Title: She Weeps Each Time You're Born Author: Quan Barry
Published: February 10, 2015
Genre(s): Literary Fiction, Magical Realism
Page Count: 288
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Quan Barry’s luminous fiction debut brings us the tumultuous history of modern Vietnam as experienced by a young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before the country’s reunification, a child gifted with the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.
At the peak of the war in Vietnam, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River on the night of the full moon. This is Rabbit, who will journey away from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. Here is a Vietnam we’ve never encountered before: through Rabbit’s inexplicable but radiant intuition, we are privy to an intimate version of history, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations through the chaos of postwar reunification. With its use of magical realism—Rabbit’s ability to “hear” the dead—the novel reconstructs a turbulent historical period through a painterly human lens. This is the moving story of one woman’s struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving out a place for herself within it.
Quan Barry’s She Weeps Each Time You’re Born is a poetic, magical exploration of 20th century Vietnamese history, told through the lens of one family group. This is a debut novel by a poet, and it shows. Not that the book is ever flowery or excessively descriptive—it’s more like Barry has chosen each word with careful thought, as one might when crafting a poem. Because of this, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born gives off every impression of a skillfully crafted piece of art, which does much to accentuate the otherworldly qualities of the protagonist and her story.
This protagonist is Rabbit, born in 1972 just as the United States’ soldiers are withdrawing from Vietnam. Born in the midst of an evacuation, Rabbit is left for dead along with her mother, and eventually buried with her. Days later, Rabbit is rescued by her Vietcong father, Tu, Tu’s mother, and Rabbit’s adoptive mother, Qui, as well as Qui’s mother, Huyen. This makeshift family spends the next several decades migrating across the newly reunified Vietnam, and making several escape attempts in the process. Along the way, Rabbit’s strange ability to commune with the dead allows the novel to reveal a fuller glimpse of Vietnam, from Rabbit’s grandmother’s work on a French rubber plantation in the 1940s to Tu’s fighting in Cambodia to another man’s time in a jungle reeducation camp.
The dead in Vietnam call out to Rabbit, and she can give them peace by hearing their stories, but at what cost to herself. There are some stories the government would like to remain buried and unheard, and Rabbit’s choices eventually come down to forced silence or exile from her homeland. In these ways, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born comments beautifully on the power of history and the suppression of truth. Aside from basic knowledge of a war that ended 40 years ago, how many in the United States are aware of what happened in Vietnam in the decades since 1972? How many Vietnamese have been kept ignorant of their own heritage?
What Quan Barry does with this book is powerful and important, but that’s not to say the story itself isn’t good—it is. Barry’s writing is dark and eerie and honest, and the novel’s structure is uniquely effective in criss-crossing Vietnam both physically and chronologically. From all technical standpoints, this is an extremely good book, and I do not want to discount that in any way. (The only thing that gave me pause was the author’s self-insertion as a character in the prologue and epilogue.) Yet so much of this story is wrapped up in history and bloodshed that it’s impossible to read She Weeps Each Time You’re Born without feeling the weight of the book’s contents.
In any case, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born is a strong, lyrical novel. Quan Barry gives a voice to a history the world has tried to forget, as well as telling a story that’s spellbinding in its creative interweaving of magic, myth, and realism. From where I’m sitting, this is absolutely not a book to be missed.
