by Quan Barry
Vietnam, 1972: under a full moon, on the banks of the Song Ma River, a baby girl is pulled out of her dead mother’s grave. This is Rabbit, who is born with the ability to speak with the dead. She will flee from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. As Rabbit channels the voices of the dead, their chorus reconstructs the turbulent history of a nation, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations to the chaos of postwar reunification.
Vietnam, 1972: under a full moon, on the banks of the Song Ma River, a baby girl is pulled out of her dead mother’s grave. This is Rabbit, who is born with the ability to speak with the dead. She will flee from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. As Rabbit channels the voices of the dead, their chorus reconstructs the turbulent history of a nation, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations to the chaos of postwar reunification.
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From the book
Sometimes things blow shut of their own accord. The way a door creaks on its splintery wooden hinges—pain in the very sound of it. How the pain comes fluttering up in the joints, the pain permanent like new teeth. This is a moment of thresholds. The sound of doors swinging wildly somewhere in the wind.
The bridge across the song ma had long since been destroyed, but the little basket boat was still sitting on the near shore, bobbing in the current. There were no oars, just a series of guide ropes one could use to pull the bamboo boat back and forth. This was the last place she’d seen him. More than eight months had passed. Little Mother still remembered the shape of Tu’s neck under his hat as he pulled himself across the water, the birthmark gleaming on the edge of his hairline. They had walked to the river hand in hand through the dusk, the bats just starting to stir. Something buzzed in her ear, but she didn’t swat it, not wanting him to remember her as anything less than stoic, Little Mother eager to demonstrate that she would be all right in his absence. They both knew the time had come for him to disappear, the war changing the land around them. As he slipped across the Song Ma, Tu didn’t look back. The sound of water lapped against the sides of the boat as he melted into the landscape, her heart slipping away from her body.
Little Mother studied the sky. There was an hour left until sundown. The old medicine man had said it would come that night. There was nothing else to do. On the far shore the rope was fastened around an iron hook set deep in a rock. She found the other end where she had left it tied up to the roots of a mangrove tree. Water sloshed in the bottom of the boat, the water hot around her ankles as she stepped in. Swiftly she pulled herself across the river, though it was mostly the current that carried her. The water coursed so dull red and matte she couldn’t see anything in it, not even her own reflection.
On the other side of the river she stepped out of the boat and crawled hand over hand up the bank. Just five months ago there had been a cluster of families living on both sides of the Song Ma. The families had made their living fishing and ferrying people and goods across the river. For the past few months the charred remains of their huts dotted the shoreline. Over time the blackened heaps looked less and less like the remains of houses. It was hard to say who’d done it with any certainty. Little Mother took a deep breath and held it as she hurried past without looking. The patriarch had gone running back into one of the burning huts to find his granddaughter, the thatched roof like a woman with her hair on fire. Neither the old man nor the girl were ever seen again. Little Mother half remembered meeting the little girl from time to time, her hair done in two mismatched braids, one longer than the other, a space where her front tooth was missing, the head of the new tooth just starting to show. The grandfather had been a fisherman. He was known far and wide for fishing with a snow-white cormorant, the bird an albino, its eyes a bloody pink. Until the fire, most nights the grandfather and the bird could be seen together floating on a simple raft, the old man’s long gray beard in stark contrast to his bald head. In the weekly market Little Mother had heard that the man and his granddaughter were somewhere still walking the earth. She imagined meeting the two of them, the blue flames of their spirits roaming restlessly through the dark. From the look of things, with the next good rain the last of the wreckage would wash down into the river, everything as...
About the Author-
- Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.
Reviews-
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December 15, 2014
In Vietnam in 1975, a mother dies giving birth to a girl named Rabbit, for the rabbit visible in the full moon that night. In this lyrical and mysterious debut novel, jungle dirt and violence are juxtaposed with miracles and magic throughout Rabbit’s unlikely life. “Shortly after Rabbit’s birth, the Americans began withdrawing from the country... the war dragged on, the rice harvests left rotting in the paddies or never planted in the first place.” Barry, a prolific poet, writes with stunning language, which carries the novel and elevates moments of heartbreak, despair, and perseverance. However, the story line relies on supernatural marvels that can be difficult to buy into. For instance, after Rabbit’s mother dies, Rabbit is nursed by a young woman and fellow refugee named Qui, who is barely out of adolescence and likely a virgin, but whose body produces the milk with which to feed the baby. When Rabbit’s grandmother dies, several years later, Rabbit absorbs all of the grandmother’s memories and visions, through a kind of pipeline of knowledge. The metaphor is powerful but feels forced. While each individual vignette is mesmerizing, the leaps in logic and chronology feel jarring, and one wonders if the story would not have benefitted from a more straightforward approach. -
Starred review from December 1, 2014
A magical child pulled from her mother's coffin observes and embodies Vietnam's tragic 20th-century history.Born in Saigon, Barry-an award-winning poet-offers a mesmerizing vista of Vietnam's recent past. Her small cast of characters, several of whom are gifted with surreal abilities, takes us from the rubber plantations of the French colonial era, through the American firebombing campaigns and the genocide in nearby Cambodia to the re-education camps. At the heart of the story is Rabbit, a girl who can hear and communicate with the war dead: "They call to me and they tell me things and I say, I hear you." Mysteriously plucked from her mother's grave, she's raised by a substitute family that includes, intermittently, her father, Tu, a Vietcong soldier, but also a spectrally beautiful woman named Qui whose eternally lactating breasts revive Rabbit when she's drained by contact with the spirit world. After the U.S. withdraws from the war, the group joins the flood of refugees heading south and later becomes boat people on a voyage filled with mysterious events and extreme dangers. Rescued from the ocean, sent to a re-education camp and then released, Rabbit eventually becomes renowned for her ability to uncover and ease the passing of the newly dead, including ethnically cleansed minorities and the victims of massacres that are denied by Hanoi. Rabbit's intuition will endanger her, but her contact with the appalling events of the past cannot be suppressed: "The simple act of someone hearing them, an acknowledgement, and then they can go wherever it is they go." While Barry's beautiful, transporting novel sometimes verges on the opaque, it pays resonant tribute to the uncounted dead below the surface of a convulsed nation.COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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October 15, 2014
Barry's debut weaves a chronicle of life in pre- and postwar Vietnam within the mystical and turbulent journey of the novel's protagonist, Rabbit. Born shortly after American troops begin to withdraw from the country in the 1970s, Rabbit is left in the care of her ailing grandmother, but they have little choice but to abandon their war-torn village. Accompanied by an elderly honey seller, Huyen, and Huyen's granddaughter, Qui, they join the chaotic and desperate exodus of a population fleeing their homes for the unknown. Thus begins Rabbit's path from adolescence to early adulthood, where she navigates dislocation and harrowing incidents in an ever-shifting situation. Rabbit's tale is deepened by her unique ability to hear the voices of the dead. From these voices emerges a rich tapestry of stories, many tragic, spanning life in 1940s colonial Indochina, the reeducation camps following reunification of the North and South, and the market-oriented economic reforms of the 1980s. Barry's rich narrative entwines one personal tale with an evocative and haunting exploration of Vietnam's painful past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.) -
September 1, 2014
In this novel by Saigon-born Barry, the author of quietly fervent poetry honored with an AWP Donald Hall Poetry Prize, Rabbit's ability to hear the voices of the dead allows her to chronicle Vietnam's history from the heyday of French Indochina to the dislocations of war and reunification.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from November 1, 2014
In 2001, on an evening with a full moon--when Asian folklore says a rabbit appears on the lunar surface--Amy Quan searches for a woman in Vietnam, "where I was born in the same year as her, our lives diametrically opposite." The woman, called Rabbit, was miraculously pulled from the grave of her dead mother on another full-moon night in 1972 and nourished long past infancy by a silent woman who will never nurse her own baby. Raised by two grandmothers and a sometime father and watched over by others, Rabbit encounters the "unnamed dead" in a country torn apart by centuries of domination and destruction. In the aftermath of war, "the government was trying to create one memory, one country, one official version of what happened." From single deaths to mass graves, Rabbit reveals the "stories the world is eager to bring to light...[the] stories it doesn't want told." VERDICT Blurring boundaries between history and invention, life and death, even verse and prose, English professor (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and multi-award-winning poet Barry's first novel is fierce, stunning, and devastating. Readers haunted by Kim Thuy's Ru, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain will revel in it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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November 1, 2014
In 2001, on an evening with a full moon--when Asian folklore says a rabbit appears on the lunar surface--Amy Quan searches for a woman in Vietnam, "where I was born in the same year as her, our lives diametrically opposite." The woman, called Rabbit, was miraculously pulled from the grave of her dead mother on another full-moon night in 1972 and nourished long past infancy by a silent woman who will never nurse her own baby. Raised by two grandmothers and a sometime father and watched over by others, Rabbit encounters the "unnamed dead" in a country torn apart by centuries of domination and destruction. In the aftermath of war, "the government was trying to create one memory, one country, one official version of what happened." From single deaths to mass graves, Rabbit reveals the "stories the world is eager to bring to light...[the] stories it doesn't want told." VERDICT Blurring boundaries between history and invention, life and death, even verse and prose, English professor (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and multi-award-winning poet Barry's first novel is fierce, stunning, and devastating. Readers haunted by Kim Thuy's Ru, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain will revel in it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/4/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- Booklist "Barry's fiction debut weaves a chronicle of life in pre- and postwar Vietnam within the mystical and turbulent journey of the novel's protagonist, Rabbit...[whose] tale is deepened by her unique ability to hear the voices of the dead. From these voices emerges a rich tapestry of stories... Barry's rich narrative entwines one personal tale with an evocative and haunting exploration of Vietnam's painful past."
- Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of the Dead "If you've read such classic American treatments of the soldier's experience in Vietnam as Dispatches and The Things They Carried, then you might discover in She Weeps Each Time You're Born, as I did, a long-desired and indispensable companion narrative. Rabbit, the novel's young Vietnamese hero, suggests that there are two types of stories: 'stories the world is eager to bring into the light' and 'stories it doesn't want told.' In these magnificent pages, Quan Barry permeates the one with the other until you can hardly tell the light from the shadow, because every last grain of it shines before your eyes. With a deep sensory intelligence that grounds the characters in their landscape and a prose style that elevates their lives into myth, this is not only a good or moving or surprising book but an essential one."
- Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones "Quan Barry's She Weeps Each Time You're Born is lyrical, luminous, and suspenseful all at once. Rabbit's experience of wartime and reconciliation in Vietnam is one that I haven't yet encountered in fiction, and it is rendered with shocking clarity and pathos on the page. Like Rabbit's Goddess of Mercy, who has many manifestations, this is a Vietnam of myriad faces, myriad aspects, beautiful and terrible all at once."
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