism. Both are dialogues between parent and child and make reference to supernatural beings. Mid-Autumn is about a mother’s first love lost, and In the Clearing is an apology from father to son for having to leave his family in Vietnam.

A Ghost Story is the strangest story in the collection and very difficult to understand. It is possible that it is based on Vietnamese folklore. The important feature of the story is that it centers around a ghost named Linh, which supports the mystical theme of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

Snow is the story of a Vietnamese woman named Giau who works as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. A Jewish lawyer named Cohen, who shares with Giau an aversion to snow, frequently visits her at the restaurant. They realize that despite their different backgrounds they have several things in common and get married.

The American Couple is by far the longest story in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain at 80 pages. It is a story about a Vietnamese couple and an American couple on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Vinh and Frank begin a strange and secretive relationship in which hostilities are sometimes manifested concerning their respective roles in the Vietnam conflict. The story is told from the perspective of Vinh’s wife, and is representative of the fact that she has little access to her husband’s experiences as a soldier. It is an outsider’s perspective of Vietnam veterans, which is why Frank and Vinh are observed at a distance.

External links

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