In other words, what I think I know is framed by the reasons Vietnam matters to the West. What I’m really familiar with are its brute signifiers: the psychology of the jungle, the absurdity of America’s involvement, the crisis of the West, free love and rock and roll. I only realised after I finished this book that I had no idea what to compare it with because I am actually quite the novice when it comes to that war. I wonder where this cynical trepidation came from. Another war novel, I thought, as if the mere proposition was enough cause for weariness. So it was with bogus sense of familiarity that I opened Audrey Chin’s As the Heart Bones Break. For all the Vietnam/Vietnam war references that flood our popular culture, Vietnam remains to me a site of silence, both a place and a set of events that I know already everything and always nothing about. I speculate of course, because I must – I have never been properly told.

How well do the unpredictability of these rages and unspoken resentments show me, much later in life, that our little family was living along the cracks of many unknown, unhealed wounds. The war has everything to do with the strictness and anger that shaped the conditions under which I was raised. Here, cut from his roots, he began a new family of his own. It is what brought my father as a young man to these shores.

But for me, too – someone whom as a halfie is both of and not-of the culture, closely related to, but always somehow outside of it – the war is the beginning of everything, the first cause. Perhaps Vietnam could not mean anything but the war, lurking in the background if not thrust in the foreground of the imaginary tableau that materializes whenever anyone says ‘Vietnam.’ So it may seem to the casual, non-Vietnamese reader or viewer in Australia. Why is that? Perhaps I have watched too many films from the 1970s and ‘80s, the American anti-war canon that counts Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now and Platoon in its number. Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Pacific Islander – yes, I have read books by authors that link their plot or persona to these categories. It strikes me as rather strange that as a literary type with a Vietnamese father, I have never read any novels about Vietnam or the Vietnamese diaspora. REVIEW: Audrey Chin, As the Heart Bones Break. Originally featured on, Lucy Van gives us an in-depth review on Audrey Chin’s book As the Heart Bones Break.

Heart bones book review