BRONZE DRUM, ancient Viet legend brought to a new, unaware audience

BRONZE DRUM
PHONG NGUYEN
Grand Central Publishing
$17.99 trade paper, available now

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Gather around, children of Chu Dien, and be brave.
For even to listen to the story of the Trung Sisters is,
in these troubled times, a dangerous act.

In 40 CE, in the Au Lac region of ancient Vietnam, two daughters of a Vietnamese Lord fill their days training, studying, and trying to stay true to Vietnamese traditions. While Trung Trac is disciplined and wise, always excelling in her duty, Trung Nhi is fierce and free spirited, more concerned with spending time in the gardens and with lovers.

But these sister's lives—and the lives of their people—are shadowed by the oppressive rule of the Han Chinese. They are forced to adopt Confucian teachings, secure marriages, and pay ever‑increasing taxes. As the peoples' frustration boils over, the country comes ever closer to the edge of war.

When Trung Trac and Trung Nhi's father is executed, their world comes crashing down around them. With no men to save them against the Han's encroaching regime, they must rise and unite the women of Vietnam into an army. Solidifying their status as champions of women and Vietnam, they usher in a period of freedom and independence for their people.

Vivid, lyrical, and filled with adventure, The Bronze Drum is a true story of standing up for one's people, culture, and country that has been passed down through generations of Vietnamese families through oral tradition. Phong Nguyen's breathtaking novel takes these real women out of legends and celebrates their loves, losses, and resilience in this inspirational story of women's strength and power even in the face of the greatest obstacles.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The Trung sisters are actual historical people who lived in 1st-century CE Vietnam. The country we know as Vietnam is, in fact, largely their legacy...these two women were the tutelary spirits of the local ethnic group's desire to be out from under the extremely heavy burden of the Han Empire, ruled by the Han Chinese people. ("Han" in Chinese just means "people" so you certainly know you're not ethnically labeling them when using the term.)

What Author Nguyen has done with this retelling of the Trung Sisters' legend is, given where and with whom he's published his novel, to offer the wider American public something that has been lacking all my life: A sense of Vietnam as an actual country, not simply a state created by then screwed over by, colonial masters. The Viet people are distinct from their neighbors in many ways, not least of them their foundational myth retold here. The sisters were daughters of a local aristocrat whose claim to fame was instilling in them a sense of themselves as different from the Han people oppressing them with taxes and slave-labor demands. This led to the sisters, when their father was murdered by the colonial masters, being made an example of. (A thing thoroughly unpleasant, I needn't remind you...the powerful don't and have never stinted in their cruelty towards those they wish to make examples of.)

What makes the Trungs different, in the sweep of two thousand years of History, is that they didn't command men. Other women have done that. The Trungs had no truck with pusillanimous men, knuckling under to the Han overlords to stay alive.

They raised an army of liberation. Made up of women. As traditional Viet women, that is to say the rulers of their world, they were simply doing what came naturally. Protecting your homeland on the fierceness of those who stand to lose the most by its subsumation into a foreign empire makes a lot of sense.

Not, as you'll imagine, to the Han. The rebellion wasn't successful in all its aims, freedom and matriarchy lost to the simply overwhelming military might of the Han, but the sense of the VIET as a PEOPLE was deeply ingrained.

There is a much-needed glossary in the book; I've seen some criticism of the author's use of formal, seemingly stilted language. Honestly, it seems that way to me too. Then I consider an important fact: This is a legend. It's the distilled essence of the legendary founders of the Viet people's sense of themselves as a unique, valid, culturally rich polity. Rules of twenty-first century grammar and usage, even in Viet which most decidedly this book isn't written in, would be inappropriate. And, let's face it, if you are the kind of reader who blenches at a modicum of work being asked of you to experience this, or any other, story, there's a sea of bland, blah word-blobs out there. Go fish.

Me? I'll be here with the Trungs, a little in awe and a lot in love.