An Artist’s Legacy

In Khanh’s historical novel, a Vietnamese artist falls in love with a singer during the Indochina War, but their commitment to the resistance keeps pulling them apart.

In 1953, Tran Khang works as a reporter—his official title is propagandist—for the 351st Heavy Division of the People’s Army in Vietnam. He tracks the division’s grueling march to Dien Bien Phu, where the French colonial forces gather in an “impregnable fort,” a “Far-East Verdun” that stands as a monumental sign of the French’s military superiority and unabashed confidence during the Indochina War. Khang is a gifted artist—before he joined the resistance, he studied at the Ha Noi Institute of Fine Arts, and his talent is immediately evident to anyone who sees his work. When he meets Hà Mi, a singer and performer who is similarly dedicated to the resistance, he is immediately taken with her, and after they part, she continues to haunt his reveries (every time he remembers her, the image “dissolve[s] like a sugar cube in water”). In this profoundly affecting work, Khang and Hà Mi become lovers, but the war keeps them apart—the Party frowns upon romantic relationships within the ranks. Additionally, they hail from vastly different worlds: She is from a working-class family, and he comes from a cultured, bourgeois one. Still, Khang falls for her deeply. The author beautifully describes his love for her: “You feel empty when you’re not with her, but that emptiness is beautiful, and you wouldn’t want it in any other way.” The historical authenticity of the narrative is simply extraordinary—Khanh’s command of the facts is magisterial, and he brings them to vivid life with a kind of literary sorcery. This is a mesmerizing novel, one that transports the reader to another time and place—one ravaged by war where love continues to thrive.

A moving love story embedded within an engrossing work of historical fiction.