Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains

Their hearts were in the right places, these members of the MFYM, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, who didn't yet have a name, perhaps because most of their meetings were spent drinking and playing cards. They discussed lofty ideals. Drank. Outlined what a free and democratic Vietnam would look like. Drank. Compared international political systems. Drank. Cited historical precedents. Cursed the French.

Carol Shields once said, “Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find”, and that would seem to be what Yasuko Thanh has accomplished with Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains: intrigued by an old family photo album and her father's stories, when Thanh searched for novels about colonial Vietnam, she found the canon lacking; so she wrote the missing book herself. Loosely based around the Hanoi Poison Plot of 1908, Thanh does a wonderful job of capturing the history and the mood of the time. And while the whole thing felt a little disjointed to me – missing some ephemeral it that elevates literature to art in my own wholly subjective experience – I am richer for having read this book.

Although Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains has rotating points-of-view, it primarily centers on Georges-Minh, the only son of wealthy parents who had been sent to Paris to study medicine. Now an adult, Georges-Minh lives alone in the huge villa his parents left to him; the income he generates from the rental properties he inherited allowing the doctor to volunteer at free clinics; spending most of his time treating the STDs and broken bodies of the women and boys who have been forced into prostitution by the effects of French colonisation. In the evenings, Georges-Minh meets with his close circle of friends and, in between drinks and hands of cards, they playact at plotting against the government; spending more time arguing over the name of their group than seriously planning a coup. Over time, however, Georges-Minh witnesses declining conditions for his fellow Vietnamese, and after the woman he has fallen in love with is nearly raped (and would have been raped if the French soldier who attacked her hadn't been too drunk to “perform”), the doctor agrees to concoct a poison that will wipe out the local garrison; assuming the task of poisoning their commanding officer himself. When the plot goes wrong and the group of friends must flee separately into the countryside, each of them witnesses deprivation they couldn't have imagined from their cushy lives in Saigon; each of them also witnessing what true rebellion and sacrifice looks like. 

Killing a man is easy. Life is fragile, for one. And the world is poisonous, for two. How poisonous? Cobras, mushrooms, stonefish, apple seeds. Consider the datura plant. Datura stramonium. White flowers the shape of a trumpet and the size of a human heart. The seeds, crushed with a mortar and pestle, are easily processed. Thieves and prostitutes favour its killing properties. Georges-Minh has seen the results in his practice and he has such a flower blooming in his courtyard.

That is the plot, broadly, but the fatalistic atmosphere was particularly well wrought: the guillotine in the market square with the heads of Vietnamese nationalists set on spikes; children knocked down in the street and left for dead; babies abandoned at the side of the road; syphilitic women calling for clients from their floating barges; and reigning over everything, the interfering ghosts of the ancestors who demand more respect than their modernising progeny are willing to provide. Who wouldn't rebel against all this? As Georges-Minh begins to acknowledge that the French (with whom he has enjoyed a good relationship based on his Parisian education) are to blame for the decline of his countrymen, he is confronted by a French doctor who believes that it was the influence of the morally degenerate Vietnamese that had led the colonists to visit opium dens and brothels; “the geography of perversion” that tempted French men to engage in pederasty. (And despite Georges-Minh's argument that it was the French men's offers of opium and luxury goods that first lured boys to prostitution, le bon docteur would hear nothing of it; conceding only that he did not include Georges-Minh himself in his generalisations about “the Vietnamese as teachers of moral vice”.) How could Georges-Minh not rebel against that?

Our country is in crisis. Men abandon their families and leave their wives in charge of feeding the children. The women have no money and they do what they must to survive. This country was the possession of the Chinese, and now is the mistress of the French. For a thousand years we’ve lived under the dominion of others. It’s why everyone’s going mad.

So, in the big picture – the historical and the political; life on the scene in Saigon – I think that Thanh does a fantastic job of capturing the era. It's when the focus trains down to the personal and family level that this book feels muddled to me. In an interview, Thanh recounts one of her father's stories – about an elder who periodically abandoned his wife and children for mistresses, but who was always welcomed back as the head of the family whenever he'd return – and this is essentially the character of Khieu in the book. In addition to this unsavoury character (and as the poverty and desperation of his family is often visited, “unsavoury” feels generous), none of the plotters in Georges-Minh's circle is a dedicated family man: one is a musician from the hill country (with “an accent that sounded like he was chopping vegetables”) who chose his old-fashioned music over his wife; another walks out on his girlfriend (despite her better judgment and to her risk) to participate in the plot; two of the characters are gay (one is closeted, but engages in sex with the other on the sly), and even when one of them gets married, he doesn't enjoy the domestic joy that he had hoped for. Because of all this – and repeated reminders that French colonisation had forced so many Vietnamese women into poverty and prostitution – the fact that there are no dedicated husbands and fathers shown in this book felt like a disconnect; why wouldn't protection begin at home? Ultimately, I couldn't understand the motivations of any of the characters (and particularly when, late in the novel, two of the women are sent on a quest by a witch), and as a result, I was never emotionally connected to their plights. 

Despite the parts that didn't work for me, I applaud Thanh for writing the book that she couldn't find. I learned much from Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, and consequently, am delighted to have found and read it.

2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

Michael Helm for After James
Anosh Irani for The Parcel
Kerry Lee Powell for Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush
Yasuko Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains
Katherena Vermette for The Break

I didn't realise that I was finishing this book (the last of the nominees) on the same day that this literary award will be handed out. So that's cool. I would give it to The Break.

*And in the end, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize went to Thanh for Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains.