Dust Child

Dust Child centers the experiences of Vietnamese people during the war, and its most important theme is the tragic and devastating repercussions of war on Việt Nam and its people. The novel specifically examines the poverty caused by war, the sexual exploitation of Vietnamese women, the plight of Amerasian children after the war, communist persecution of “collaborators,” and chemical warfare.

The French occupation of Việt Nam and the wars that followed had a devastating economic impact on the region. The novel shows that Trang and Quỳnh are driven to sex work in order to help their parents repay a sizeable debt. This plot point is rooted in the real-life history of Việt Nam: Small farmers like Trang’s parents struggled to make ends meet because the colonial government sought to exploit the Vietnamese. The war of the 1960s and 1970s further destabilized the region, and several young women turned to sex work to earn money. Trang’s madam tells her, “[E]very girl who enters this place says [no] at first, but trust me, you won’t be able to hold yourself back” (84); she ends up being right since the money for sex work was comparatively very generous in those lean times.

Thus, Vietnamese women were sexually exploited due to their economic circumstances. However, if they became pregnant, they were abandoned by their partners and shunned by Vietnamese society. Trang’s narrative embodies the stories of real-life women who faced similar struggles. She is abandoned after she becomes pregnant, and she knows that she will be stigmatized by her fellow Vietnamese since she has slept with an American soldier. She knows that no one would want to hire a woman who has sold herself to a Westerner. Many women in Trang’s position were forced to make the difficult choice to give their children up for adoption, although even that was a risk, as orphanages often closed and children were left to fend for themselves.

In the novel, Phong’s story becomes an embodiment of the difficulties faced by Amerasian children in postwar Việt Nam. Before leaving him at the orphanage, Trang worries that “if she abandon[s] her baby, [he] could become one of the Amerasian children scavenging at markets” (266). By the time Trang is pregnant, there are already Amerasian children who have been abandoned and are forced to fend for themselves, showing that several Vietnamese women have been in the same position as Trang and have been forced to give their children up. Phong does indeed become another one of these “scavenging” children, and he has the additional burden of being mixed race: His dark skin makes him a target for colorism and racial prejudice. In this way, the novel highlights how the related issues of sexual exploitation and abandonment impacted the lives of Vietnamese women and children.

Although the impact of sexual exploitation and the plight of Amerasian orphans are focal points in Dust Child, the novel also sheds light on other ways in which the war impacted Vietnamese people. It makes numerous mentions of communist persecution of “collaborators” with the South Vietnamese and American militaries. It also discusses the re-education camps that many Vietnamese citizens were sent to after the war in order to instill in them an “appreciation” for communist values. These indoctrination centers were brutal places where violence was common. Phong spends time at one such camp, and the experience leaves him scarred. The war stoked anti-American sentiment in Việt Nam, and the American army’s presence there for so many years made the situation even worse for anti-communist Vietnamese since they were considered to be aligning themselves with the hated outsiders.

Part of why anti-American sentiment remained so high during these years was because of atrocities committed by the American military while they were in the country. Civilian casualties were high because American soldiers were encouraged to view civilians as potential spies and thus legitimate military targets. Civilians also suffered due to chemical warfare. Chemicals such as Agent Orange were dropped from airplanes in order to deforest dense areas of jungle and make North Vietnamese soldiers easier to see. However, the chemicals killed countless civilians, many children among them, and caused lasting damage that led to cancer and other disorders even decades after the war ended. Dan and Linda visit an orphanage that cares for children who were victims of Agent Orange, and this grounds the novel within the history of the war, showing the country’s lasting postwar damage.