A historical adventure of ancient Vietnam based on the true story of two warrior sisters who raised an army of women to overthrow the Han Chinese and rule as kings over a united people.
In Phong Nguyen's indelible rendering, Bronze Drum resurrects an early segment of Vietnamese history that both evokes and subverts the founding myth of the United States...The revolutionaries in this story are not white men expounding on the principles of individual liberty while ignoring the harsh realities of slavery, but clear-eyed Southeast Asian women who understand the cost of war and the fraught legacy of peace...Bronze Drum's epigraph reiterates the tenet 'Nothing Ever Dies' articulated in both Toni Morrison's fiction and Viet Thanh Nguyen's collection of essays on war and remembrance...This concept explores how conflict becomes imprinted upon a culture's collective memory, and transformed in each retelling, until a reconciliation with the past is reached...Any effort to censor this memory would paradoxically ensure its longevity...As Sethe tells Denver in Morrison's Beloved, 'If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.'
During the early years of the Common Era, Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhi, two daughters of a Việt lord, grew up within palace walls...The sisters have long been revered as national icons in Vietnam, and this fictionalized account of their rise to military greatness includes extensive, cinematic descriptions of battlefield tactics and imagined scenes of heartache and horror while not avoiding references to mistakes in judgment (diplomatic and otherwise) they may have made...Nguyen reminds us that the power of women is nothing new.
Nguyen shines with this portrayal of two sisters’ heroism in ancient Vietnam...Set over seven years during the Bronze Age, when the Han Dynasty ruled what is now Northern Vietnam, the story follows Viet Lord Trư ng and Lady Man Thiệ n of Cung Diệ n Mê Linh, who raise their daughters Trư ng Trac and Trưng Nhi to rule as men’s equals...Throughout, Nguyen returns to the traditional bronze drums as symbols of Viet pride and culture, scorned by the Han...Readers will not want to put down this epic feminist page-turner.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
